{"id":60631,"date":"2013-12-17T08:00:25","date_gmt":"2013-12-17T13:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=60631"},"modified":"2015-02-01T02:46:09","modified_gmt":"2015-02-01T07:46:09","slug":"help-my-eyeball-is-bigger-than-my-wrist-gender-dimorphism-in-frozen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/12\/17\/help-my-eyeball-is-bigger-than-my-wrist-gender-dimorphism-in-frozen\/","title":{"rendered":"“Help, My Eyeball is Bigger than My Wrist!”: Gender Dimorphism in Frozen"},"content":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t offer much in the crowded field of Disney gender criticism. But I do want to update my running series on the company\u2019s animated gender dimorphism<\/a>. The latest installment is\u00a0Frozen<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Just when I was wondering what the body dimensions of the supposedly-human characters were, the script conveniently supplied the dimorphism money-shot: hand-in-hand romantic leads, with perfect composition for both eye-size and hand-size comparisons:<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

With the gloves you can\u2019t compare the hands exactly, but you get the idea. And the eyes? Yes, her eyeball actually has a wider diameter than her wrist:<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Giant eyes and tiny hands symbolize femininity in Disneyland.<\/p>\n

While I\u2019m at at, I may as well include\u00a0Brave<\/em>\u00a0in the series. Unless I have repressed it, there is no romance story for the female lead in that movie, but there are some nice comparison shots of her parents:<\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a>Go ahead, give me some explanation about the different gene pools of the rival clans from which Merida\u2019s parents came.<\/p>\n

Since I first complained about this regarding\u00a0Tangled<\/a>,<\/em> I have updated the story to include\u00a0Gnomeo and Juliet<\/a><\/em>. You can check those posts for more links to research (and see also this essay on\u00a0human versus animal dimorphism<\/a>\u00a0by Lisa Wade). To just refresh the image file, though, here are the key images. From\u00a0Tangled<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"3.5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

From\u00a0Gnomeo<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At this point I think the evidence suggests that Disney favors compositions in which women\u2019s hands are tiny compared to men\u2019s, especially when they are in romantic relationships.<\/p>\n

REAL WRIST-SIZE ADDENDUM<\/strong><\/p>\n

How do real men\u2019s and women\u2019s wrist sizes differ? I looked at 7 studies on topics ranging from carpal tunnel syndrome to judo mastery, and found a range of averages for women of 15.4 cm to 16.3 cm, and for men of 17.5 to 18.1 cm (in both cases the judo team had the thickest wrists).<\/p>\n

\u2018Then I found this awesome\u00a0anthropometric survey<\/a>\u00a0of U.S. Army personnel from 1988. In that sample (almost 4,000, chosen to match the age, gender, and race\/ethnic composition of the Army), the averages were 15.1 for women and 17.4 for men.\u00a0Based on the detailed percentiles listed, I made this chart of the distributions:<\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The average difference between men\u2019s and women\u2019s wrists in this Army sample is 2.3 cm, or a ratio of 1.15-to-1. However, if you took the smallest-wristed woman (12.9 cm) and the largest-wristed man (20.4), you could get a difference of 7.5 cm, or a ratio of 1.6-to-1. Without being able to hack into the Disney animation servers with a tape measure I can\u2019t compare them directly, but from the pictures it looks like these couples have differences greater than the most extreme differences found in the U.S. Army.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Family Inequality<\/a>\u00a0and the Huffington Post<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nPhilip N. Cohen is a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and writes the blog Family Inequality<\/a>. You can follow him on Twitter<\/a> or Facebook<\/a>.<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I can\u2019t offer much in the crowded field of Disney gender criticism. But I do want to update my running series on the company\u2019s animated gender dimorphism. The latest installment is\u00a0Frozen. Just when I was wondering what the body dimensions of the supposedly-human characters were, the script conveniently supplied the dimorphism money-shot: hand-in-hand romantic leads, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":287,"featured_media":60632,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,55,23676,2103,129,343,868,293],"class_list":["post-60631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-gender","tag-gender-binary","tag-gender-bodies","tag-media","tag-tvmovies","tag-power","tag-social-construction"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/12\/17.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/287"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60631"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62912,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60631\/revisions\/62912"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60632"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}