Every single Disney princess refused their status quo and changed their future. What better message can there be? I love Classic Disney. So do all my kids.

The problem with all of these "woke" SJWs is that each one of them is afraid that someone somewhere is enjoying life.

The main problem is that SJWs conclude the worst about every story, song, movie, event, etc.

In Sleeping Beauty, they see sexual assault when the prince kisses the sleeping woman, for whom the kiss of a prince is the only means of rescue from the enforced slumber. They argue that it promotes that only a man could rescue her; perhaps they'd be okay if she'd been kissed by a transgendered prince.

It goes beyond fairy tales. In "Baby, It's Cold Outside," a song about a flirtatious banter between two people who are obviously into one another, SJWs hear the desperate pleadings of a woman on the verge of being roofied and raped.

Like Jay points out, they're afraid someone might somewhere be having a good time.

==================================================

OT: what the hell is up with Apple's latest Mac O/S and spellcheck. In the earlier sentence, I used "hear" to indicate receipt of auditory stimulation and the spellcheck put a squiggly line below it with the suggestion that "here" would be correct. Um, no.

It's been doing that with too/to/two, you're/your, and there/their/they're for weeks now.

Stop hiring the functionally illiterate to be editors!

"OT: what the hell is up with Apple's latest Mac O/S and spellcheck."

iOS is similarly deranged, offering rare proper nouns no one uses for the most common words one would speak.

The problem might be indicated by the forced inclusion of several dozen non-European languages in the OS load. If you must accomodate phonemes used in Plantagenet Cherokee, Urdu, etc., it might well stymie the OS to come up with the right word within the expected second or two. I'm sure the problem exists for those people, too.

One problem is that some people want to nice-i-fy the world (in all fiction) when the world is not nice. Take the pinnochio story: there are horrible things that happen to the bad boys in the story, just like in real life in the old days--it is a warning. Other old fairy tales were warnings about the danger of wolves or creatures in the dark or witches--all things that terrified people during the time of the Grimm brothers. Now all the stories have been so dumbed down that they don't make sense. Cartoon pirates are friendly.

The princess stories put into fictional form the very real innate tendency of women to have a strong desire to marry as close to a prince as possible. Imagine the old days. In order for a couple of children to survive, a woman had to give birth to 7 or 8 or 10. Life was brutal for a peasant. If a woman could marry the local chief or officer in the army or local prince, she might have 5 children survive and would live a very nice life (for the time). This desire of women to marry up is thus based on 50,000 years of selection pressure. While it may cause marital unhappiness now, it is still there.

I took family to see Cinderella on stage. It was the "woke" version unfortunately. The prince was a doofus with no will of his own. In the original, she was not only beautiful but kind and they emphasized this too much in this version to clarify that merely being beautiful is not enough. When the princess realized she had his attention, she refused to marry him unless he gave away most of his authority to an elected prime minister (who was the worst sort of SJW character in the play). urgh

And another thing.

Why all this concern over the portrayal of fairy tale princesses? In Disney movies, princes are portrayed as little more than meat. Disney princes exist only to give a kiss or hold a ball. This dichotomy was delightfully skewered in Shrek.

Disney princes are also blindly stupid - e.g., not recognizing Cinderella after having spent an entire evening dancing with her. Thankfully, her shoe fit - and what's up with that? The other shoe apparently turned back into whatever it originally was. Why didn't this one? I know, stop looking for logic in fairy tales; or Disney movies.

When is someone going to protest this demeaning portrayal of men in Disney movies?

/sarcasm

"The main problem is that SJWs conclude the worst about every story, song, movie, event, etc."

That's exactly it, and I don't think that they're aware of what they're doing. It's like listening to people with untreated depression a/o anxiety who don't understand that their illness is coloring their perception of things.

But unlike someone who's depressed, SJW's expect everyone else to be accountable for their distorted worldview.

"That's exactly it, and I don't think that they're aware of what they're doing. "

Oh yes they are. In SJW-land, it's all about them, and they require constant attention and adulation. It's the politics of narcissism.

Thankfully, her shoe fit - and what's up with that? The other shoe apparently turned back into whatever it originally was. Why didn't this one? I know, stop looking for logic in fairy tales; or Disney movies.

Disney's Cinderella version is a delicious essay on female intrasexual competition.

The other shoe remained as a glass slipper, that was pivotal for the plot twist at the end of the film.

For Amy to be so hospitiably published in Quillette in 2018, the 'year of the IDW,' is not a small thing, and she deserves our props.

Good Going, Big Red.

...Only with a correct spelling of "hospitably."

