For my research paper I was thinking about analyzing the different medias that children are raised with. This includes Disney's movies, Barbie's advertisements, and much more. Looking at Disney's movies there are many stereotypes. The ones I want to focus on are the false ideals that they teach children. Most of their older movies portray women as the home care takers and helpless, the men are the physical power and hero, step parents are evil, and much more. However we all know that in today's society these ideals and stereotypes are not true. It seems there are a divide in bloggers. It seems that the argument is that yes Disney does this, but the parents’ upbringing of the child will ultimately determine the outcome, not Disney. This is a matter of opinion, but if you look at the opinions of some psychologists (considered experts), there is more validity to these statements (http://thedisneyblog.com/2008/08/08/constructions-of-masculinity-in-disney-movies/). Another stereotype that is put into children’s heads is that all women are skinny, large chested, and tall. A prime example of this is Barbie. According to many blogs her physical dimensions are impossible to survive as a human being. She would have the height of 5’9”, a bust of 39” and a baby’s size 3 feet. These dimensions are given on a blog and therefore cannot be blatantly taken as true. However if one takes these facts and does more research on concrete sites, you will find that almost every site agrees with this blog.(http://www.supertoy.org/cgi-bin/wiki/read.cgi?section=Supertoys&page=barbie)
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I think this will be a really interesting topic to research. Embarrassingly...I still love Disney movies and I randomly rewatch some of the movies that were my favorites as a kid and I notice things that I definitely didn’t notice when I was younger. But I do agree that almost all of their movies are really stereotypical and follow the same patterns. And as for Barbie, I think I have also heard of the argument that her figure is pretty much impossible to achieve in reality. I guess the argument with that is that it’s a bad idea to instill that kind of perfection in young girls but then again isn’t the idea of Barbie supposed to be that she can do anything, her world is endless, etc. I think as girls grow they can come to terms with the fact that she is not real and her world is not real… I mean… if the media didn’t point out that her dimensions were unrealistic, I never would have noticed.
ReplyDeleteI definitely am not going to lie when i actually looked up to Barbie in numerous ways. One of the ways was definitely that I used to think she had the ideal figure when i was little, and I used to want to grow up to look just like her. But of course after doing some growing up, I realized that was never going to happen and was unrealistic. But I do think that things like that to affect what many people and in this case kids think and help to form those stereotypes.
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