"Very little ammunition is required for a culture war these days, so long as your troops are primed to mobilise at the drop of a blog. Julie Tremaine and Katie Dowd, two writers for the online newspaper SFGate, discovered this last month. Their review of the revamped Snow White ride at Disneyland was generally positive, but queried a new scene showing the prince giving Snow White the all-important “true love’s kiss”.
“A kiss he gives to her without her consent, while she’s asleep, which cannot possibly be true love if only one person knows it’s happening,” they wrote. “It’s hard to understand why the Disneyland of 2021 would choose to add a scene with such old-fashioned ideas of what a man is allowed to do to a woman.”
Discussion of the current brouhaha at The Guardian, which ran a related story last month about potentially offensive stereotypes in the Disney catalogue.
Addendum: An interesting comment from reader Charles - "In some of the earliest versions she is raped while she is unconscious..."
" One day, while a king is walking by, one of his falcons flies into the house. The king knocks, hoping to be let in by someone, but no one answers and he decides to climb in with a ladder. He finds Talia alive but unconscious, and "...gathers the first fruits of love." Afterwards, he leaves her in the bed and goes back to his kingdom. Though Talia is unconscious, she gives birth to twins — one of whom keeps sucking her fingers. Talia awakens because the twin has sucked out the flax that was stuck deep in Talia's finger. When she wakes up, she discovers that she is a mother and has no idea what happened to her."
Oh, fer hevvins sake!! Get over it ~ it is a fairy tale!!
ReplyDeleteI'm so tired of all this. Does anyone else get tired of cancelling the past? Use this scene to teach your kids that you should be hands (and lips) off unless invited.
ReplyDeleteBut if you like the movie and the ride and the idea of making out with royalty, who the crap cares? If you don't, cancel your trip to Disney and go to...wherever people who cancel Disney go.
I never really used to get annoyed at these fringe ideologies and their unhinged followers as I always understood that their views do not reflect the experience and opinions of the overwhelming but largely silent majority of people on these topics. What does dismay me, is how the modern MSM amplifies these voices and pushes them to the front of people's attention for outrage clicks.
ReplyDeleteWe live in an era where careers, livelihoods, reputations, entire lives can be destroyed on the basis of a 280 character tweet or a random blog post. Most normal people reject these ideas, they have more important things to worry about, they have actual problems in their lives that are ignored every day, some groups have been fighting for justice for hundreds of years and see that an inordinate amount of attention is given to this pathetic charade that makes up what is portrayed as social justice in the media. The conspiratorial side of me thinks it's all a ploy to keep us bogged down in non-issues so we stay divided and unable to focus on tackling actual issues with any concerted effort. We live in a world of stunning wealth inequality, mass extinction, environmental degradation, there are an estimated 40 million modern slaves, western societies have never been more polarised and suicide rates have never been higher. There's no shortage of real problems and yet our attention is constantly being diverted toward nonsense and distractions that leave individuals feeling powerless, without hope and driving them toward apathy or the arms of demagogues. It reminds me of more than a few 20th century dystopian novels.
Sorry if I'm ranting, I don't really have a point, it's a topic I tend to stay away from because I can moan about it for a long time and then I start believing that the modern "culture wars" are tearing society apart. I've long since abandoned social media, I don't really watch TV anymore and limit my news intake just enough to stay relatively informed about what's going on in the world. Modern media just doesn't reflect reality anymore, you simply don't hear any of this if you don't engage so that's what I choose to do, maybe that's what they actually want.
Love the blog by the way, welcome back!
Standards apply in contexts, which is to say, times and places -- neither before, nor after, nor elsewhere. There are no such things as universal standards. Sumner was right about that (if about nothing else).
ReplyDeleteExactly. You can't judge something by any other standards than the standards of their time. My personal example is the work of H.P. Lovecraft. By modern standards, he was pretty dang racist, and a eugenicist to boot. But... at the time he lived and in the place he lived, these were the prevailing scientific theories. You can't judge him by modern standards... and by the standards of his time, he wasn't a bad person. Judge fairly, or don't judge at all.
DeleteSorry but Lovecraft was a very outspoken bigot, racist, anti-semite, and white supremecist. Although it was perhaps slightly more socially acceptable to be those things back then he was certainly outside the mainstream of his time. I don't have the desire to reprint anything he said here but you can follow that link below if you'd like some examples of what he was putting out into the world.
Deletelink: https://lithub.com/we-cant-ignore-h-p-lovecrafts-white-supremacy/
The original Grimm version is more appropriate in this regard - there's no kissing. The coffin drops and the apple dislodges from her throat. There is more executions via torture though ;)
ReplyDeleteVery interesting - and new to me. Thank you, adeus.
DeleteLoves true kiss refers to the spirit in which it's given, he's not grabbing her by the Trump.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the concern here is that people will be offended. I think the concern is (validly) that we should be more conscious of what versions of romance and consent we want our children to absorb.
ReplyDeleteIf you've watched "Abducted in Plain Sight," remember when she said something like, "of course I believed that my father could be an alien and my mother human. That's the story I heard every Christmas." Non-rational belief systems set kids up to be marks. So do stories where the only way to be saved is for someone to kiss you.
In some of the earliest versions she is raped while she is unconscious...
ReplyDelete" One day, while a king is walking by, one of his falcons flies into the house. The king knocks, hoping to be let in by someone, but no one answers and he decides to climb in with a ladder. He finds Talia alive but unconscious, and "...gathers the first fruits of love."[10] Afterwards, he leaves her in the bed and goes back to his kingdom. Though Talia is unconscious, she gives birth to twins — one of whom keeps sucking her fingers. Talia awakens because the twin has sucked out the flax that was stuck deep in Talia's finger. When she wakes up, she discovers that she is a mother and has no idea what happened to her." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty#Basile's_narrative
I totally didn't know that. Added to the body of the post. Thank you, Charles.
DeleteSo your saying this story called xxxxxx should be censored because of someone else's story also called xxxxxx was offensive?
ReplyDeleteWe're more concerned about the prince kissing her to wake her up than the crone who poisoned her to sleep.
Good point (second one), but I think the problem is that everyone already agrees poisoning people is bad, but not everyone agrees that kissing women without their consent is bad.
DeleteTo your first point: no stories should be censored, it's just illuminating that this story has already evolved a lot over the years, from really vile things like rape to less vile. Removing a non-consensual kiss has a precedent.
How is this a "culture war"? It's no different than Disney himself leaving out Cinderella's sisters cutting their toes off to fit the glass slipper. He 'cancelled' parts of Grimm that weren't palatable for modern audiences and everyone saw it as his editorial right and no big deal. Stories evolve with society and this one is just showing its age. Some people think it's not good to romanticize the lack of consent, some people think it's silly to care about an old fairytale. It's not censorship to dislike something. Each generation has the right to tell their own stories.
ReplyDeleteI have two young boys and I will absolutely teach them it's not romantic to kiss sleeping women.