A Disney Princess's Guide to Feminism
by Stephanie Ann Devito
A Disney Princess’s Guide to Feminism looks at our patriarchal criticism of femininity and examines how reclaiming the Disney Princess archetype can inspire us to move past binary concepts of gender and towards real equality.
If our identity is just the story we decide to tell, then we need to start telling a better one.
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Once upon a time is where the story starts and happily ever after is how it ends. That’s what stories teach us when we’re children.
That is until some adult, in a fit of seemingly unrestrained sadism, extinguishes the brightness of youth in our eyes by telling us there are no happy endings. Growing up will, unfortunately, prove those assholes are right, but it also reveals the obtuse hypocrisies of adult’s own manufactured stories.
Adult life is filled with the repetition of facile narratives that stifle a genuine understanding of life’s complexity. Especially egregious examples of this include our contemporary conversations about Feminism, gender, and identity. We’ve all heard mature, functioning adults pass up earnest ideations about the experience of gender in favor of opinions that sound more like an ignorant nursery rhyme.
Boys wear pants and girls wear skirts
That’s why bathroom laws protect us from perverts.
When people express that their experience with gender roles, expectations, and stereotypes don’t line up with the identity they’re expected to conform to, some grown-ass adults begin mourning their core sense of reality.
People have been committed to telling a dumbed-down story about gender equality that does not get us any closer to feminine empowerment. The dominant idea about feminist equality has a linear progression followed by a definitive end. What that’s given us is a version of feminism that’s about as nuanced as a child’s bedtime story.
Once Upon a Time was when women (white, wealthy women to be exact because we should all know that race and class affect everything) were seen as only princesses, wives, and mothers. The Happily Ever After of this feminist story comes when women start to enter and thrive in masculine spaces becoming leaders, warriors, and entrepreneurs.
The US may have high rates of maternal mortality.
But American equality is only about making a six-figure salary
It’s pretty lame when you think about our metric of progress for women being masculine, dominant, and capitalistic. Thankfully, with time and understanding, we start to change the stories we tell one another. In fact, rewriting, reworking, and reimaging our concepts of self over the past millenniums has made humans the singular species we pride ourselves on.
We’ve evolved, and built civilizations because of an impulse to know ourselves and each other using artistic expression. As we grapple with sentience, we learn how to pronounce grief, see the colors of loss, find rhythm in perseverance, and change the beats of power.
Putting our humanity into sounds and shapes allows us to make sense of the scope and size of life’s unresolvable conflicts: man vs man, man vs society, and man vs self.
Once in a few centuries, however, it happens that the poignancy of one single voice echos for generations. Their stories, who tells them, and how we respond to them create the touchstones we use to construct our individual identity and develop a broader cultural consciousness.
So when it comes to editing our narratives we have to enlist the stories that capture our emotional zeitgeist. Representation does indeed matter, and so does finding a literary model of what a revised vision of Feminism and equality looks like.
To do this in our century, we should turn to the greatest storyteller known to the modern western world: Walter Elias Disney.
Yeah, I said it and I mean it.
Fight me.
But hear me out first.
Why Disney? Well, for starters, Disney has a secular yet universally known set of stories. Their cannon of reimagined fairytales captivate modernity’s attention within a wide radius. And, yes, that is partly because they buy up creative property like a Dad trouncing his 6-year-old in Monopoly, but there is another reason they’re the preeminent name in entertainment.
With, what is basically a pantheon of characters, Disney tries to hold up a mirror in which we see ourselves.
Just about now you’re likely feeling a sense of alarm. After all, it’s conventional wisdom that Disney is only useful in a feminist dialogue if it’s being criticized. Most people know that Disney propagates Princess characters that personify and merchandise white patriarchal culture. And honestly, that’s fair.
You probably also feel that Princesses reinforce hyper-feminine stereotypes, put too much emphasis on romantic love, and damage girls’ self-esteem with their incommensurate waistlines. Also fair.
As I said, stories of the creation and creators of the people who make them.
Disney itself sucks big time too. They’re a destructive behemoth of a corporation that owns everything and pays no one. But embracing princess archetypes doesn’t mean forgiving Disney of all its transgressions. It’s about acknowledging the unintended harm sloppy criticisms haves on everybody’s equality.
