This is Merida. She’s an awesome little ass-kicking archer who has one or two ideas about how to save her realm from disaster, and they involve comfortable clothing and a distinct lack of concern over her hair (which is completely fabulous).
Unlike other Disney Princesses, Merida was lauded by the feminist media because she doesn’t give a hoot about icky things like love and romance and boys. Boys?!?! Ewwww. Gross. We don’t want to be encouraging our own little princesses to think that family and love and children and marriage and men might be a key part of their happiness. Get married to a man you love and then have children? How dumb is that?
http://news.moviefone.com/2012/06/21/princess-merida-disney-role-model/
Jezebel got so horned out over the drawing of an underage girl, they started imagining having sex with her. Merida could be a lesbian! Imagine what we could do with a lesbian! Nothing to see here, folks. Grown women lusting over an underage cartoon drawing of another woman.
http://jezebel.com/5921127/merida-from-brave-isnt-a-lesbian-but-she-could-be
Ick.
In the movie, Merida is 16 years old, just on the cusp on becoming a woman. Disney recently issued a new drawing of Merida in which she has aged a bit, and her form has taken on a decidedly more feminine, womanly silhouette.
Cue the outrage! 16 year old girls don’t grow into lovely, shapely women! That’s bullshit! She can’t be slender and willowy! That doesn’t happen. La la la I can’t hear you biology!
http://jezebel.com/ugh-disney-gave-braves-merida-a-pretty-pretty-princes-500751813
Had they chunked Merida out, made her a fat little sow, and chopped off her hair, I am sure Disney would have been applauded and adored! Fat acceptance! Defiance of heteronormativity*! Hooray!
One shivers to think of the lesbian fantasies a fat Merida with short hair would elicit.
*heteronormative means understanding that most people are heterosexual which is obviously a big fat lie
Shamefully, Disney caved and withdrew the new drawing of Merida. That’s actually very troubling. At least the executives at Disney pointed out the total hypocrisy of equating Merida with what she wears or how she does her hair.
That image doesn’t represent a ‘new’ Merida replacing an ‘old’ Merida: it’s just another iteration of Merida, who is much, much more than just red curls and a green dress. The gussied up Merida on the coronation invitation is Merida gussied up for one of the most important events of her princess career. That she’s a little more sparkly for the party is not a heresy against her independent and spirited self – I consider myself independent and spirited, and I wore the sparkliest gown that I could find when I got married, because of course I did.
http://jezebel.com/disney-pulls-sexy-merida-makeover-after-public-backlash-494274022
Disney Princesses come in for a whack ton of criticism for caring about men and marriage and love, but the biggest crime the Princesses commit is being thin and pretty.
And it’s true. The Princesses are slender and beautiful and the features that humans tend to perceive as the most beautiful are greatly exaggerated.
Jasmine’s eyes are huge and her hair is impossibly fluffy and long and her limbs are so slender and her waist is so tiny and oh my! Real women look nothing like Disney Princesses.
Of course, the Princes are always depicted as normal, proportional, utterly realistic male human beings, right?
No emphasis on strength?
No impossible beauty?
No chiselled jawlines?
No ridiculously broad shoulders and narrow waists?
No smooth pectorals?
No bulging biceps?
No washboard abs?
And Princes never, ever have great wealth and power and prestige to trade for the Princesses beauty, right?
It’s curious that Jezebel will go to town on the Princesses for being unrealistically beautiful and kind and pretty and thin, but when it comes to the Villainesses, the choir falls silent.
The Evil Queen is every bit as slender and beautiful as Snow White. Why, she’s the second fairest in the land. How do you deal with being the second prettiest girl in the room? Well, you murder the prettiest one, obviously.
http://jezebel.com/screw-princesses-disney-villains-are-the-real-role-m-476307885
The live action movie Snow White and the Huntsman failed precisely because Charlize Theron is so much prettier than what’s-her-face.
Cruella deVille? Scrawny little bitch, ain’t she? And she turns puppies into coats!
Glenn Close did a marvellous job bringing her to life. She’s not at all unrealistically beautiful.
Maleficent? Size zero evil.
And Angelina Jolie is so totally average.
The hypocrisy of all this just drives me mad. The only difference between the Villainesses and the Princesses is that the Princesses are kind and they love a man. The feminist outcry over body image is nothing but a smokescreen. If feminists cared about unrealistic body images, they would care just as much about how the evil women are portrayed and about how the men are portrayed.
