I thought about it, and I realized that I never really noticed that the princess had such tiny waists. And that's the scary thing--the fact that images like these have been engraved into our minds as normal, whether it be on a subconscious level or not. It's scary that each time I watched a Disney movie, each time I saw Jasmine or Ariel or Aurora or any other woman in Disney, I never even questioned any of their appearances. I just viewed whatever image I saw and never actually properly absorbed everything Disney was saying about women. We don't question it, and we just accept it as 'normal'. We shouldn't be accepting this, however. Disney doesn't care about us. Michael Eisner, a past CEO of Disney, has said, "We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. To make money is our only objective." Disney doesn't care about how we take their messages. All that matters is that they make profit, whether it be from the degradation of our society as a whole or not.
Recently, my class and I watched Frontline's documentary MissRepresentation. It brought up several good points about how the media's portrayal of women has affected the outlook of women by society as a whole. By constantly feeding us women who are depicted as sexual objects in revealing clothing, the girls of our society feel this need to fulfill these expectations--the expectation that they must focus on perfecting their bodies instead of their minds. The media has often portrayed women constantly in skimpy, revealing clothing, with oversexualized behavior. Not only is this expectation of being a sexual object prominent in our society, but we start to become our own worst enemies and make ourselves feel that reaching the ideal standard of how a woman should look is an obligation that we must fulfill no matter what. So we start to focus on polishing how we look and how to become the 'perfect' female instead of focusing on our actual dreams and achieving great things in life.
Even if women are qualified in a certain field, they are subjected to criticism of their looks. Their achievements are not even taken into account, and they're immediately associated with negatively connotative words, like Hilary Clinton with "bitchy", "annoying", "too pushy", etc. There's a clear double standard here if we were to compare this to a male politician, whose news would probably be reporting on matters such as his stance on whatever issue is out there, compared to what a female politician is wearing and how bad or good she looks in it. Our patriarchal society is scared to have empowered women. Normally, power is held in the hands of men. This is what has been delivered to us for a long time, so this is what's normal. We accept this, but we shouldn't be. Without the presence of females in power, we will never have female leaders. We don't feel as if it is possible to be someone with any power at all, so we don't even try.
People are naturally self-conscious, constantly caring about what opinions others have of them. Many females I know constantly complain of this problem or that problem with their bodies. The thing is... no one has ever even brought up whatever imperfections many girls obsess over. This is the problem here. We've become so conscious of how other people view us that we nitpick at small details that we personally view as features that just aren't 'right'. And of course, I''m not exempt from this disease. We're our own worse critics. But the reality is is that many of the things we see as 'wrong' with our appearance has been sculpted by what media constantly feeds us. Women have this need to become the midriff of their worlds. The media is a powerful thing. It plants an idea in our mind, the idea that women exist solely for the purpose of becoming pretty and fitting in impossible standards. But this is most definitely not true, and not even just for women. More and more people have to realize that us human beings cannot just be summarized into one category (e.g. women have to be pretty, women cannot be smart, men have to be manly, etc.). Fortunately, I believe more and more people are becoming more aware of this problem.
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