Tag Archives: Tavi Gevinson

Disney destroys Brave’s Merida with sexy makeover #NotBuyingIt

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From the Mary Sue:

“On May 11th Brave‘s Merida will be officially crowned as the 11th Disney Princess, the impact of which is that Disney will be selling more stuff with her on it, I guess? Anyway. Along with the “coronation ceremony,” to be held at Walt Disney World, Merida’s gotten a new redesign…”

A great summary from Toward the Stars:

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Here’s one of my favorite pre-botox, pre-makeover Merida expressions.

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Pithy analysis from Peggy Orenstein on the eventual fate of way too many of Disney’s female characters:

Because, in the end, it wasn’t about being brave after all. It was about being pretty…I’m especially creeped out by Belle who appears to have had major surgery… In addition to everything else, they’re pushing the brown girls slowly but surely to the edges…

I’ve always said that it’s not about the movies. It’s about the bait-and-switch that happens in the merchandise, and the way the characters have evolved and proliferated off-screen. Maybe the problem is partly that these characters are designed in Hollywood, where real women are altering their appearance so regularly that animators, and certainly studio execs, think it’s normal.

The disease of homogeneous, anorexic, botoxed, generic females has spread worldwide, through these kinds of images. Did you see the Reddit story about the Korean beauty queens: “Has plastic surgery made these beauty queens all look the same? Koreans complain about pageant clones.” Talk about creepy.

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One commenter wrote:

‘The surgery takes away their individuality and uniqueness and its sad. Most are beautiful without it but telling them that their Korean ethnic features are in fact lovely is as effective as screaming at a brick wall.

‘They wont believe you because they’ve been brainwashed to think westernization of their features is superior, I don’t think they want to look white, but a mix of white and Asian and definitely less Korean.’

This is how one “beauty” queen describes herself:

The student revealed her plastic surgery secret after photos emerged of her looking very different at school, but she said she hadn’t misled anyone.

But she defended her crown telling the Korean media: ‘I never said I was born beautiful.’

 

So sad because this generic look has absolutely nothing to do with “beauty” and everything to do with power, Westernization, capitalism, and status. TV host Stephen Colbert explained it well when he jokingly asked teen writer/ phenom Tavi Gevinson: “But if girls feel good about themselves, how will we sell them things they don’t need?”

How indeed? I was a huge Merida fan, as were my kids, and I bought my three young daughters several figures, books, and posters featuring her because she was cool. Here’s a framed poster over my four year old daughter’s bed so she can see her when she goes to sleep at night, along with her favorite Merida book.

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Like Merida, my daughter, Rose, has wild, curly hair that she hates to have brushed.

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I hope my daughter never feels that she has to look generic and homogeneous in order to be “beautiful.” I hope she always knows that her beauty comes from her spirit. That’s not some meaningless cliche. There’s nothing “attractive” about frozen-faced clones. Disney’s new, madeover Merida has absolutely nothing to offer my kids. I won’t be buying ANY merchandise with this awful, new image.

Reel Girl rates the new Merida ***SSS*** for major stereotyping.

Please Tweet @Disney We want Merida brave, not botoxed. New, madeover Merida is bad for kids #NotBuyingIt

 

 

High school sophomore calls out lack of complex female characters in media

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When Tavi Gevinson was 11 years old, she founded the fashion blog, Style Rookie. Soon Style Rookie was drawing 30,000 visitors a day, got featured in the New York Times, and Gevinson was invited to Fashion Week.

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Gevinson started blogging because, she was trying to “reconcile all these differences that you are told you can’t be when you’re growing up as a girl. You can’t be smart and pretty. You can’t be a feminist who is also interested in fashion. You can’t care about clothes if it’s not for the sake of what other people, usually men, will think of you.”

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I am so impressed that a pre-teen had the courage to express herself like this. Wow. Her words hit the nail on the head, too. I am so psyched that she calls out the smart or pretty choice foisted on girls and women. It’s bullshit, just a way to keep females down and frightened of power, and teen girls need to know that.

Three years after creating Style Rookie, Gevinson decided to move on from fashion, founding a new feminist site for teen girls, Rookie Magazine, featuring content almost entirely by them.

Gevinson introduced her venture in a TED talk. She begins with the words: “I am a feminist.” Take that Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. Gevinson’s talk is awesome and focused on the theme of female characters in TV and movies. She says that her generation sees few female characters to admire.

“We get these two dimensional superwomen who maybe have one quality that’s played up a lot, like, you know, a Catwoman type who plays up her sexuality a lot and it’s seen as power. But they’re not strong characters who happen to be female, they’re completely flat and they’re basically cardboard characters. The problem with this is is that then people expect women to be that easy to understand… In actuality, women are complicated. Women are multifaceted. Not because women are crazy, but because people are crazy and women happen to be people.”

I will definitely be following Rookie Magazine.

Here’s the TED talk.