Haven’t you ever reveled in what jet streams of joy and pixie dust little girls leave around Disney? Once you’ve watched that ebullience spread across the day like a sunrise, you’ll start to wonder if that’s really a bad thing.
That adjective is used consciously, by the way. Forgoing better words like malignant, ruinous, baneful, and insidious, I settled on an adjective s elementary as the argument it describes.
There’s a clear dissonance between how princess characters make kids feel and the diatribes of “Princess shaming” with which we currently oversaturate our feminist media critique. Pair that with new understandings of gender as a role into which you’re cast and taught to act and princess shaming becomes more of a tool for misogyny than empowerment.
A Disney Princess’s Guide to Feminism is about restoring value to feminine traits and respecting the feminine spaces Princesses represent in a way that welcomes everybody into them.
What is the appeal of the Disney princess anyway?
For starters, it’s one of the few privileges of girlhood. If you don’t care to be labeled a bad feminist by outdated standards, you’re expected to like Disney. You get a pass to shamelessly enjoy the restorative intersection of catharsis and childish optimism to which a Disney movie takes you. It’s a rare perk of femininity that feels good on the soul.
As a girl, you’re expected to take time to lick the wounds of outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows with stories centering on friendship, hope despite adversity and commitment to the greater good.
During these 90-odd-minutes, young girls are given something else that’s critically important and scarce outside the Disney universe. The Disney Princess catalog guarantees that girls hear stories where they are the protagonist.
Now I say this knowing full well that conventionally attractive, cis-white girls are offered most/all representation by Disney (and all other Western media for that matter), but that only means that our condemnations for Disney should be about diversity efforts, not the continued existence of the princess herself.
Because by reconstructing classic fairytales, Disney reinvents our fundamental human conflicts too.
Plots are driven by feminine experiences: woman vs woman (Rapunzel vs Mother Gothel), woman vs society (Mulan vs Chinese Familial Traditions), and woman vs self (Elsa vs Elsa). These are worlds where girls are the center of the story.
We cannot undervalue the importance of this even if the story is about romantic love. Actually, strike that – especially – if it’s about romantic love.
Disney romances, to some extent, take Hollywood’s manic pixie-dream-girl trope and flips our perspective. Seeing love through her eyes, audiences are asked to understand the multitude of things that motivate and fulfill the romantic needs of girls.
Take Ariel, she’s often berated for having recklessly thrown herself to the mercy of a sea witch just for a shot with a boy. This conclusion could only be born by willful ignorance seeing as how she sings A WHOLE DAMN SONG about her insatiable curiosity, dizzying myriad questions, and her extensive collection of antiquities.
“And ready to know what the people know
Ask ’em my questions and get some answers
What’s a fire and why does it, what’s the word?
Burn?”
She is basically an archeologist willing to come up against magical spells if that’s what leads her on the path to adventure and romance. But for whatever reason, a story that is beloved as Indiana Jones is belittled as The Little Mermaid.
Better still, look at Cinderella’s story. Examined plot point by plot point, it’s clear that all Cinderella wants to indulge in one night that’s free from abuse. She spends most of the movie unaware of the Prince’s very existence.
Nevertheless, our collective narrative has managed to over-emphasize the relevance of love in her life in the same way a Bechtel Test Flunkies does. The convention of Princess shaming doesn’t take the time to listen and understand the fictional women it dismisses, sending a clear message to girls and to boys.
There is no place, fictional or otherwise, where a woman’s voice can be heard or believed.
I’m not suggesting we find convenient excuses for gripes against the Disney brand. Plenty of problematic themes and images just gotta go and never come back.
Besides race inequities and racist representations, Disney’s animation choices have compelled, even me, a pussy-grabs-back-feminist, to say things like “I need to be Disney Princess thin to fit back into that dress.” While idolizing the characters, I also came to idolize their lithe, flawless beauty too. How diverse, and relateable the images of these women are matters greatly.
But like Ariel’s seemingly 10-inch waist, some of our accusations levied against Princesses rob girls and women of their dignity. Princess shaming damages the emotional well-being of boys and men too because all of us are receiving the message that everything associated with what we have defined as womanhood is bad.