*crickets*
Pretty young women who are kind and love a man. That’s the story feminism hates. The story they do not want little girls to hear. They want the heart of that story carved out of every little girl’s chest and brought to them in a box.
It will never work. The Huntsman for one, refuses to carry out the Evil Queen’s dirty work. And the Princess won’t stop loving the Prince. It’s in her nature.
And nature is a difficult force to reckon with. It hardly ever ends well for those who try.
Biology always wins. Beauty wins. Love wins.
Your beauty does not have to be extraordinary. Just make the most of what you have. Try. Beauty and the Boobz anyone?
Disney fairytales are beloved because they are true. Be kind, be loving, be generous, be as pretty as you can be. That’s how you capture the heart of the Prince.
That’s how you live happily ever after.
Lots of love,
JB
judgybitch 
Chris Hemsworth makes me weak in the knees. He and Charlize Theron were the only reasons to watch that Huntsman movie.
My favorite Disney heroine (not strictly a princess) was Mulan. I never was a huge fan of Little Mermaid because Ariel seemed kind of superficial- Mulan had a backbone. Same with Belle (who was my daughter’s favorite). To this day my husband calls me his Belle- which I think is really sweet. Princesses were big in my house while my daughter was a little girl and we still go see every Princess movie that comes out. I liked “Brave” because it had a nice mother/daughter story. Not too many of those these days.
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Gorgeous. Polemics is a demanding art, but you handle both jobs — argument and art — masterfully, lyrically, hypnotically. I’m in your debt for what you do, even more for how you do it.
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Merida is the name of a Spanish city, close to Portugal. It has one of the oldest theatres in the world (Roman) which still a theatre. Every summer, they play there Greek classics, some of them about female heroines like “Antigona” or “Medea”. The Roman name of Merida was “Emerita Augusta”. The character of “Maximus” played by
Russell Crowe in “Gladiator” supposed to be from Emerita Augusta. And, this Maximus character is a strong male archetype: the hero, the one who protects his women, the one who is rooted to his land and is a man of “strength and honour”. Not a jerk, not a psycho, not a women torturer, like the character played by Joaquim Phoenix: “Commodus”‘. Do women prefer Commodus instead of Maximus?
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i think what got most people was how the drawn version looked compared to the 3D one, which looks a lot more typical of a disney princess. this is why we cam’t have nice things.
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The difference between gay men and lesbians:
Gay men don’t recruit.
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I think if gay men were openly fantasizing about underage boys, there would be a huge outcry, even if the boy in question was a drawing!
Manga cartoons get criticized all the time for depicting under age girls for the male gaze.
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I suspect what’s really at issue is that these cartoons are supposed to be “kid’s movies”, and the idea that adolescent or even grown men might find Merida sexually attractive scared the $#!+ out of certain people. In other words, don’t expect to see a female protagonist in a Disney cartoon feature drawn like Pocahontas anytime soon.
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Yet another example of feminism working as hard as they can to increase choice for women, by employing the very clever method of reducing choice for women. I can’t figure out if that is supposed to make sense or not. Maybe it isn’t.
All I know is that it doesn’t. Make sense, that is. At all.
Feminism – splitting atoms. With. Their. Minds. Since 1967…
And yet, women keep buying this crap in bulk. I don’t get it.
Tell me, why does this character have to be plain in order for the feminists to think she’s awesome, and as soon as she is not plain anymore, they turn on her? Are her actions what make her awesome, or just the way she dresses? What’s driving this?
Jealousy?
I mean, did her awesomeness somehow melt away as soon as she put on a sparkly dress for a big event in her honor?
I can just see the feminist response: “How awesome would it be if she’d just worn burlap to this event, am I right? I mean, how independent would she be if she just threw off every single social construct and did whatever she fucking wanted anytime she wanted to? Wouldn’t that be fucking great if you could just do whatever you want anytime you want? And how about all these people that would tell you that you can’t, or, even worse, look down on you if you did? What do they want us to be, responsible? Accountable? Polite? Patriarchy!!!!!***
I, for one, refuse to be beholden to anyone, and plan to start defecating in place anytime I feel the need – society can’t tell me that I need to go to the toilet! I want all my bills paid, but I don’t want to be responsible for paying them! I want kids, but want someone else to raise them for me, so I can have the career that I want to have, which needs to be one in which I ‘kick ass,’ but don’t have to make any hard decisions at all. I want! I WANT!!!
