A couple of people have shared this link with me -- a woman at Buzzfeed imagined Disney Princesses with realistic waistlines. I'm a little unsure if this is her own original work, but I think it is. The most striking one is probably Ariel:
Well, I say that...but Jasmine and Aurora are also strikingly different:
It's an interesting concept to think about, I think...much like the whole if-Barbie-were-a-real-woman-she'd-collapse thing. Body image and its portrayal in the media fascinate me as a whole though -- largely because I wasn't conscious of it when I was a teenager. Which is...weird. That's normally when girls are hyper-conscious of it. But I was an athlete who burned 3000 calories a day and ate whatever she wanted, and I was preternaturally confident.
When I googled the article to find the link to it, interestingly enough, a piece from Cosmopolitan was the first one to come up. Here's the text blurb that accompanies the piece:
Disney Princesses have long been held up as the Feminine Ideal. Graceful, lovely, and impossibly thin with big breasts; they could give a girl a complex. However, when you readjust their proportions to make them more human-like, as Loryn Brantz did over at Buzzfeed, they are still incredibly graceful and lovely, without presenting unrealistic beauty ideals to the future girl leaders of tomorrow. Plus, they all look damn good. Better, even. I wouldn't mind seeing some of them with smaller chests and bigger butts too! Beautiful women come in all sizes, even princesses.
Which is actually a fairly positive take on the Buzzfeed article -- from an unlikely source. Cosmo, after all, is not exactly a bastion of feminist content. One blog even points out that, "as the best-selling magazine in college bookstores and the No. 1 magazine for women with children Cosmo shows and tells its increasingly younger readership...what it means to be attractive, desirable, and successful through its glossy pages each month."
Which, yay Cosmo. (Or, more specifically, yay Cosmo blog.) But, I think its important to note that Snow White isn't included -- most likely because she's a pretty realistic portrayal. And by "realistic" I mean she's rounder and chubbier than her successors, perhaps because beauty standards were wildly different in the 1930s.
That being said...I'm perhaps most intrigued by the comments below the article itself on Buzzfeed--particularly the debate about whether we consciously or subconsciously internalize "as normal" the standards Disney presents. I actually thought that the Interwebz would agree with the first commenter -- in that they insist that these are just movies and don't affect us -- but it seems to be a bit more evenly divided. Can't wait to discuss this in class!
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