You don't get to buy this if you boycott Disney.
Well, she blames Disney for ousting the Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood from its Harvard-based offices after the CCFC successfully pushed Disney to offer refunds to everyone who’d bought Baby Einstein videos from June 2004-September 2009. But really, she just hates Disney, of course. What properly educated liberal parent doesn’t? From the princesses (bad role models, not sufficiently feminist, with sanitized versions of folk tales stripped of their true depth and meaning) to their evil marketing of children’s products to children, they’re the big bad company we love to loathe. After all, they’re…big. And bad.
And all that bigness and badness just can’t be good for anybody. Can it?
Read more as I channel my inner freemarket Bill O’Reilly on Babble. You Disney-hating communist, you.
It’s a good thing Lisa Ray will never be coming to my house. I have Disney plates, a Disney bathroom and my daughter’s bedroom is Disney princesses. We’re getting Jess a big girl bed (she’s been in a toddler bed ever since the only night I tried to put her in a crib so we could stop cosleeping and she climbed out of it) and I brought her to Target telling her she could get whatever bed linens she wanted from the huge array they had. She chose the Disney princesses.) I am a Disneyholic and proud of it. I think that those who thought Baby Einstein was actually going to make their child into an Einstein need to take the money they get in a refund and use it to see a mental health specialist because that’s just insane.
I do not support Disney in many facets, but I’m not calling for a boycott of the company. I don’t allow my children to watch the princess movies and won’t be going to Disney World. The reason is that I believe these specific messages go against what I am trying to teach my children — in particular, what I’m teaching my daughter.
However, I am doing what you suggest. I work to change the standards of beauty and success for women and girls. I work to protect them from gendered stereotypes and outdated ideas about what is considered feminine and beautiful.
And so Lisa Ray seems ridiculous to me, but I understand her frustration.