By: Kelly
We all know how Hollywood brainwashes children into having premarital sex and murdering people in cold blood. But in the last few years, it has also become the culprit behind a plot to rid females of their girlish charms (which include giggling and being a completely helpless airhead). For a while, the media had the right idea. Disney was manufacturing princesses so pure of heart that it seemed every girl in America would grow up to into absolute perfection. After watching Snow White and Sleeping Beauty, I saw nothing odd or wrong about princes traipsing through forests, slaying witches and dragons to save the loves of their lives. I of course, assumed that the princesses had tricked their princes into believing they couldn't do it themselves, thereby giving them times to take a break from the needy men in their lives. I figured that they had mastered "playing hard to get" so well that they literally made men risk their lives to earn them. I imagined Sleeping Beauty walking up to that sewing machine and saying "Screw this! I don't want to sew I want to go watch some UFC. I'll just pretend to prick my finger and fall into a deep sleep so this hot dude will feel bad for me and go fight a dragon in my honor. Then I can take a nice nap and wake up to a kiss. Easy as pie!" Rapunzel probably had it made chilling up in that tower watching television and eating cheese doodles all day long. Those Disney princesses knew what they were doing, I'm telling you.
But then 2D animation went out the door, and with it went all of its glorious role models and quirky little animals. Instead, the mainstream media moved on to bigger and grittier things such as Shrek and the Cheetah Girls. All over, little girls were now looking up to Princess Fiona who, at the end of the movie, abandoned superficiality and not only married an ogre but became one as well (Devolution, I'm telling you. Hidden racist meanings abound, find them if you can.) Fiona far surpassed Shrek at marital arts and ripped apart the merry men while also ripping to shreds the collective identity of the perfect woman.
Even worse, after Shrek came the Cheetah Girls, four hard gangster chicks in New York, only one of which was white! I mean, Disney had been creating princesses since 1937 and not once did they make a black one. Pressure from the Disney Channel in the form of the Proud Family forced Disney's hand and 72 years later, we had our first gumbo-making black princess (of course, they remedied this by turning her into a frog). But I digress. Besides abandoning the Aryan image of perfection, the Cheetah Girls also departed from the ideal of docile woman. All of a sudden, girls were no longer singing “I’m wishing for the one I love to find me” but “I can slay my own dragons/I can dream my own dreams/ My knight in shining armor is me/ So I’m gonna set me free”. Are those lyrics loaded, or what?! (If you read that verse again, this time in terms of rejecting sex and embracing the notion of “pleasing yourself”-I don’t know if there is a delicate ladylike word for masturbation the way women “glisten” rather than sweat, so whatever- it takes on an entirely different meaning.) After watching Galleria and her friends belt it out, I and every other girl across the country would look at women like Mary Jane in Spiderman with upmost contempt. I mean really, did she not have use of her legs? When the Green Goblin was attacking Peter, could she really do nothing but scream? I know she’s a ginger, but still!
So for several years, I continued on under this delusion that I should be distressed by damsels in distress. But then along came today’s savior for women everywhere. She hopped into the hearts and minds of every girl from the age of 11 to 45. With her vapid chocolate brown eyes and heart full of passionate and empty love to give, she had America hooked again on what it means to be female- all encompassing passivity and meekness. Who could I be speaking of, if not Bella Swan? She, like the good Mormon who birthed her, reacquainted us with the idea that the most important thing a girl can ever do is marry successfully. Although Mrs. Stephanie Meyer was smart enough to trick many of the feminists by frequently having Bella attempt to save Edward, she always stayed true to her roots and reversed the situation. For example, when Bella tried to go save Edward in Italy, he ended up being tortured trying to save her from an evil band of vampires while she once again screamed in that manly voice of hers, “No! Edward don’t!” How funny is that? This completely average girl bewitched a mythical creature into falling so madly in love with her, that upon believing she died, he attempts to kill himself. So Bella hops on a plane and gets a nice vacation in Italy where she got her boyfriend back after crying enough (Every girl knows that if you throw a big enough fit, you can get anything you want). And then she stands idly by as his entire family is put in danger. She really is the mastermind Sleeping Beauty reincarnated.
She tricks Edward into thinking her head is so empty that he cannot even read her thoughts. Bella was showing us the light. If we women pretend to be completely helpless morons, we can get guys to do pretty much anything we want. They’ll swim across entire oceans to save us because we pretend we can’t do it ourselves. They won't question our motives because they'll assume we're too stupid and weak to ever plot against them (which is of course, what we've done since the beginning of time. Literally. Eve got Adam to eat the forbidden fruit after all, as I mentioned in my first blog post ever). And Bella conned Edward into making her into a vampire so now she can live forever, look incredibly beautiful, and have insane speed and strength, all while acting like the lovable and completely dense girl he loves and doesn’t feel threatened by. Oh, and her power in Breaking Dawn? The ability to “shield”? If that isn’t a throwback to good old womanly submissiveness, I don’t know what is. There isn’t even a battle in that book. Bella is so good at playing the role of the idiot, she even gets Edward to practically beg her to have sex with washboard abs Jacob. Well, those Mormons do love their polygamy. Except now it’s the women who have the upper hand, with multiple guy partners. I knew Bella could bring us back to our proper morals.
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