***Of course, we want all men to continue to be responsible, accountable, and polite. And also to treat us like ladies whenever we want, and to feel sorry for treating us like ladies whenever we don’t want. It’s just women that should be able to do whatever, whenever, with no accountability and consequence whatsoever, and if anything goes wrong at all, we want to be able to blame it on someone else*. How dare they expect us to dress nicely for an event in our honor!!! How RUDE!“
*And by “someone else” we mean “men.”
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I’m holding out for a father/daughter story. Haven’t seen one of those in quite some time.
The Little Mermaid was a good one, with Triton coming to his daughter’s rescue at the end, and doing what Dads do – putting a massive amount of hurt on the POS that hurt his daughter. Or at least trying to (he did fail, and it was the Prince that finally came to Ariel’s rescue). Never mind that for most of the movie up to that point, Triton served as a living embodiment of “the patriarchy” holding back the dreams of a woman.
Beauty and the Beast is about as close as I can come to finding a second example, but even then, Maurice was a bit of a dundering buffoon who wouldn’t be able to exist without his wise, benevolent daughter to help him get his clothes on in the morning. Same for the Sultan in Aladdin. In fact, now that I think of it, the Sultan and Maurice were very nearly the same character…
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I’ve always loathed anything Disney*, so I don’t really have a dog in this fight. Still, one would think that even the vapid moronettes at Jezebel would have something much more important with which to occupy the few semi-functioning brain cells that they have.
(* Amazingly, my grandson, now 10, seems to share this loathing, without any prompting or influence from me and appears to be one of maybe a half dozen kids in the Northern Hemisphere who is a “Disneyphobe.” Even when he was a toddler, he never showed any interest in anything Disney, he actually dislikes all of Disney’s films, and has ze-ro interest in ever visiting either Disneyland or Disney World.)
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I thought Mulan had a great father-daughter dynamic. He didn’t understand her but was sure proud of her when she came home.
Remember she went off to war (disguised as a man) because her father was too crippled to fight and she was worried for him and knew he’d be too proud not to go. I need to watch that one again…
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Yaoi.
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What, are you kidding? Gay men can be totally predatory.
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What? Are you kidding? Gay men can be totally predatory.
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Of course they can be!
They’re humans.
Some humans suck.
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Point being, they are also men and they would come in for waaaaay different treatment if the discussion was about a teenage boy.
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Never saw Mulan. Going to now. Thanks.
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It all boils down to profit. Tangled came out a year earlier and was your classic boy-saves-girl story. Given the short time between the two, we can compare.
Tangled
Budget:
$260,000,000 (estimated)
Gross:
$200,807,262 (USA) (27 May 2011)
(flop)
Brave
Budget:
$185,000,000 (estimated)
Gross:
$237,282,182 (USA) (11 January 2013)
(profitable)
Like it or not, parents want their little girls to grow up and be man hating lesbobos. It also appears to be cheaper if you cut out the male character.
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Cartoon characters? Really? That’s an issue now?
A few weeks ago my curiosity got the better of me and I spent an hour reading jezebel to find out what the site – which seems to be popular – was all about. My conclusion: if some people are this stupid, it should be illegal for them to share their thoughts. I’m all about free speech, but for the good of our civilisation, young people should be prevented from reading hogwash written by mindless, spoiled, self-hating bitches. Moronic drivel is poison for a developing mind.
And if we are so concerned with movie characters, we should just ignore the blatant misandry spread by almost every American movie of the last 15 years?
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Oh, and if you want your kids to see Disney films, get dvds of The Aristocats, Jungle Book, 101 Dalmatians etc. – films made by the actual Walt Disney, not the money-grabbing untalented ass-holes who took over his company.
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I am trying to understand why feminists celebrate the concept of “girls can do everything men can…in heels!” (Oops, almost wrote “hells” there…they are hellish shoes though), meaning they supposedly love the idea of women being strong, empowered, kick-ass and all that while looking gorgeous. But when women or girls are actually depicted as being gorgeous, especially when women are portrayed in a manner that is attractive to the opposite sex, then they cry SEXISM! MISOGYNY! UNREALISTIC PORTRAYAL! UNREALISTIC EXPECTATIONS! So Disney drew a more grown up Merida in the classic non-3D Disney style? Oh, how dare she be slender and curvy and have a feminine smiling face!