Spellingchecking is so lame that it can't be trusted, as in the present instance, "spellchecking."

Someone should be talking about this problem. Somewhere.

Props Big Red.

> The main problem is that SJWs
> conclude the worst about every
> story, song, movie, event, etc

A person named Jones once said: "QED: every Sorkin character is what Sorkin fears he is."

I don't know that they are aware Cousin Dave. My sister is a fringe SJW. Last Christmas I made an offhanded comment about something that offended her feminist sensibilities. A little later I realized how stupid I had been and tried to get out of the conversation. I flat out told her I didn't want to talk about this anymore. She still wouldn't let it go. I went into the other room. She came chasing after me. I told her to leave me alone and left the house to walk away. She came chasing me down the road still going on about her feminist stuff. I told her she could leave me alone or I would pack up my family and go. She couldn't understand why I was unhappy and tried to keep going on about her stuff. So I packed up my family and left.

She still doesn't understand what she did wrong or why I left. I'll agree about it being the politics of narcissism. But because it is all about them and only them that is why they don't understand. They don't consider anyone else's position.

On the bright side she is finally starting to understand not everyone works at Boeing. That not everyone is part of a union. Not everyone has a work environment like hers. But that took over a decade of fighting with everyone in the family to just start to understand. And after all that time she only barely has the concept.

For Amy to be so hospitiably published in Quillette in 2018, the 'year of the IDW,' is not a small thing, and she deserves our props.

Agreed. But I found it amusing that the Quillette Twitter account referred to this article as "short" when it came in at 1,500 words.

Based on some of the thumbsuckers I've read (or abandoned reading) on Quillette, the site could be improved by whacking some of those lugubriously argued pieces down to 1,500 words.

I know, stop looking for logic in fairy tales; or Disney movies.
_____________________________________

Indeed.

Btw, I'd say most fairy-tale movies are aimed at girls anyway, so THAT'S why parents of girls are concerned. I had mixed feelings about Disney's live-action "Enchanted" (2007), but boys, apparently, don't WANT to watch that one anyway. Not to mention that it's been said that in any Disney cartoon, the fully-human characters are always the least interesting characters, so if boys want to watch "Snow White," it's likely just for the dwarves and the animals - and the scary parts.

But there IS a method to the madness of some tales in their original form. Not to mention that even if you only look at European versions of Cinderella (there are different versions worldwide, the oldest being the Egyptian story of a Pharaoh who finds a tiny lost shoe, falls in love with its size, and finds and marries its owner, a prostitute - yes, you read that correctly) - you'll find multiple differences. In the Grimm version, Cinderella gets everything on her own, pretty much! (Hint: Yes, magic is involved, but there's no godmother, per se, and the magic wouldn't exist without Cinderella's initiative.)

Some points:

1. Wicked stepfamilies weren't just made up. IIRC, academic Maria Tatar said that hostility in such families was common and heavily based on competition for inheritances - obviously, very important for women in past centuries.

2. While I don't remember any critic's pointing this out, Cinderella's constant passivity/politeness at least ensures that none of the women will mistrust her or lock her up or worse. (Yes, I know, Disney changed that, near the end!)

3. Neither the Perrault or Grimm version is really a rags-to-riches story, because in both cases, Cinderella is BORN into a rich family and thus has the upper-crust manners to match - as well as the confidence/training/ability to dance well enough to fit into royal society! As I recall, there really aren't that many stories in Grimm, at least, where a girl from a POOR family gets to marry a rich man. (Common men often get to marry princesses, though.) Of course, it IS ridiculous that the stepsisters don't recognize her.

4. Last but not least, tiny-foot fetishism has been common in many societies, so in a way, it makes sense to focus on that rather than on just having the prince search for her in a more realistic fashion.

From The Straight Dope column, Oct. 1998:

"Dear Cecil:

"In your column on Chinese foot binding, you mentioned that small feet have been prized in many cultures, using as an example 'Cinderella’s tiny glass slipper.' While your point is well taken, you missed a chance to mention the story behind Cinderella’s unusual footwear. In the original folktale, Cinderella wore (in French) une pantoufle en vair (a fur slipper). Because the word vair was uncommon, the 17th-century French translator thought it was verre (glass). Cinderella has been wearing glass slippers ever since."

— Foot Fetishist, via the Internet

Cecil Adams said:

"Great story. It appeared in the Encyclopedia Britannica at one time, and the French writer Balzac believed it. But the consensus among folklorists is that it’s, well, folklore.

