Where are the Disney MEN?

I apologize once again for my long absences, voracious readers. Sometimes time gets away from me, and I find that suddenly it's been months since ____. Lately there's also been lots of distracting things going on in real life, so even when I do think of exciting things I want to post about, I end up just stashing them in my juicy brain storage places, and there they molder sometimes. Like my post on the dreaded "Friendzone" and some surrounding issues, or my post on The Feminine Mystique and its relevance to my generation. (Both of which I still fully intend to write.)

Either way, I thought today I would write about the thought that struck me the other day, which was this:
Where are all the Disney men?

Disney is my childhood, and as a feminist, I've spent way too much time thinking about Disney, their princesses/other female protagonists, and how it relates to the way that women are treated and perceived by our culture. But the other day, someone posted on Facebook (my blogs come from this way too often lately), yet another of the squijillion covers of "Let It Go" from Frozen.

Even if you've never seen this movie and know literally nothing about it, you know every word to that song, and it fills you with fury.

Which is absurd, because the best songs in the entire movie are OBVIOUSLY

"Reindeer Are Better Than People," and "No Heat Experience."

This cover, though, was a genderbend. For those of you who live in a hole, this means that they changed the characters sex to the opposite one, in this case being a male Elsa prince thing with generic vocals to make the radio rock world proud.

But this got me thinking. Where are all the really good male Disney leads?? The actual men that we want to see portrayed as a positive representation of what men are like, or are supposed to be like (as in the case of all the princesses). I wracked my brains while washing dishes at work that day, and all I could come up with was Tarzan and Aladdin. And maybe Jim Hawkins. Is Treasure Planet Disney? I doubt it, but I love that movie.

Yes, I suppose you could argue that there's also Peter Pan and Pinocchio, but Peter is a gigantic prick and Pinochio is irrelevant to everyone. Honest John and his cat sidekick are the best part of that entire movie. 

Someday, I'll have a friend to dress up like this with me.

One of the things that struck me was that all of the male characters that immediately jumped to my mind for awesome, sympathetic, admirable, animated men were almost exclusively non-Disney, like Cale from Titan AE, or Dimitri from Anastasia (I'm sure it's a total coincidence that they also have almost the exact same character design.)

My point here--as I frolic gleefully away from it--is that we have this ridiculous double standard presented, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone question it. No one is upset that Prince Charming has even less personality than Cinderella, the most saintly, plain-whitebread-toast woman you can imagine. We spent so much time complaining about what Disney is doing to little girls and then praising characters like Belle and Mulan and Merida that I don't know if it ever occurs to anyone to ask what it does to our boys.

Shang!

Captain Lee Shang from Mulan. There's another genuinely admirable, multi-faceted Disney man. He's overtly masculine, and yet still works with and for a strong, smart woman without being threatened by her, and he learns to adjust his culturally skewed notions of what women can and can not/should and should not do.

Interrupted thought over.

There's this Ted Talk that I think is very connected to this. It's about marginalizing men in the pursuit of feminism, which is just stupid for everyone. "Women's issues" are not just relevant to women. These issues are people issues, problems that we as a society and as species experience. Presenting weak, stupid, disproportionate women as idealized princesses is a serious problem, but I think making men irrelevant is also a very real problem. Boys are given the choice between choosing bad male role models, or weak, practically nonexistent ones. There's a whole set of gender expectations that little kids are being poisoned with, and that's exactly where we don't want to propagate the centuries of repression and violence. 

Not every girl wants to be a sylph-like damsel, so why can't we remember that not every boy wants to be a shining prince, or a cartoon animal?

Quick, Anecdotal Social thoughts: Gender roles

I realized when I wanted to write this post how much the purpose of this blog has changed some in the last few months. Because, if you recall, I originally started this as kind of a snarky joke, to share my wellspring of BS with an easily amused audience, but it was in practically no time that this turned into whatever Rachel feels like today, which is sometimes me thinking I'm clever and funny, and sometimes it's not.

Anyways! The reason I thought about this was because something that happened this morning started turning into reflection and the desire to throw my personal views out into the void.

As I've mentioned several times, during the school year, I babysit on Tuesday mornings, and this year, we have a much wider age range and a larger group of kids. The oldest ones are around six years old, and the youngest aren't quite a year old. This morning, the older girls (there are three of them) were all hanging out in the corner of the room monopolizing most of the plastic food and baby dolls, presumably playing at that most horrifying childhood game "house."

I may need to take a moment here to interrupt myself and rail against the horror that inspires in me...There's part of a stand-up routine I watched that the guy is talking about the heinous unfairness to little boys and girls, because when a boy is small, what do we get him? Trucks and guns and Legos and such, but what do you get for a little girl? Another kid, of course! He says something like, "Hey, little baby, here's your baby!" and then adopts this horrified and disappointed face and responds, "But I just got here..." Maybe this a the benefit of hindsight, but why on earth would children want to play at the mundane? There is sadly few thrilling things about keeping a house, being poor, having children, or cooking dinner. I know I played some aspects of that as a wee child, but I'm pretty sure I was usually also building shelter on a desert island, or fleeing Bad Guys, or embarking on a quest...

And now that I've thoroughly derailed both of us, dear audience, I shall continue me story!

One of my unashamed favorite children in the nursery, a little boy named Daniel, a little two-year-old, chubby, ginger kid,  comes over and picks up a little plastic "milk" bottle and this hideous, plastic, Cabbage Patch-esque monstrosity, and promptly pretends to feed it, cuddle it a bit, and place it clumsily in the toy crib with a blanket. And these little girls look at him like he's utterly mad--but, of course, he's only a baby, so he can't be expected to understand that these are girls' toys. They keep giving me side-long glances, as if waiting for me to do my grown-up duty and gently pull Daniel away, informing him sternly that these are for girls, and little boys don't play with baby dolls.

I find that both amusing and infuriating. I came across the same thing in a family I used to babysit for. The youngest girl was ridiculing her little brother, because he wanted the three of us to play the Angelina Ballerina game, and she claimed that was a girl game, because it contained pastel colors, primarily pink, and was about ballet. I gently explained to her that ballet was also for boys, and they're hardcore, and that if she, a girl, could like "boy" things, like green and Legos and guns, it was ok for boys to like "girl" things too.

This might simply be because I know many happily metrosexual men, but I don't understand this double standard in rigid gender roles. You would think that in a country that has experienced not one, but three major feminist movements, we would understand that gender equality is not just about one sex. If women demand to be freed from centuries of social tradition, how can they refuse to extend the same right to their male counterparts? There's this absurd stereotype that men fulfilling traditionally female roles, like stay-at-home dads, or nurses, or stylists, or whatever receive ridicule and criticism for not fulfilling their "role as men." When a woman enters a field that is primarily populated by men, she is either congratulated as a pioneer, or laughed at for being crazy, but when men do the same thing, they pretty much just get their sexual preferences questioned.

...What?

How does that make any sense, boys and girls?

Anyway, I think that's about enough from me for tonight. It was just something on my mind that I thought I would share with the silent void.