We had to do an art project in class the other day which allowed us to express the issues surrounding women in sport. One of the girls in my group happened to have some Disney Princess rub-on tattoos in her backpack that we were able to incorporate into our project. We talked about how Disney adds to this negative media portrayal of what young women's bodies should look like. Because each one of these princesses were posing semi-provocatively and were very thin, we concluded that every one of these Disney Princess tattoos were sending little girls negative body image messages.
Later this same day, I happened to stumble onto a disneyfamily.com article which talked about body image issues for young girls. The title of Teri Brown's article is: "Avoiding Body Image Issues in Sports, Avoiding Potential Body Image Problems when your teen participates in competitive sports." Basically, this article talks about was how young athletic girls "are our little princesses" who participate in "princess-like" sports, and should be protected from negative body image exposure through these "aesthetic sports". It focuses on how little princesses are involved in sports like figure skating, dance, and gymnastics, where their looks are judged as much as, or even more so, than their actual talent. It warns parents to keep a close eye on the potentially negative environments these princess sports expose their little girls to. I find it ironic that even though this Disney article is trying to help end the exposure of young girls to negative body images issues surrounding sport, it is one of the very sources that adds to this perpetuation of negative body images through it's very own Disney Princess characters.
http://family.go.com/parenting/pkg-teen/article-773408-avoiding-body-image-issues-in-sports-t/
Katie D: May Intersession
2 comments:
I found this post to be quite interesting in the way that it expressed how "aesthetic" sports are viewed very differently in comparison to other more masculine sports such as basketball or hockey or softball. I agree that these sports are more difficult to avoid being referred to as "princess" sports because they ARE being judged not only on their sport/talent but on their looks as well. However, I think that the main problem is that this article, along with many other people in the sporting world, is that they view these sports as having a lesser value than the more powerful, media-driven sports. In my eyes, this is completely ridiculous. I believe that the athletes that train for aesthetic sports such as dance, gymnastics, diving, etc., should receive just as much credit as the athletes involved in with a sport such as basketball. They train just as hard, practice just as hard, and compete just as hard as every other athlete in the world. I feel that because these aesthetic athletes can maintain a more feminine look while they are performing just gives them a stronger and more powerful edge to their sport. The fact that they can encompass both a feminine and masculine role just proves how powerful they are as athletes. Hopefully future years will bring more credit to these sports, as they deserve just as much recognition and coverage as other athletes of this world.
Martha Hamilton
Kin 338i
posted the above comment
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