In Medias Res: As a Parent of Four Daughters, I Need to Know These Things

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

As a Parent of Four Daughters, I Need to Know These Things

(Hat tip: Laura McKenna)

The text is a little unfair to Cinderella, whom frankly I think gets a bad rap. (Until her stepmother cruelly destroys her ambition to attend the ball and she completely breaks down, Cinderella's a pretty realistic and tough broad, all things considered.) And, strictly speaking, Belle isn't a princess. Still, everything else is, unfortunately, pretty much dead-on as regards Snow White, Aurora, Jasmine, and Ariel (Ariel particularly so). Note that Pocahontas and Mulan aren't featured, presumably because they break the Disney Princess mold. And yes, I am thinking about this stuff too much.

8 comments:

Dan said...: Or Elastigirl or Jesse. There is a definite shift mid-90s, and it is noticeable in this image that they don't have any examples from after 1994.; Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Anonymous said...: Through hard work, resourcefulness, and magical-girl-power-enabled subterfuge, Cinderella was able to elevate herself to a life of comfort and ease by ensnaring a rich, good-looking prince, despite the fact that she was, by prevailing mores, clearly beneath his station.

By taking initiative and striking a deal with a shady pawnbroker, Ariel was able to get a new set of wheels, escape the sway of her father's oppressive, controlling undersea patriarchy, and elevate herself to a life of comfort, ease, and exciting human technologies by ensnaring a rich, good-looking prince, despite the fact that she was, by prevailing mores, a fish.; Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Russell Arben Fox said...: Dan,

Well, if you start throwing the Pixar characters in there, things get even more confusing. Consider Barbie in Toy Story 3, and how she totally dominates Ken...

Anonymous,

I can totally go with with your description of Cinderella, but you're papering over the biggest issue in the case of Ariel: her "new set of wheels" was her own disfigurement. Kind of creepy, that. (I had a feminist friend at BYU back in the early 90s who would go on and on about how Ariel's "empowerment" really begins with her choosing to spread her "legs" apart...); Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The Silent Observer said...: Looks like some academic has taken one too many hits from the peace pipe.; Tuesday, August 24, 2010
martin said...: Cinderella and Snow White didn't ONLY have beauty -- they were also very kind! And good house keepers...; Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Anonymous said...: As far as Ariel is concerned, Ariel and the prince actually hit it off before Ariel is disfigured. The sea-witch is the one who suggests that "the only way to get what you want is to become human yourself," right? Of course, Ariel is the one who takes a gulp and takes a breath and goes ahead and signs the scroll, so the choice is still hers in the end.

On the other hand, her prince doesn't completely fall for her until after her voice and fins return -- and Ariel is pretty gutsy attacking Ursula in order to save her prince and father in the end, so I think the explanation given in the graphic is a little unfair to her: if anything, that explanation does more toward objectifying and glorifying the role of her sexuality/disfiguring than the movie does.

...I'm thinking about this way too much, methinks.; Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Anonymous said...: On the Ariel issue, first of all, only some feminists would frame Ariel's self-transformation as "disfiguration"--the same ones that have axes to grind with cosmetic surgery, makeup, fashion, weight control efforts, etc. Plenty of feminists and feminist theorists would take the exact opposite approach.

Second, why even consider Ariel's sex to be the issue? She's a fish, before she's a girl. But all her life she's felt out-of-place as a fish--a special affinity for the human world. Given that, feminist theory is a more awkward fit than GLBT theory. From that perspective, she's defying the narrow bounds of the fish and human worlds by crossing over, by asserting that, fluke notwithstanding, she's a GIRL.; Wednesday, August 25, 2010
grego said...: But RAF,

If I recall correctly, didn't you already start a "future spouse candidate" list for your daughters about two years ago? I don't remember any... princes being on it?; Thursday, August 26, 2010

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Tuesday, August 24, 2010

As a Parent of Four Daughters, I Need to Know These Things

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