Artist Places "Disney Filter" on 10 Real Life Role Models

[shipperx]

Err... so that happened.

Holocaust Princess seems massively, MASSIVELY wrong. (I know it's intended to but still...  So wrong).

On the other hand, it's not that much of a stretch that Marie Curie might actually have glowed... [/death by radiation joke]  (So wrong.)

Comments

[wildrider.livejournal.com]

I rather thought Hillary made a pretty awesome princess, though.

Also VERY fond of Ruth Bader Ginsberg. :)

[eilowyn.livejournal.com]

At least their heart was in the right place? Though I don't know how "princessifying" female leaders combats feminism. Doesn't it just essentialize gender? I like the thought, but it feels too much like circular logic.

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

I'm not seeing the bad in this in terms of his intention:

I drew this picture because I wanted to analyze how unnecessary it is to collapse a heroine into one specific mold, to give them all the same sparkly fashion, the same tiny figures, and the same homogenized plastic smile. So that was my intent, to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to paint an entire gender of heroes with one superficial brush.

My experience of female role models both in culture and in life has shown me that there is no mold for what makes someone a role model, and the whole point of Merida was that she was a step in the right direction, providing girls with an alternative kind of princess. Then they took two steps back, and painted her with the same glossy brush as the rest. So I decided to take 10 real-life female role models, from diverse experiences and backgrounds, and filter them through the Disney princess assembly line.

The result was this cartoon, which earned equal parts praise and ire from readers. Some didn’t get the joke, some disagreed with it, others saw no harm in it at all and wanted to buy the doll versions of them… it was a polarizing image, but I suppose that’s the point. The statement I wanted to make was that it makes no sense to put these real-life women into one limited template, so why then are we doing it to our fictitious heroines?

Isn't one of the problems with the Buffy comics the fact that Joss & Co have been doing much the same thing to Buffy (breaking her down into a less threatening "heroine" who isn't heroic at all), but without the irony or conscious intent?

What I find troubling was the comments section - of course - where people go on about why he's wrong because their 4 year old daughters find this version much more appealing, without stopping to consider that their daughters are being socialized to accept this model; and when one woman calls it out, albeit a bit harshly, the entire conversation turns into bashing her for bashing someone else and "angry women suck"

So the intent gets lost, once again. And I don't think that's the artist's fault if people miss the fact that it's satire - which is in fact the heart of the problem, that people see nothing wrong with this. (And yes I know Joss would say the same thing about CiTW and Dollhouse so, slippery slope. Again it comes back to conscious intention to me.)