"The Cinderella story we know today was published in 1697 by the French author Charles Perrault in his book Tales of My Mother Goose. Perrault based the story on an oral fairy tale that, interestingly, seems to have originated in ninth-century China. Perrault made many changes to the crude peasant original to sanitize it for a bourgeois audience. For example, in some early versions Cinderella’s sisters cut off their heels and toes in order to fit into the glass slipper.

"But Perrault didn’t invent the glass slipper, and it probably didn’t arise from vair/verre confusion either. As the French folklorist Paul Delarue pointed out in a 1951 essay, 'one can also find [glass shoes in Cinderella stories] in other countries where there is no homonym which permits the confusion.' For example, glass shoes appear in an old Scottish version of the Cinderella tale as well as in several stories in Irish folk literature.

"As for the argument that glass slippers must be a mistake because they aren’t realistic … no shit, Sherlock. Why do you think they call these things fairy tales? But glass footwear does suggest that its wearer is a creature of elegance and delicacy, which of course was the point."

Finally:

"Is Frozen the Only Modern Disney Movie that Matters?"

(this includes a link to my comments on "Enchanted")

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/rec.arts.movies.past-films/lGqriLb5OWo/xo6GL-aeAQAJ;context-place=forum/rec.arts.movies.past-films

Quotes of mine from that thread:

Aside from the good music, the long-overdue message that "you can't marry someone you just met" is like water in a desert.

It's interesting that even millenniums ago, when people were very seldom (presumably) allowed to marry for love, there's no shortage of myths and folktales where marrying for love is precisely what happens. Also, having fictional characters fall in love "at first sight" makes it easier to write a story, of course, but it's likely also a sort of cover-up for the fact that if you lived back then and you DIDN'T fall in love with your betrothed (who may or may not be a stranger) until long after the wedding, well, too bad for you...

...And:

It's become de rigueur for parents, post-1960s, to teach their children that ANY story, magical or not, that ends with the sentiment of "happily ever after" is automatically a fairy tale, since life, by definition, has both joys and sorrows - including the chance of becoming just plain bored to death with your spouse.

(To go back to my first post, I think one question to ask is "of course romantic love isn't sustainable, but just how much boredom, within a couple, should one have to put up with even BEFORE getting married?")

And speaking of fairy tales and wrong messages, I think another reminder that would be good for kids - over and over - is that princesses and princes, and their lifestyles, ONLY exist by keeping poor people down, so it's wrong to worship any real-life royalty. Or any real-life rich people, for that matter.

Amy wrote:

Author and activist Lenore Skenazy urges parents to go “free range”—give their kids healthy independence, such as by letting them ride their bikes around the neighborhood without being accompanied by a rent-a-mercenary. I suggest parents also go psychologically free range. This means allowing children to watch classic Disney films instead of giving in to the ridiculous panic that their daughters will start seeing “princess” as a career option.
_____________________________________

To me, the real danger lies in:

1. Buying movies - as opposed to renting them and watching them WITH the kids - since it's not good for any kid to be wasting precious brain cells on screen time in general, never mind watching the same videos over and over.

2. Letting kids think that watching a movie version is as good as reading the book. 90% of the time, no it isn't, and even the low-key book "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" deserves to be read first - if only so kids will have a chance to develop a TASTE for slow-paced entertainment that also makes you think! (Not to mention that in the book, Oz is NOT a dream! Very important and good, in most kids' view.)

3. Letting kids think that there's nothing too commercial or dumbed-down about Disney. I buy hundreds of books for multiple families with children, but you will NEVER catch me giving Disney books of any kind to kids. How many would bother to read the original "Winnie-the-Pooh" after reading Disney versions? What is the point of giving kids candy before dinner, so to speak? Kids can easily get candy in secret on their own. Why encourage that?

Finally, here's another thread about this, from 2015:

http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2015/07/23/whats_wrong_wit_18.html

Here's what I said at the end:

(link to the book)

It's an 1847 book: "The Ladies' Vase; or Polite Manual for Young Ladies." You can read the whole book.

(Amazingly, it was reprinted in 2006 - and again this year!)

The reason I'm mentioning it is the chapters "A Difficult Question" (2/3 down the page) and the follow-up, "Easily Decided."

It's a story about whether girls should grow up well-educated or not - the "moral" is more modern than you might expect.

SPOILER

Bottom line: It does girls no good to deny them education or to push them into it if you're going against their true inclinations, whatever
those may be. (Pretty radical for that time, don't you think?)

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, you have to realize that these fairy tales take place in a time period where strong, assertive, independent women still had to operate within parameters dictated by the times.

Snow White didn't live in a time when she could say, "To hell with men. I'm going to be a biophysicist."

