Now, I am a huge fan of Walt Disney and I will never stop loving the magic he brought to my childhood. But I can not ignore that his movies has portrayed the princesses as unrealistic expectations of beauty. This false reality has given women the hopes that if they work hard enough, they will achieve these looks in real life. This is NOT true at all. The way the anatomies are represented is that the princess look is having a big head with long hair, straight white teeth, small nose, skinny stomach, big waists, defined legs and small feet. Women in real life are NOT this perfect.
Another problem that I have noticed about Disney princesses is that they are naive. The video above is a funny video that I found on Youtube called, If Disney Princesses Were Real. I found this clip useful because it supports the claim that I stated before.
I've also come to notice that some of the Disney princesses have come to be seductresses in the movies. For example, Jasmine in Aladdin. There was a scene where she is distracting Jafar from seeing Aladdin by seducing him. She also really shows off her body to him during this distraction to gain more of his attention. This comes to show that due to gender roles that we experience, women are shown to be sexualized. Especially in mass media.
In the Disney movies, the princesses are the "damsel in distress" and are to fall in love with a handsome prince. Although recent Disney movies such as Moana, do not fall into this category, the majority of the women have. In fact, these princes actually have shown to be "bad" for these princesses and not the best role models for boys. Beauty and the Beast is a great example. Here's a beautiful, independent girl who comes to the Beast's castle searching for her father. Belle, out of love for her father, asks the Beast to take her as prisoner instead of her father and the Beast traps her there until she falls in love with him. Now I know, in the end he is a better man but this does indeed show acts of violence, especially towards women, in this case Belle. Two of the older princes are portrayed as stalkers to the princesses and follow them around like lost puppies. But not like the princesses care anyways, because they're "charming". In real life, if a man was doing that to me, I would not be romanticized by that. In fact, I would be pretty terrified and uncomfortable.
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Overall, gender stereotypes and body image play a big part in Disney movies. The princesses give false representations of perfection in the face and figure. They are also naive when it comes to men and are unsurprisingly sexualized. The princes turn out to not be the best role models for boys and they actually show violence, manipulation and stalking. The stereotyping of gender may not have been intentional but unfortunately, that is the reality.
