The purpose of this essay is to examine how media directed at children, such as fairytales, television, and books impacted my gender identity and how I communicate with my own gender and other genders. The influence the media has on a developing child can be hard to tease out, but it is my hope to better understand how I formed my identity by examining the media that I was exposed to at a young age, and noting the gender stereotypes I was exposed to via that media.
My favorite movie growing up was Disney’s The Little Mermaid. I’ve known for a while how problematic that movie is from a gender perspective. There’s the overarching message that it’s perfectly acceptable to abandon everything and everyone you know for someone you haven’t even met properly--a theme that isn’t unique to The Little Mermaid, unfortunately. I feel like this theme reflects a tendency in our society to over-emphasize the importance of finding The One. That isn’t to say that I think that having a partner isn’t important, but that they narrative of finding your one, true soulmate is a common trope that many teenagers have to navigate when they first begin dating. I started dating later in life, but I still find myself falling into the trap of looking for someone who is “perfect” for me, as though complete compatibility is something that you can discovery within moments of meeting a person. I think it’s disingenuous to sell the idea that a 16 year old is capable of knowing that the person she’s interested in right that moment is going to be the person that she’s interested in when she’s 36.
The Little Mermaid also contains the message that love is something that just kind of happens to you, that it isn’t something that you build through interaction with someone you’re interested in--again, not unique to The Little Mermaid, and probably one of the most damaging messages I know of in media for both children and adults. Having grown up exposed to multiple instances of “love at first sight is the most true love”, I can’t know fully how many opportunities I’ve missed in having a fulfilling relationship with someone just because I didn’t experience that initial attraction. It certainly seems to make navigating personal relationships more difficult, because if you rely too heavily on the expectation that your initial impression of someone (whether or not you feel that first “spark”), you overlook the just as important attraction which develops over time. There seem to be a dearth of media for young people about what to do when you find yourself attracted to someone you’ve been friends with for years, that doesn’t end with the friendship turning into a romantic relationship. If you were to base your expectations of how pursuing a relationship with a close friend solely on movies based on this theme, you would expect nearly one-hundred percent success. This is entirely unrealistic, but it’s certainly something that I had to unlearn.
The Little Mermaid also features the princess who can’t get out of trouble without a prince to come and rescue her. Another problematic idea is how Ariel gives up is her voice--a symbolic gesture of Ariel’s general willingness to give up everything that is dear to her in order to find “true love”. The idea that Eric falls for a woman who can’t speak at all (though she does communicate admirably with gestures and facial expressions) is troubling to me, because it seems like the idea is that a woman who doesn’t have opinions (who is literally without a voice) is the perfect woman. I’m not sure that this was the intended message of the movie, and given how wrong Ariel’s plan goes initially the case can be made that these themes aren’t that problematic.
While it might be easy to overlook the impact of literature and movies aimed at children, I think the above themes tend to reinforce messages that young women get throughout their life; I certainly was exposed to unrealistic ideas about love and romance from the movies, books, and television that I watched as a child. The persistence of heteronormative romantic themes in children’s literature and media was particularly problematic to my development, given that I’m gay. I wasn’t exposed to any narrative but “boy meets girl” growing up, and so felt that I had to conform to this narrative in order to be “normal”. I don’t think that compulsory heterosexuality is the caused by the media, but it is reinforced by the media. Given the number of romance-centric movies which exist and are catering specifically to children, I can’t ignore the idea that these narratives were probably a large part of why I was in the closet for so long. Being exposed to so many stories where the female protagonist wants to marry the male protagonist informed my ideas about what “normal” relationships looked like, and they looked like monogamous, heterosexual relationships.
Aside from all of the bad romantic advice I absorbed as a child, there is the tendency for women to be the passive subject in fairytale-style stories. Sticking with Disney movies for the moment, the majority of Disney princesses, especially the ones from the earliest Disney movies (Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty), aren’t really active participants in their own lives. Things happen to them, they don’t act in their own interest. I’m sure that these ideas have influenced the choices that I’ve made with regard to important life choices. The idea that good things will happen to you if you just wait for them and let them happen is a seductive one; Sleeping Beauty didn’t have to find the solution to her curse, someone else was able to do all of the dirty work for her, and she was able to wake up to a castle full of people waiting to cater to her needs.
While I’m not entirely convinced that there is a direct causal connection between the media that is consumed by children and the persistence of harmful gender stereotypes and bad patterns of communication in society, these narratives certainly reflect and serve to reinforce the status quo. When a child finds a book, movie, or television show that they like, they become immersed in that piece of media; if that work contains troubling messages about “appropriate” gender roles (such as the passivity of women, or the stoicism of men) or reinforces harmful ideas about how men and women should communicate (women shouldn’t be concerned about talking to men they’re interested in, and men shouldn’t care about what the women they’re interested in have to say), a child is likely to incorporate those views into how they think about the world. The realm of imagination is often very real to children, and if their favorite characters are acting in a certain way, they’ll want to emulate these actions. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect to scrub all troubling media from the world, there at least needs to be conversations with children about the media they’re consuming.
Overall, I would say that my experiences with fairytales and children’s media was a net negative. I still have fond memories of many of my favorite books and movies from my childhood, but wish they had included better role models and contained better representations of diversity. At the very least, I wish they relied less heavily on gender stereotypes, though that feels like setting the bar too low. I don’t fault the media I was exposed to for any issues I’ve had communicating with various genders, though it certainly could have done a better job of preparing me for what to expect.
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