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Disney Princess Gender Typing

Disney Princesses :)

Disney Movies

Disney Products

For decades, Disney have captivated their audience, particularly young girls of the ages 5-8, with the elegance, poise, and feminine characteristics of princesses behaving as a lady.

However what is the "elegance, poise, and femininity" Disney teach young girls?

How are these characteristics being marketed to young girls?

How has this affected their lives and futures?

In 2011, Disney collected $1.6 billion.

According to Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, people automatically crave a sense of belonging, which is represented by this fact.

Children ask for Disney products to feel like they belong and feel accepted. In the process, they are succumbing to the gender roles Disney portrays.

Instead of taking advantage of observational learning to make strong and independent princesses, Disney makes them submissive, sensitive, nurturing, and often collapse and cry. These characteristics are considered feminine and demonstrate girls the manner in which they should behave. Being submissive, like Belle, shows girls that they should not defy their man no matter how abusive he is and implies that women are lesser than man. That is just one example of how Disney engraves in impressionable minds.

Disney Products

Elegance, Poise, and Femininity

So What

These products further enforce the idea that a woman’s natural habitat is in the home often catering to the needs of others. Cleaning, cooking, and being cooperative are things that have become a norm amongst the princesses, consequently being hammered into the minds of young girls as well. Gentility, kindness, other adjectives such as these are used in the descriptions of princesses on the princess.disney.com website. When these ideas are incorporated into products that are being distributed to young girls it strengthens the idea that their role in the world is to please others by domestic activities such as cooking, cleaning, and gossiping with others while drinking tea.

Gender typing is the process by which a child becomes aware of their gender and thus behaves accordingly by adopting values and attributes of members of the sex that they identify as their own.

"Little girls long for acceptance and to feel beautiful, but they never expect their favorite Disney Princess to make them feel self-conscious and have a low self-esteem.

Disney Princesses are not healthy role models. Women grew up with the Princess image as a model of perfection.

They cause a number of problems for girls and how it is simply an industry focused on making money rather than building young girls’ character."

Disney Products

Disney Movies

The young girls who use these products are in the preoperational stage of development; a stage in which they express themselves through pretend play.

Children in ages 3-12 are still at an age in which they learn through observation. Observational learning is the process in which children learn through observing and imitating the things they see. Watching Disney movies "influence girls to gender role acquisition and expression" and influence their ideas about gender as they are still learning through observation.

These products appeal to these cognitive skills and encourage girls to take on the role of a Disney princess, integrating into these products the ideas of femininity and how to be the perfect princess.

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