The Accepted, the Distorted, and the Omitted

• "Unlearning the Myths that Bind Us" by Linda Christensen
• Our society uses media to knowingly and unknowingly teach poeple how to act, what to aspire to, what to desire, how to succees, who to love, etc. The childeren who view fairy tales have no filter to jugde through (no intellectual armor p. 127), so they are more sessebtable to absorb any hidden scripts they see. This can carry through to adulthood. The idea that you can be brainwashed is very painful for people to hear, because we have the notion of freedom. Some poeple think that by changing one aspect of the media (like skin tone or weight), they have changed the hidden scripts, but this just further proves that the population has been brainwashed, or simply never taught how to critique these scripts ("im not taking my kids to see walt disney until they have a black woman playing the lead role" pg 131). When you have the tool to analyze, you can apply this to all media, conversations, and situations. Media has the power to change us, but we have the power to change it as well. Furthur, critiquing media does not mean that the media is inherantly evil or wrong, or that we can't enjoy the stories for their element of entertainment.
• dont understand: "we are taught, more than anything else, how not to rebel"- so this is suggesting that since it is indoctornating us to all desire the same things and giving us only one path to get there then our personalities wont kick in and we will all become the same person, or type of person, and so we wont deviate from the norm, so noone will be different, wonder about why they are different, and rebel against the system? I don't think i buy that. I agree that it tries to teach us how not to rebel, but i don't think it suceeeds. Afterall, teenagers spend the bulk of their adolescence feeling like they are misfit and questioning normal, which i would call classic rebellion.
• This connects to the fact that Media Matters, by the very fact that we are proving that these are not cute and harmless stories floating in time and disconnected from all influence on humnaity. Walt Disney was not some guy who wrote pretty tales who accidentally happened to have reoccuring themes that are racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. Media matters because kids connect princess with desireable and princess dreams as their dreams. Black childeren are honestly hurt when they see all those princesses and none of them are black. Gay children are honestly hurt when all princesses have to fall in love someone of the opposite gender, and are hypergendered. Poor childeren are honestly hurt that happiness is fuled by consumerism (even if they cant use those words). And all childeren are hurt when they realise that the standards fairy tales set are very unrealistic and very unattainable (atleast to 99.9% of the population).
• To share: Chistinsen doesn't mention that gayness and gender ambiguity are also largly left out in popular media and fairy tale, specifically. She seems to mention this with her reference to "happiness means getting a man" and goes on to call men a "commodity". But i suggest that this is not a reference to gayness but that happiness only exits with a partner, in that a single woman cannot be happy. Furthur, it is a woman's job to make her partner happy, not to succeed ina career or reach for goals independant of him. This still horribly misleads us from even discussing the GLBT community. Mainly, that women have to be ultra feminine, men have to by hyper masculine, and that women and men should only seek eachother as an acceptable partner for life. This is omitting a huge percentage (10%) of the world population.
• Disney is one of the worst offenders of abuses to lack of gender difference and sexual orientation in their output, so i find it HIGHLY amusing that this website thinks disney is promoting a "homosexual agenda" (which is highly untrue) and further amusing that they aren;t concerned about the ways that disney is actually brainwashing their children. Click HERE to view site.
• to prove that you can like and hate something at the same time, i challenge you, as my reader, to watch this video clip- my favorite disney moment, and try to tell me the three VERY major problems i have with it.