Strategically Communicating

There were approximately a million ideas for a blog post that occurred to me on gender issues alone as I did this week’s reading. There’s the increase in coverage through blogs and traditional news about young boys who want to wear ‘girl clothes’ and play with ‘girl toys.’ It seems pretty clear that it’s adults who are struggling to accept this more than the children themselves. There’s the phenomenon that men who have characteristics patriarchy calls feminine must be gay (check out the coverage on the 5,000 year-old remains of a man buried with household jugs).

But I’m going with the sexual objectification of women, but not men, in the epitome of all Western media aimed at children: Disney movies. Below are two Disney heroines. Consider how little clothing they are wearing and the sexual ways that they are posed, especially when compared to their male counterparts below them.

In researching more about this topic, I stumbled upon the artist David Kawena on another blog who creates portraits of Disney heroes that sexually objectify them. What would happen if Disney depicted heroes more like they are shown in Kawena’s images? As much as we advance on gender equality, why is it still normal to bombard our children with sexual images of girls and women while sexually objectifying images of men and boys are inappropriate?