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mulan struggle on why she isn’t born a guy who could serve in her father stead. in the end, she decided to just do it and impersonate herself as if she was his son.
i like it because she did not do it out to prove anything, but rather out of love and duty to her family. she overcame the odd and prove her worth equal to that of a son.
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There is one Disney “prince” that deviates strongly from the male beauty ideal: Quasimodo. And (surprise, surprise), he does not get the girl. However, I think this is one time Disney got it right, instead of going for wishful thinking – being a weird-looking insecure nice guy doesn’t pay. If feminists want a cartoon where “ugly” people win, they should be happy there is Shrek. Both the woman and the man end up being ogres, that’s cool, right? 🙂
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Of course, look at the Catolic clergy! They go for the MALE children.
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I think Charlize is hotter playing the “evil woman” or the “bad girl” than the “good girl”, like in that movies with Keanu Reeves.
Well, except the “evil woman” of “Monster”. Of course.
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Bara for men, shota for women.
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A non disney suggestion for people that has a Father/Daughter relationship is a movie called Imaginarium. I warn that if you don’t cry you will at least need a few hours to recover. Very beautiful but when one of the people in it has dementia it is going to be sad.
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I can’t ever think about feminism without immediately thinking of this:
The resemblance is uncanny
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The only cartoon movie from the last fifteen years you should let your kids watch is The Incredibles.
I still have crushes on Belle and Ariel from my youth. Those sea shells…
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Behold Doris Lessing, a literary genius of Noble Prize caliber documenting “female experience”. I wonder, how much does abandoning two toddlers with her ex-spouse “to pursue her writing career and communist beliefs” reflect “the female experience” in general, when put under scrutiny?
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They have to dichotomize everything. Merida is either 100% awesome or she is 0% awesome. And “dressing up for others” isn’t awesome to them unless the character doing it is leading around men by the nose, then it might be….or it might not be.
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Are you talking about the Nightwish movie? Huh…yeah it was an interesting depiction of the father/daughter story.
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I actually have no problem with the traditional Disney Princess narrative, as long as the characters are well developed and the like. My only gripe is that seems to be the only story we get for girl characters out of Disney. Merida and Elsa just a little variation in the story. Merida learns to accept her responsibility and WILL marry when she’s older and more prepared, while Elsa is too be busy becoming Queen and overcoming her crippling anxiety and such to have a romantic arc just yet. There are a lots of different stories to tell for girls, and we should explore them.
I love characters like Belle, Rapunzel and Mulan and the like because while they do have a romance, they’re still so much more than that. Mulan is about family and duty no matter the odds (I also love that her romance comes around because of her loyalty to her family, and that it’s a relationship born out of mutual respect), Belle is intelligent and kind and adventurous. Rapunzel is also adventurous, wants self-discovery and is self-sacrificing (as is her Prince, which is a great story IMO – they’re both willing to give up everything for each other). That love comes out of that, I can totally enjoy (I love Jane Austen too JB, not to mention Shakespeare, including the lovingly maligned Taming of the Shrew, but my favourite is the love story between Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing) I’d just love to see some different narratives for female characters in Disney Movies, for variety’s sake, along with well-written romances.
…I hope I don’t get a verbal beating for this one…
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Benedick and Beatrice are two of my favorites! I love their verbal wars. It’s so obvious they love each other.
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Same! I’m kind of a silly romantic girl at heart and Shakespeare had fantastic characters, male and female, before Austen hit the scene XD. I have no clue what part of Canada you live in, but have you ever gone to the Stratford Festival? It’s really fantastic. They had a great Much Ado a couple years back with an adorable married couple as Beatrice and Benedick.
To go off-topic, I ugh don’t agree with a whole lot of your opinions, but I do agree on the importance of love, marriage, and family – however that family takes shape. See, since my teen years I’ve always had the knowledge that I wouldn’t be a good mother. I’m just not the maternal type. But I have decided on a few alternatives: My family will be my nieces and nephews, friends, brother and sisters and the partner/spouse I do hope to have in the future. I want to be an amazing aunt and I am prepared to take the brunt of the care for my parents when they get elderly, since I don’t plan on having kids for the foreseeable future. It’s not the norm, but it’s what fits me.
Sorry for the rant.
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