Traditionally feminine traits as defined with the help of Dawn England’s essay, Gender Role Portrayal, and the Disney Princess, are seen as physical weakness, sensitivity, being emotional, submissive, and fearful.
Think Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora. Disney heard this and offered (heavy-handed) corrections with Mulan as a hero in battle, Moana as Chief of her people, and Giselle saving the life of her Prince.
While some feminists embrace these characters, others make their approval contingent on the erasure of other princesses. So what we’re really saying is that being these things makes you less-than. In order to be socially acceptable girls (and boys) cannot be associated with womanhood or femininity.
Instead of expanding girls’ sense of self, we have diminished everyone’s potential in half. What does it do to someone when they’re told that being weak and fearful is degrading?
Another thing we do when we say Aurora is a bad version of womanhood and Merida is a good version of womanhood is reinstate the idea that personality and characteristics are the product of gender.
Should we really tell girls and boys that the desire to be loved, the ability to be tricked, and the tendency to be fallible is a product of negative gender representation and not basic human traits?
If representations of boys and men in the media aren’t expected to be feminized but our female characters are constantly being masculinized, then who gets to be sensitive? Sob dramatically on a bed? Who befriends small animals and excels at compassion? What aren’t these things something everyone should get to do from time to time?
Instead of shunning early Disney characters, we can embrace them and spread the message that being physically weak, sensitive, emotional, submissive, and fearful is perfectly fine. Depriving anyone, especially when they’re children, the expression of these attributes won’t deconstruct misogyny, it simply hurts our daughters in the same ways it’s hurting our sons.
If toxic masculinity is the mentality that exhibiting “traditional female traits” is demeaning, then Princess shaming is toxic masculinity in a pink package. Now for women.
It’s easy to understand why it made sense to us in the 1970s and 80s. Second Wave Feminism motivated women to prove that they can contribute in the same way as men. Third Wave Feminism, though, is supposed to keep us from settling into a place where feminism unconsciously agrees that being masculine is the only way to earn respect from society.
In 2021, Third Wave Feminism empowers the Madonna and the Whore while asking what exists in between. But I would argue that our next step isn’t about accepting all the ways girls can identify, it’s about removing the topic of gender altogether. In turn, telling children, and reminding adults that your character makes you who you are.
And as every good storyteller knows, character is built with actions.
Disney and its place in culture is essentially American folklore. A 20th-century parable, not about gender roles or history, but about humanity. These characters can represent the universality of life’s best and worst plot points, but only if we encourage our children and ourselves to look for it.
Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that the most criticized Princesses have defining circumstances to which we can all relate. They’re young, they’ve lost parents, grew up with trauma, are subject to abuse, held back by society, and are actively perused by an evil beyond their control.
They make friends, assemble teams, and meet older sages who protect them with hard-earned wisdom. Their story structures mirror that of Arthurian legends and Greek tragedies but the relative recentness of Walt Disney’s death and the atrocious capitalistic stronghold of his global disciples make it hard for us to accept the Disney Princess for what she is: an archetype.
And isn’t that all gender is? It’s just a way to define the role we are playing on the world’s stage. We can see that symbiotic partnerships tend to have a provider and a nurturer and that the stoic and the emotional balance each other out. We can admit that there are clear dualities in our natures (or our nurture), but they’re all legitimate and none of them correlates to which sex organ a random universe has bestowed on us.
Frankly, we shouldn’t even think of ourselves as having only one archetype. Within us is a compendium of selves, and we discover new ones by seeing ourselves through someone else’s call to adventure.
The simple conclusion of Princess Feminism is to take what once was seen as masculine and feminine and just change the name. Accept that these things, whatever they may be, exist in us but the character of our story is not predetermined, static, or binary. Instead of insisting Cinderella is a bad role model for girls, maybe consider that she’s a necessary character for boys.
Start to take power away from stifling gender expectations with vocabulary. After all, systems of oppression always start with carefully chosen words.
Let’s pick better adjectives to describe ourselves and the Disney Princesses. Snow White isn’t subservient, she is hospitable, Cinderella isn’t weak, she is compassionate. Aurora is whimsical, and Ariel is a romantic.
All Princess shaming can do is reinforce a gender binary where feminity is deemed regressive and damaging, but really it’s necessary for all of us.
Isn’t it just time to let it go?
Read On
