That's absolutely okay, and thank you for asking.

And I just want to add, if even half of all photographers I've worked with produced such amazing images, I never would have quit. Finding your work was the best thing that came out of me writing this post. It's just gorgeous.

That's true! They just exemplify those other people I was talking about. And my friend-crush on Amy Poehler just gets deeper by the day.

Thank you! It's always a relief to know I'm not alone with this sort of stuff.

I don't remember a lot of instances where I actively pretended to have body issues (some, but not many) but I did absolutely learn to shut up about the fact that I felt fine the way I was. And I wasn't exactly the prettiest kid on the block. It seemed to draw some ire and frustration, like I was betraying some unspoken covenant. I'm still very careful about being vocally nice to myself about my looks. It just doesn't go over well, for various reasons. I don't really mind that now.

But it does teenage girls a great disservice to simply assume that they're going to have body issues. At some point it became prescriptive instead of descriptive. And it denies the fact that teenage girls are individuals too.

That's a damn shame. I may have actually gone to see this movie if it included a scene of Jamie Dornan rooting around in our hero's bloody vagina. Hot! Sexy! BDSM!

I feel that since I'm white, my opinion on this does not carry much weight. I wanted to present enough information here to be an ally to the people whose culture is being appropriated and point it out for what it is, but it's not me as an individual who's being harmed by this type of appropriation. So I thought it best to link to discussions and opinions by people who have more personal and direct experience with it than I do. Their public opinion matters a LOT more than mine does in this context.

But yeah, no, it probably isn't.

This movie isn't helped by the inevitability of its outcome. Even if you're watching it for the first time and have no idea what's going to happen, you realize with creeping dread that it can only end one way: they find out and get together anyway. It's the only way movies like this are allowed to end. And that's usually problematic, because the whole genre gets pretty problematic, but this movie in particular just makes the whole thing feel all the more cynical and creepy. Them getting together despite all of this doesn't just feel contrived, it feels wrong and gross.

I've found out that the hardest thing about explaining Feminism 101 and social activism in general is convincing people that our culture is in large part shaped by our entertainment. People just refuse to believe it. They take any indication that they might be influenced by media as a personal insult to their intelligence. They're 100% cynical and 0% skeptical. And once they feel personally offended by the imaginary implication that you think they're stupid, it shuts down. If a person grows up thinking that entertainment has zero bearing on society, you can't dislodge that idea. I've never seen it happen anyway.

I honestly don't know what that show was. I kind of weave in and out of the room when I get a chance and I don't always catch what the name is. I know it was some sort of European Tough Love knock-off though, where some sort of self-proclaimed "relationship guru" (and holy shit do I ever not trust white people who describe themselves with the word "guru") teaches non-conformist women how to... date properly, I guess you'd call it. Be more conventional. That sort of thing. One of those shows that's cast and edited to humiliate and hurt non-conformist people or just women who don't follow the Reality TV Script For Women (insecure, aching for marriage, materialistic, infantile, but only if they're white) under the threat of "dying alone," which is the worst thing that can possibly happen to a woman in Reality TV Land. There was the vampire, a single mom stripper who dared to talk openly about her job, several women who laughed too loud and were a little more confident than makeup advertisers can stand, you know the type. Reprehensible shit all around.

I thought long and hard about this. It's not an easy question. I don't think this can be fixed by altering individual movies, but I do think that what you suggest would lessen the problem, not in the least because it would show that filmmakers agree that there is a problem in the first place.

Movies, with their limited running time, use visual shorthand to get a lot of things across. "Same-face" is one of those visual shortcuts. It telegraphs to the audience that (for example) Belle is special and unique, and then there are "the other women," all of them, the monolith, indistinguishable from each other. So I think that as a cosmetic change, eliminating same-face would go a long way to preventing the problem from existing in the first place. Mer-brothers would help too.

But I think the only substantial difference you can make would be to have the princess interact amiably with her age and gender peers. This never happens (except for in Pocahontas, and her inclusion in the line-up is dubious. But note how she's also the only one here to NOT end up with the designated dude.) Belle is even shown to roll her eyes in condescension at the triplets. Ariel's sisters have nothing nice to say to her that I can remember. (Do they interact? I honestly can't recall.) Mulan never interacts with the other young women on their way to the matchmaker, while in my estimation she seems like the sort of person who would welcome another young woman's insight into a scary phase in her life, as is traditional in many cultures that engage in arranged marriages, because that would be a different perspective than her mother and grandmother offer. (Mulan is the ONLY Disney Princess from this lineup with a living mother, by the way, and she's got, like what, three lines? Female relationships are not a priority here.) Even Jasmine, who is so eager to learn about how people who aren't royalty live, never talks to another young woman, while that should be the first perspective she would naturally seek out.

It's why I have a lot of sympathy for some of the sequels to these movies. They're awful in every possible way, like, every way you can imagine, but at least they show things like Cinderella talking to and comforting her stepsister. Then you watch Mulan 2 and just cry a little.

It does help that they're both auteur movies set in heightened reality with a mostly female cast, and both start out with their female protagonist being ludicrously victimized. There's definitely enough there to make the comparison fair.

Oof, that's an interesting one. I haven't actually seen Sucker Punch, because everyone I know and their dog assured me it was the most awful thing ever, so I'm primed to dislike it. And picking apart Kill Bill may actually hurt me in the soul. On the other hand, I'm the feminist who thought Lollipop Chainsaw was a good idea, so yeah, maybe there's something there.

Comparing and contrasting something I love for nostalgic and visceral reasons against something I'm primed to hate for intellectual reasons sounds... very challenging, actually. It's a good idea. Great, even. I'll give Sucker Punch a whirl and see where we end up. Thanks for the tip!