You want to know what I consider the most offensive, sexist, Disney tale of all? Enchanted.

This one actually took place in modern times, and Robert (played by Patrick Dempsey) is a consummate dickhead.

Giselle (played by Amy Adams) is enjoying a hot dog, saying, "This is so yummy!" So, dickhead, of course, takes the rest of it from her and throws it away.

She starts to sing "That's How You Know" and the calypso group performing nearby starts to join in and dickhead grabs her by the arm and starts pushing her along. That is not how you get a woman to accompany you.

Maybe in Snow White's time, that's what you did. But remember, Robert is a modern man, and actually prides himself on being a good boyfriend and fiance to Nancy. And all throughout that movie, I keep finding myself asking, "What the fuck is your problem?"

Giselle, during the song, reads a sign advertising a ball, and says that that would be fun. So, dickhead, being a dickhead, says, "No, that would not be fun."

Basically, dickhead spends the entire movie trying to control her, negating her own experience and preferences, and he can't stop telling her what to do.

Yes, to a certain extent, this is appropriate, because Giselle, coming from a different time period and reality, is a fish out of water, but he overdoes it big time.

I wonder if you realized this...
Disney bought the portfolio that includes The Rocky Horror Picture Show - so Frankenfurter is your newest Disney princess!

"On the bright side she is finally starting to understand not everyone works at Boeing. That not everyone is part of a union. "

Ha. From having worked at Boeing -- at a non-union location -- I know what all is behind that statement.

I'll agree about it being the politics of narcissism. But because it is all about them and only them that is why they don't understand. They don't consider anyone else's position. ~ Ben at December 17, 2018 1:23 PM

The narcissism is not limited to just politics.

I've got a sister-in-law whose Facebook feed is full of variations of those "What does your name mean" clickbait posts. She takes the survey, test, whatever, and publishes the results. And those results are never, "you're an idiot," but always "you are strong," "you are independent," or some variation of "you are a warrior queen." And, apparently, she will get rich in 2019 and wants us all to know it. It's worse than LOL Cats.

I don't care if she takes the tests, surveys, whatever. Just don't publish every single one of them. I'd block her inane posts, but in order to keep up with family news (a brother-in-law in bad health), I can't. So, now I'm stuck with 10-20 "XXXX is a warrior queen" posts clogging my already crowded feed every day.

"I've got a sister-in-law whose Facebook feed is full of variations of those "What does your name mean" clickbait posts. "

I wonder if she realizes that Facebook and their third-party marketers are using those things to collect all kinds of personal data from her. Maybe she doesn't care.

As I recall, there really aren't that many stories in Grimm, at least, where a girl from a POOR family gets to marry a rich man. (Common men often get to marry princesses, though.)
__________________________________

I checked my edition again (the classic Grosset & Dunlap, 1945 edition illustrated by Fritz Kredel).

Mind you, it only has 55 tales, so it's not complete. But, once you take out the two dozen or so stories where there's no wedding (e.g., "Hansel & Gretel"), more than half the stories that are left are about rich women marrying rich men - "Sleeping Beauty," "Snow White," "Cinderella," etc. Then you have 7 stories about poor or ordinary men marrying princesses - "The Gallant Tailor," "The 12 Dancing Princesses," "The Golden Goose," etc.

So how many tales are there about girls from POOR families who marry princes?

Four.

Rapunzel
Rumplestiltskin
Snow-White & Rose Red
The Three Spinning Fairies

Bottom line: It shouldn't be that hard for parents to point out to their daughters that most of the time, rich men only marry rich women, so girls had better figure out on their OWN how to become rich, since chances are, they don't feel rich even when they are - unless their immediate neighbors or most of their classmates are clearly much worse off. (This is why telling kids to "count their blessings" makes little or no sense to kids - why should they be grateful for things like TVs, cell phones and laptops when at least half the kids they know in school already have them?)

In her case Conan it is all about how 'women are oppressed' and 'how hard it is to be a woman', yada yada. The politics are peripherally there but the misandrist feminist thing is what is really going on. She literally doesn't understand that I don't have to talk to her if I don't want to. I've talked with her about this before and all she can get is that I'm oppressing her by not being her verbal punching bag. So while I feel your pain with your inlaw, but you aren't on the same level as this. I won't visit because I don't want to be trapped with her. I only talk on the phone a few times a year. Even my parents are limiting their contact. I'd hope she could change but we are all getting close to 40. Change may happen but it isn't likely.

