Faith, Trust, and Pixie Sex Appeal

When I watched Peter Pan as a child, I didn't notice that Tink wore a teeny tiny green dress. I didn't notice that this dress hugged her hips and outlined her figure. I didn't notice that this dress was just inches below where her legs met her hips. Sometimes I noticed that she had tiny cotton ball looking things on the toes of her shoes. Sometimes I noticed that she was stubborn and did not like Wendy. Why would I have paid much attention to her dress when she is only three inches tall and lighting up rooms with her fairy magic? Why would I have cared about her body when the slightest sprinkle of her pixie dust could make ordinary people fly?

Faith, trust, and Pixie dust sex appeal is flashed before the eyes of young viewers.

The documentary Miss Representation examines this problem within our media called "sexualization." Rather our society is so accustomed to bringing out the "sexy" in characters, on billboards, or modeling our clothes that this problem has grown larger. It has become "over sexualization." Never had I thought before watching this film that female characters in G-Rated movies wear just as sexualized outfits as female characters in R-Rated movies. To prove this point, the film showed images from Disney classics: Tinker Bell, Jasmine, Ariel. The speakers compared the cartoon pictures of the young women flaunting their breasts and wearing revealing clothing to R-Rated women doing just the same thing.

Our society has okayed G-rated sex appeal because our media conveys that women are just here for the eyes of others. This is shown through everyday activities like watching the news. Female newscasters, hair primped and eyelashes batting, wear low-cut shirts and reveal their legs from beneath their tight skirts while their male counterparts look like ancient grandpas who have not bothered looking in the mirror before heading to work. Even when women run for congress or political campaigns, what is mentioned about their work first is not how well they presented this or how they did that, it is who wore it best, it is how her hair looked, it is how many wrinkles she has. Our media holds female beauty as an achievement. Women are not praised for their brains or accomplishments, they are praised by how well they look. 

Even when a woman is feeling confident or is considered beautiful in the eyes of the media, she is still attacked by others, she is still the victim of our ruthless society. Miss Representation argued that women are natural enemies with the bodies our society puts on display. It was said that women spend more money on cosmetics than they spend on education. So-called "models" and cosmetics put men in the dominate position because women and young girls are so concerned with their image that they are willing to put beauty before anything else just to live up to society's ideals. Beauty in the media leads to self-objectification. Self-objectification leads to a lower GPA and lower cognitive functioning. Teens, whose brains are not fully developed until the early twenties, have the same stress, hormonal, and emotional levels as adults today. And to think that over sexualization is taught to us as early as the years of watching Tinker Bell fluter around in a tiny dress.

In Peter Pan it is said that "The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it.” Our society teaches women that they cannot fly, and when women believe it, they never try.


Why does Tinker Bell need to wear such a tiny dress? Oh of course, because she lives in Neverland with the lost boys, so doesn't that society, too, need to cater to horny teenage boys?