Sexism In Fairy Tales Essay

Most of the princesses portray women to be weak and in need of saving from a prince from a faraway land. Cinderella is one of the most well-loved and famous Disney princess but its story also serve as a classic example of how gender roles dominate Disney films. According to Mahooney, “Cinderella demonstrates the female need for a male to form her identity.” Cinderella, while shown to be kind and lovely, never did show any trace of strength in standing up for herself at all, a coincidence most of Disney princesses have in films. In light of physical appearance, one of the most controversial themes almost every Disney princess films have is the existence of “Prince Charming.”

Many fairy tales contain controversial and social issues, such as stereotypes, poverty, and gender biases. For instance, the story about Cinderella describes her life of poverty and servitude due to her evil step family, until the prince fell in love with her and took her to the castle for their "happily ever after." This is a common stereotype about how women need men to support them because of their incapability to defend themselves. Furthermore, it depicts how men usually are wealthier than women. Since these stereotypes can cause children to make assumptions about others, they negatively impact a child’s ambitions and

Snow White is a fairy-tale known by many generations; it is a beloved Disney movie, and a princess favoured by many kids. But did you know the fairy-tale was made to teach young children, especially little girls, their duties in life? It also values beauty over knowledge, portrays women to be naive and incompetent, and assumes that women cannot understand anything other than common household chores. Throughout this criticism, I will be using the feminist lens to analyze the fairy-tale, Snow White, through the perspective of a feminist.

As explained in Judith Lorber’s excerpt from “‘Night To His Day’: The Social Construction of Gender”, gender is a socially constructed concept that everyone unconsciously adheres to (Lorber). As a socially constructed concept, representations of gender roles can reinforce or challenge the stereotypical images. In Killing Us Softly 4, Jean Kilbourne analyzed the advertisement industry’s representation of women and argued that the media plays a huge role in shaping gender formations (Kilbourne). Although objectification of women is still a prevalent issue, Kilbourne acknowledged that there are efforts nowadays that challenges the unrealistic representations of women and femininity (Kilbourne). Inspired partly by Killing Us Softly 4, the project is my way to reflect on how the Disney movies I had watched as I grow up represented gender.

In fairy tales the hero is often the male. Women often succumb to their naivety and are left to rely on men to be rescued. Furthermore, domestic duties are present in many tales. For instance, in Cinderella, although she is incredibly brilliant and beautiful, she is reduced to a house servant for her evil

Fairy tales are passed down through the generations. However, fairytales are embedded with gender dichotomies which stem from a dominant social ideology of patriarchy which put men above women. Traditional fairytales encourages women to be passive, gentle, eager to marry and have children, if they get in trouble and need help, they have to have self-restraint and wait for a handsome strong prince to rescue her. Although in modern adaptations of fairytales, women have a more equitable social positioning, being able to think and do things for themselves, whilst the expectations of men have lowered, and that men too can possess feminine qualities.

The Tough Princess by Waddell is a children’s book that can be considered part of the fairy tale genre, shown through its inclusion of stereotypical conventions. It can also be classified as a fractured fairy tale – which is a tale that has been retold or created in order to give a different view on the original plot. The original review of the book by Child Education, suggests that the book “breaks all the conventions of the traditional fairy tale and is all the more fun for that”. Within this essay, I will be discussing to which degree this is accurate, in terms of subverting all of the conventions and whether the reasoning behind he subversion is simply for comedic effect, or not.

Fairytales by the Grimm brothers were not only gruesome but also have a common characteristic of most fairytales, which is having evil characters or villains that are played by a women figure. This theme has been around since the earliest

abused as children and adolescence. However, the complex dynamics of sexism of oppression targeted against feminism is overwhelming and needs to be examined in the society.

Whether Female antagonists within fairy tales are portrayed in a positive or negative light their roles within the stories are very important if not crucial to the development of the protagonists. Karen Rowe in “Feminist and fairy tales” explains the divide between different female antagonists. Female antagonist come in all forms, Faeries, ogresses, evil queens, and evil witches step mothers and or step sisters. For the most part these characters are often divided between good and evil, or light and dark, but what is often realized, is that there isn’t much of a combination between the two groups in which an antagonist falls in between both categories. In this essay I will lay out the thematic roles of these different types of female antagonist’s portrayed within fairy tales.

In her commentary “Onceuponatime: The Roles” feminist writer Andrea Dworkin maintains gender roles are ignited as a result of fairy tales and those fairy tales have a cynical impact on culture and society. Dworkin points out genders are born into a world which predetermines their fate, a world in which one has to conform to distinct sex roles. The humiliation of females in society has become a reoccurring issue that society and it people are aware of from a young age. Growing up watching fairytales we are subconsciously taught that men are heroes. He is always vigorous and seems to be rendered sightless to the evil that exists. The “evil” in fairy tales is continuously presented in the female gender. The female is considered “evil” due to her

Fairy tales have always been focused towards children ever since Walt Disney took over the industry of remaking these stories. He took out all of the gore and some of the violence to make it more acceptable for children. With Anne Sexton's version of Cinderella, she brings back the gore and violence to its full capacity just like with the original Brothers Grimm story. Sexton's poetic version of Cinderella gives a humorous and eye-opened twist to this classic fairy tale. What brings all of these stories together is the way they all socialize women to make them naive. With this in mind, fairy tales do humiliate and objectify women to get them to accept violence within society.

In fairy tales, female characters are objects, and their value centers around their attractiveness to men. Since fairy tales rely on cultural values and societal norms to teach morals or lessons, it is evident that fairy tales define a woman’s value in a superficial way. Fairy tales teach that, typically, beauty equates to being valuable to men because of their fertility and purity; whereas, ugliness equates to being worthless and evil, including being ruined because of their lack of virginity. Descriptions readers see from fairy tales like “Rapunzel,” and “Little Snow-White” revolve around the women’s, or girl’s, physical appearance, and both stories play out to where the women remain in a state of objectification. In addition, they are damsels

But in fact we use the stories that we tell children, and especially those that we tell over and over, to instill messages, to teach cultural norms, to establish the roots of what we hope will be proper behavior as the children grow up. Fairytales are a form of propaganda. The traditional fairytale almost always reflects (and therefore works to reproduce) the power relations of patriarchy; its rigid sexual patterns teach that fear and masochism are tenets of femininity and all of the symbolic inversions that occur are not chances to upset the standard patriarchal hierarchy but are instead ways of maintaining it (Bacchilega, 1997, pp. 50-1).

Books, plays, and movies that depict culture and social life often make statements about social issues such as gender roles, racism, and class distinction. Stories set up a context in which characters relate, often representing “stock” characters chosen from society and placed in situations where their stereotypical behaviors—and sometimes their breaking of these stereotypes—are highlighted. As feminism became a popular movement in Western countries in general and the United States in particular, female voices were naturally heard through fictional characters. Social and political issues commonly fuel entertainment; feminism, racism, and classism—recurring themes in entertainment through the 20th Century and into the modern day—have