Children effects

Movies and cartoons are the first impression of what children often understand how men and women are supposed to act. For example when we look at the Disney princesses represented to us like ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Cinderella’ is often saved by young handsome princes because of how they are look. This signifies that this is how young girls should be looking like to get their prince charming. It reinforces social roles, the dominant and passive roles of a man and women. It could also signify that you are a good person if you appear this way, because if you look at the female villains they are represented as large horrible woman for example Ursula from “The Little Mermaid’’. (2006-2011 Association for Natural Psychology)

The princesses were represented to us as beautiful but completely unaware of their beauty, you never saw snow white or Cinderella preening in front of a mirror. They were so virtuous so warm and welcoming. They were hardworking, always scrubbing cement floors and serving food to others. Because they were so beautiful they were detested by older vindictive, murderous stepmothers or queens wearing too much eyeliner and eye shadow, usually blue or purple.

These women had way too much power embodying the truism of that age that any power at all completely corrupted women and turned them into monsters.  In their hands, power was lethal it was used only to bolster their own overweening vanity, and to destroy what was pure and good in the world. In the ensuing battle between the beautiful, innocent, deserving, self sacrificing girl and the ugly black-hearted, covetous women, the girl won in the end, rescued from female power run amok by some handsome prices she had met once. (Where The Girls Are/ Susan Douglas 1994)

While men in Disney films are represented to be rich, aggressive, macho and charming and always get the poor beautiful girl and make her into a princess.  All princes have the same ‘look’, broad shoulders, chiselled jaw line, strong arms, and a handsome face, it naturalises them as the best example of masculinity to the impressionable young audiences. The princes don’t get much role in the movies or cartoons as much as the women.  They are shown just fight and save the ‘damsel in distress’ and look very charming. We can relate this back to real life and how a ‘man’ should be presented in society.

Disney has created and inculcated an ideology of perfection in young children through the representation the characters. The idea of being beautiful gives you success and happiness. We can see this by how the beautiful princesses and princes live happily ever after and the villains who represented as ugly have unhappy ending.

We could look at another example of how men are presented in Disney the example of Peter Pan. Peter is represented as a cocky-self absorbed, egocentric and indifferent to the feelings of the females around him. It shows how Wendy and Tinker-bell fight for his attention but he likes to play the girls off one another and takes special delight in the Wendy-tinker-bell catfight. He refuses to grow up and is supposed to be especially charming. (Where the girls are/ Susan Douglas 1994). Disney gives a role of being independent and free, it has a sense of patriarchy because Disney always represents women as being imprisoned but when we look at peter pan he's free and happy. We can also see that Disney creates romantic ideas at such a young age. Peter Pan is represented as child but they put the idea of him having two girls loving him. Peter Pan refuses to grow up and is stubborn and arrogant this could be related to how men are portrayed as