Don’t be oversensitive about race.

Rapunzel with cancer is sad, but not offensive. She’s defined by her hair, and losing it makes her a fallen princess. It doesn’t mean if you have cancer you’re a fallen person. You need to have an open mind.

I find it very disturbing that these images of monarchy and stratification are considered ideal, hopeful, and good lessons for our children. We supposedly live in a democratic society yet our “ideals and fantasies” involve pining for a time and place that strongly resembles a fascist society before the word “fascism” was invented.

I’m not some bitter and sad person who wants to see all idealism and fantasy wiped from the earth. To the contrary, I watch a lot of movies, documentaries and lectures about hopes and prospects for a better world. It keeps me up at night imagining a just and equitable future where every individual and community has a say in the policies and conflicts that affect them, where work is so efficiently organized from the bottom up that we will only work a few days a week and spend the rest of the time building joyous relationships and discovering the wonders of the world, where rich neighborhoods and countries stop exploiting poor neighborhoods and countries. Look at LA, for example: Rodeo Drive can only be so trouble-free because the industrial production is off smogging up the poor neighborhoods, giving black and brown kids asthma; and because hyperpolicing in poor neighborhoods keeps the disenfranchised in their place instead of taking the things they need. Then look at the underdeveloped nations that are now experiencing the impacts of climate change driven by the greedy overconsumption of industrialized nations.

For every Disney princess there’s a little girl from Gaza with PTSD, wasting away because her parents’ subsistence farm was walled off or given to settlers. I think an uplifting story about the Gazan girl can offer much more hope than the princess story. After all, every hour the princess spends on true love is another hour that the Gazan girl spends stagnating, unseen.

Disney concepts are not just neutral vessels of happiness, they tend toward certain social, racial and political ideals, and definitely a stratified society where most people are irrelevant rabble and the few born into wealth and power are the only ones whose stories matter. Again, not so great for a democracy, but very suitable for the kind of society Walt Disney envisioned, if you can imagine how a Nazi sympathizer would want us to view the different races and classes in our society.

I realize I’m quite late in replying to this thread; however, I interpreted the image of Rapunzel as her being lost without her one crowning quality; her one point of vanity: her hair.

Trinna said, “I believe what the reality is in these pictures is that these women have the choice to have several babies, go to a bar alone, fight in a war, to get treated for cancer, and have cosmetic surgery.
What is the problem here?”

Whilst I’ve never been one to dictate how works of art must be interpreted, the concept of “choice” was clearly not Goldstein’s purpose. The premise — of the latent messages of fairy tales and reality — is oppression. For example, I would argue that the focus on beauty both in the original Cinderella AND in modern times (i.e. the pressure to be beautiful, i.e. plastic surgery) is rooted in oppression, not in the “choice” to become beautiful. What about the choice to believe you are naturally beautiful? No such choice exists in our society. I would also argue that, to some extent, choice is but an illusion. After all, how can one truly choose when one has been brainwashed since birth into accepting the norm? Obviously we HAVE to choose, but I would argue that the POWER of FREE choice is greatly diminished, if not nonexistent, in society? If the pressure to “be pretty” didn’t exist, then there would be no pressure to make the choice to get plastic surgery.