Disney fans beware - Mickey Mouse Monopoly

Attached is the film Mickey Mouse Monopoly. This documentary looks at the pervasive power of Disney and the gendered and racialized images within their films.

The film is broken up into five segments on Youtube. While the whole film is definitely worth watching, the second and third segments apply directly to this week’s classes. The first video is the film from its very beginning, the second video is the film's second section, which is specifically about gender.

Like Kilbourne argues of advertising, the film depicts how Disney films often portray women as a monolithic stereotype: the helpless seductress. This character, seen both time and time again in both Disney films and advertising, is highly sexualized, slim, frail, and passive. Often, the only time these characters are seen asserting their own power over a man is when the women character uses seduction to manipulate the masculine characters. The body becomes the only way that the women Disney characters can achieve their goals (goals which are always simply to please and “obtain” the man). Otherwise, the women characters in Disney films constantly find themselves in precarious situations where they require the men to rescue them.
Conversely men are often depicted as burly, strong and powerful. They are also often seen as sexual aggressors, however this aggression is justified because the women always allow it and eventually surrender to the sexual dominance of the masculine characters.

The film The Beauty and the Beast is a prime example of this gendered stereotype playing out. The Beast is an aggressive and violent character that abuses Belle for the vast majority of the film. Once Belle allows, passively tolerates and excuses his violence, she falls in love with him. This is essentially telling a young audience to excuse violence against women, but also presents a cultural climate where that violence is justified and normalized.

What are these images teaching us gender norms? How are they teaching us about the ways that men and women should act, and interact with each other? What are they teaching us about intimate relationships between men are women? Disney films are shown to children at such a young age (as are countless ads)? What are these images teaching our youth?