They have been 'celebrated and encouraged' for a long time and done no good for anybody. Because celebrated and encouraged is code for forced. I have never heard anyone say that men should reject masculinity and women should embrace it or that feminism is icky. A niche branch of feminism are these people who believe there should be no difference between gender at all, and they spend their time attacking trans-gender people on tumblr, but that is all have heard of that.
A lot of our gender differences are valid, physical things, and other things are societal pressures and expectations that we internalise.
This celebration creates more division than is necessary. There are a lot of good messages and things to love about Disney movies, yet boys rarely see them or know them at all.
Girls can be taught the values of friendship, love, caring, sharing and the joys of emotional freedom, but often only it is wrapped up in a pretty pink and purple package with a glitter bow. Both boys and girls have an expectation that they will fall into certain categories that create a hard line between the sexes.
Marketing follows that trend, aiming at creating and reinforcing those stereotypes. By stereotypes I mean expected typical behaviours; boys should be strong, capable, emotionally controlled, chivalrous and not engaged in things that are seen as traditionally feminine.
Girls should be soft, delicate, emotionally available and invested heavily into everything that is part of a feminine culture.
Some people naturally do find themselves fitting here, a girl who grows up playing with Barbies and as an adult finds herself awash in a love of shoes, fashion and makeup isn't inherently wrong in any way.
Nor is a boy who grows up and plays football as an adult.
But not everybody finds a place in one of these factions, many people find themselves somewhere in the middle which leads to somewhere on the outside.
Society as a whole has a strong distaste for men who don't act like men in the traditional sense, a man who is emotional and who cries is seen as weak and called a 'pussy' because crying is seen as feminine and femininity is seen as a weakness. If a man has an interest in fashion, his looks, he wants to get a manicure and have his hair expertly cut, he might be called 'gay', because being gay means not being a man, being gay means not being tough. I hardly need to explain how men can feel about another guy if that guy actually IS gay.
These are stereotypes, they are widely held views and they are overly simplistic. They are relics of our evolution, biologically and sociologically. The 'Disney is for girls, action heroes are for boys' era is coming to an end anyway, Disney is quite slow off the mark in many respects.
The notion isn't to tell girls they can't be 'girly' or to tell boys they should be . . . gender neutrality doesn't aim at taking that possible identity away from you, it aims at giving you a choice from a very early age on how you will become, letting you have a hand in choosing for yourself and hopefully creating a society that is more understanding about you doing that.
Disney purposely targeting boys in this fashion is a wonderful idea, for girls and boys. Disney becoming invested in not just the story, but the characters is something I encourage. The classics will always have a place in my heart, but the flaws within them are very evident, these more modern tales are trying to slowly close the gap that exists.
It's not about making people reject things, it's about making them STOP rejecting things.
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