Cousin Dave, since you've been there you probably get some of it much better than I do. I've never worked for a union company much less a place like Boeing. I used to think unions were wasteful and largely pointless in today's economy. But after listening to my sister I have a much darker view of them. They seem one step removed from the KKK now. Full of racism, sexism, and all other kinds of vile behavior. When no one can get fired you can get away with all kinds of horrible things. And when no one can be fired you move up by making people's work environment so horrible they leave voluntarily. But as I said you probably have a more accurate view of such things.

I've never worked for a union company much less a place like Boeing. ~ Ben at December 18, 2018 2:26 PM

I have; never for a company like Boeing, but a unionized company nonetheless.

The company was a retail grocery company whose line workers were, by union shop laws, compelled to be members of UFCW. As part of the back office staff, I was management and, therefore, not unionized.

Cashier wages were pegged to those of industrial machinists. This was done when cashiers had to memorize prices, lift products from the shelf, know and use math, and operate complex adding machines. UFCW refused to concede that the job had changed, that technology meant the cashier's job was no longer the physical job it had been.

UFCW's intransigence on wages kept labor expenses high, cashier and otherwise, and put the company on the ropes at a time when Costco and Walmart were dismantling the traditional grocery business model, threatening all of our livelihoods.

Ben has your sister always been this way?

The reason I ask is because it sounds like you may have been closer at one point and she doesn't realize her behavior is changing that.

I've had a few friends who became noticeably anti-men as they got into middle age. I think a lot of it was from their own disappointments and frustrations that they projected on to men and society in general. A lot of media for women really encourages that idea.

With two small XX types in my house, I have watched a lot of princess movies over the last few years. And read a lot of princess books. And bought a lot of princess dresses. And facilitated the small folks meeting quite a few princesses both close to home and in that state with the palm trees and giant mice.

Know what Disney princess movies are? They are quest tales starring young women. The main characters want something, they state that want, they sing about that want, and then they go out and get it. Yes, the main characters are attractive and wear pretty dresses (though I firmly contend that the three dumpy, middle-aged fairies are the real heroes of "Sleeping Beauty"). So? Most action movie heroes are good-looking and wear flattering clothing.

(Also, it is a travesty that Howard Ashman died before he could make more movies, and his songs in "Little Mermaid" are wonderful. Yes, Ariel getting married at 16 is not what I want for my kids. Which is why I have discussed that with them using the movie as a springboard, much as I have discussed the history of Native Americans with them while reading the "Little House on the Prairie" books. And they find all that interesting, rather than tedious, because they like the characters involved! SHOCKING.)

It was around junior high she picked up the victim mind set Sheila. So it has been a while. I just get the worst of it. She puts me on some kind of pedestal mentally. I'm extra strong, extra smart, extra yada (at least in her mind) so if anything goes wrong (or at least less than what she wanted) it is all my fault. After all, I'm so great and so powerful that I obviously could have prevented it. So the fact that something didn't go according to plan is therefor my fault.

I guess the only thing that has changed is I am thinking about writing her out of my will. I was freaking out a bit over the holidays. After her behavior last year chasing me down the street insisting on lecturing on her favorite topic and not understanding why none of that was appropriate I was unconsciously uncomfortable with seeing her again. Once I realized that I also realized I don't want to put my sons in a position where she would be raising them. So I need to rethink who would get the kids in the case that I and my wife die.

All around a generally unpleasant topic.

Regarding Boeing: it's weird in that there are union and non-union locations. At the union locations (including everything in the Seattle area), nearly everyone is union, including the engineers. Every now and then the engineers' union would send an organizer to the location where I worked. We'd all laugh at him. They actually had a certification vote once; the union got less than 10% of the vote. None of this seemed to bother the organizers much. They just kept coming back, confident that someday, somehow, we'd all magically see the light. There were a few categories of techs at our location who were unionized, but we seldom had to interact with them. Most of the unionization is over on the Commercial Airplanes side; there's not much on the Space and Defense side. (If there was, it wouldn't be cost competitive on government contracts.)

Boeing used to tolerate the unions, but over the last decade or so, they've done a lot of subtle and some not-so-subtle things to "remind" them where things stand. The biggest one was the dismantling of the Wichita location, which was heavily union and a prime source of agitation among the company's workforce. (I worked on a project with some ex-Wichita people, and with only one exception, they were assholes.) An opportunity landed in Boeing's lap when a supplier, Chance-Vaught, went bankrupt. Chance-Vaught had a huge, under-utilized plant in South Carolina. Boeing bought the company and started doing some overflow assembly of 787s at the South Carolina plant. They have promised that they won't move any airplane manufacturing from Seattle, but everyone with any sense knows they have their fingers crossed.