I remember seeing Beauty and The Beast in the movie theatre. I remember a trip to the concession stand to help get treats. When I looked up from what I was carrying, the door had shut behind my dad. I remember all the doors were blue and because I couldn't read yet, I made a guess. There was a very nice blonde woman in the area my parents had chosen to sit. I asked her where they had moved to and she took me by the hand and delivered me to them in a different auditorium.
I remember not liking Snow White as much as I liked Cinderella, and I absolutely adored Sleeping Beauty. I remember Aladdin being a good time, although I much preferred when the stories were about women - I never really liked Pinocchio.
These ladies all exhibit similar qualities: Their friends and loyal companions are little animals. They are nurturers and caregivers. They are innocent, but provocative and demure. They all have hourglass figures with round breasts that are not small, but not too large; wide-spread, but firm hips; and tiny little waists with perfectly flat bellies. All of them waiting for the day that The Prince will whisk them away from the lives they know and deliver them into a dreamy happily ever-after.
I remember being gathered into a space to watch a movie with my small peers and the first one to say "I get to be Sleeping Beauty!" won, and she who had to be Ursula was devastated . . . at least the Wicked Queen, and Maleficent were beautiful too, not like the fat, husky voiced octopus.
In my Women's Studies course in the Spring of 2009, we spoke at length about little things that lead to entire social movements - for instance, Margaret Sanger believed that women should have control of how many babies they had and when they had them. In 1873, the Comstock Act made the distribution of information regarding contraception a lewd act, and Margaret Sanger spent a lot of time in jail because she refused to relent. At that time, a woman could only get a diaphragm if her uterus was prolapsed - meaning, she'd had so many babies that her uterus was falling out of her body through her cervix. Childbirth was life and death for these women.
Sanger spent a lot of time in Europe learning about contraceptives and eventually found a man who helped her smuggle diaphragms into the United States. The man, who had 14 children at home and understood the struggle, agreed to help her if he could have one for his wife.
The two of them stuffed the diaphragms into empty whiskey bottles, packed them into boxes, and marked them with an "X". The sailors were asked to drop those boxes overboard just outside the harbor and then Margaret Sanger and her helper rowed out to get them in the middle of the night. Later, they were distributed the same way you would distribute a handbill.
Later she founded Planned Parenthood, which lead to the contraceptive methods we know today.
I don't want to place blame for my body image on Walt Disney, but to speak of little things that lead to entire social movements . . . even the Disney Princesses who are women of color are fair skinned. Talk about creating an ideal for beauty before little girls even have fully developed body parts.
