Bad advice we get from Disney princesses — including the new Ariel

Last week, I wrote about how the “black Little Mermaid” controversy ignores the fact that the storyline is the problem. This is true no matter who plays Ariel in the upcoming live action movie. In fact, I believe Disney made the decision to cast a “black Ariel” to make feminist moms feel better about taking their daughters to see it.

So Disney’s marketing team did the only thing they could do: they decided Ariel would be black. They would then wait for the inevitable backlash from Twitter morons lamenting about “political correctness,” ginning up and promoting the backlash as a selling point. Millennial mothers could now indulge their nostalgia for regressive Disney storylines while signaling their “anti-racist” bona fides. In other words, they could take their daughters to see this deeply anti-feminist movie while patting themselves on the back for “not seeing color” and embracing a cocoa-hued Ariel with supermodel features and a thin, idealized figure.

The bottom line: Millennials can’t be strident feminists while also pining for the deeply anti-feminist storylines of their childhood. (I was born in 1985 and have a 10-year-old daughter, so all of this applies to me, too.) After all, what did older generations of girls learn from Disney movies long before the controversy over a “black Ariel”?

Let’s recap. For the sake of brevity, I’ll only include the Disney movies that came out during my own childhood.

The Little Mermaid: In 1989, Disney taught us that it was worth sacrificing our own homes and our own families in order to chase after a guy who barely knows or cares that we exist. The key element of the story is that Ariel is willing to sacrifice her “voice.” We can take “voice” literally — in the movie, it means her singing voice — or we can see it metaphorically, as “Ariel’s voice” encompassing Ariel’s thoughts, feelings, opinions, musings, complaints — all those things a thinking, independent person has. Apparently, Prince Eric is into chicks who have no voice. There is one exception: he likes Ariel’s voice when she’s singing to him. In fact, he will swoon over a woman who only using her voice to soothe and entertain him, which is why he dumps Ariel at the last minute for a skanky chick who has stolen her voice.

In case you need a refresher, Disney’s classic animated film told the story of Ariel, a young mermaid who fervently believes the grass is greener on the other side — or in this case, on land. Sure, she wants to try out earthly delights like dancing on two feet. But, this being a Disney movie from the backlash years of the 1980s and early 1990s, her primary motive is: Some Guy. She spots Some Guy from afar and is willing to give up her own home and her own family in order to pursue him. But first, she has to give away pieces of herself, including her voice. Meanwhile, her love object, Prince Eric, doesn’t long for Ariel in particular, but any woman who has “that voice.” In fact, he readily abandons Ariel at a moment’s notice to marry some skanky chick who lures him with “that voice.” The only way Ariel can win him back is by sabotaging the wedding and stealing back her voice to regain his interest.

Of course, Ariel does regain her voice, at which point she holds Eric’s attention long enough for him to dump his other prospective bride, Vanessa. Uh…how romantic? For this, she gives up her father and six sisters, permanently separated by the fact that she is now above sea level with her man.

Beauty and the Beast (1991): An abusive jerk abducts a woman and holds her hostage out of sheer malice after her father mistakenly wanders onto the palace grounds. Belle tries her best to “kill with kindness,” but unfortunately, the Beast is a total asshole. This abusive jerk is clearly beyond reform, as he became the Beast in the first place by turning away a poor beggar woman looking for shelter in the dead of winter. Eventually, the Beast works on being nice to Belle in order to break the spell, but his abusive tendencies keep breaking through. Luckily, the docile and gentle Belle is there to quietly take her beatings like a good girl and try to redirect him to the right path. Eventually, with the help of an entire palace coterie, he becomes tolerable and even musters up some manners. Good thing it’s a fairy tale. In real life, women can’t change their abusers by working really hard at being nice to him and taking their beatings like good girls. There’s a good message about seeing beyond outward appearance, but can you imagine if the genders were reversed? 1991 was named the “Year of the Woman” by magazine editors who thought having Hilary Rodham Clinton as First Lady meant we were living in a hip new era of feminism. (And then Hilary went down in history for being totally blindsided by her serial sexual abuser husband’s affairs.) But no one was brave enough to give us a movie about a strapping young man with everything going for him who drops everything to try to make a hideous, hairy woman fall in love with him.

I hate this movie.

Aladdin (1992): I’ll admit I like this movie, and Princess Jasmine was my favorite of the Disney Princesses. But, again, imagine if the genders had been reversed. Are young boys raised on the idea that they should “date down”? Are our little upper-middle-class princes taught that they’ll find the woman of their dreams on the street, wearing ratty clothes and living in a grimy hovel — because she’s a great person? I don’t think so.

In my opinion, the live-action remake of Aladdin was no better for making Jasmine a powerful, opinionated force in the kingdom of Agrabah. Jasmine was plenty opinionated in the first movie. But the whole point is that it doesn’t matter if she is a “strong woman” with her own ideas about how to run the place — she still has no power, because the system doesn’t permit her to have any. This movie was actually my first lesson in how a patriarchy works, even if it took me a few years to put a name on it.

If Disney actually cared about more progressive messaging — which they don’t — they would stop putting out remakes of regressive storylines. There are plenty of overlooked folk stories with feminist-minded heroines; Irish mythology is a great place to start. One of my favorite stories growing up was “Swan Lake,” which is actually based on an Irish fairy tale. Any time she doesn’t feel like submitting to an abusive jerk, or a guy making sexual demands, the Odette character turns into a swan and flies away.

Of course, Disney doesn’t care about that. They can host “gay days” at Disney World and slap a cocoa-hued face on a regressive story and call it “woke.” It doesn’t change the fact that Disney’s classic storylines are completely at odds with feminist values. However, the Disney Princess franchise is simply too popular to stop them from cashing in on it, over and over again.

Therefore, expect plenty more “black Ariels.” At the heart of the story, nothing changes.

What does this have to do with my song challenge? Well, for Day 10, I’d like to share this video about “historical accuracy” when it comes to Disney movies. Not only is the music hypnotic — I use it for yoga and meditation — this video ends by stating what should be the bottom line in the absurd controversy over “accurate” Disney characters. (Mermaids aren’t any more real today than they were when Hans Christian Andersen wrote the original story in the 19th century.) There is no such thing as accuracy here. If there were, the princesses probably wouldn’t live Happily Ever After.