My Take On Girl's Cartoons From A Pony Perspective

[FarDreamer]

I know this is old news, the blogs about whether girls' cartoons are feminist or ant-feminist or encourage gender biases, or tell little girls they are no good without their prince, or desensitize us to the anti-christ, or worse yet, encourage little girls to actually like the color pink  have been around for a long time.

I still enjoy reading these articles and blogs.  I get really amused by it, actually.  I rather enjoy Googling, My Little Pony, Evil, and seeing what pops up.  In fact, I was doing that last night, and it got me thinking . . .

Now let me say a couple of things first, 1:  this is not intended to be a controversial rant, just my opinion, and 2:  I don't have any children, so of course I have great advice for what you should do with yours.

Everyone probably remembers when these articles first circulated:

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/12/09/my-little-homophobic-racist-smarts-shaming-pony/

http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2010/12/24/my-little-non-homophobic-non-racist-non-smart-shaming-pony-a-rebuttal/

I was reading them again last night, just for fun, and then I realized . . .

Both arguments make me uncomfortable.

I grew up watching the original My Little Pony n' Friends cartoon, and still like it.  The G3 cartoons are kind of boring.  I enjoy the new FIM cartoon and usually watch it on Saturday mornings.  I also grew up watching Disney movies, and gasp, playing with Barbie!  Besides these influences which I read should have made me a spineless bimbo, I had issues with my dad (actually his whole side of the family), and was bullied in school.

I should be a mess, right?

So how did I actually turn out?

One of my proudest achievements: I passed organic chemistry.

I never put up with any crap from any guy.  If you didn't treat me well I wanted nothing to do with you.  I ended up marrying one of the nicest, gentles, kindest, most intelligent, responsible, and dare I say handsome, men on the planet.  Is that because I'm such a great catch?  I have my faults, but I know my own value.

Yup, those Disney princesses really screwed me over.

So, here's my point.  Please protect children from the trash that's on TV.  I absolutely believe that a lot of tv is crap, and children should not be inundated with sex and violence, and that we watch way too much tv . . . I also believe that what is more important is that children should be taught to think for themselves.

Yes, I believe I turned out just fine because I can THINK FOR MYSELF.

Now I credit this to God and a strong relationship with my family on my mother's side, but for whatever reason I always have.  All of my toys had very strong personalities, and my ponies still do.  There was lots of saving the world and each other from monsters and enemies, with both male and female heroes and villains.  My favorite toys had personalities and interests similar to my own.  This wasn't because the cartoons or toy manufacturers gave them these personalities, this was because I imagined them with these personalities myself.  Clearly MLP had a strong influence on my tastes since I, at nearly 30 years old, have a whole room full of them. 

Where I cringe is the idea that we would even allow something like a cartoon or marketing colors to have a huge influence on a human being's personality.  How many MLP collectors didn't have any boy ponies as a child, but love them now?  I fit into that category.  I like pink, it doesn't bother me if stores want to decorate the "girl's" toy section in pink and the "boy's" section in blue.  What would bother me would be if I actually shopped based on the colors in a store.  When we have kids, I want to buy whatever toys they enjoy playing with, regardless of the packaging color.  Stores, vendors, merchandisers, do whatever you want, my kids will be deciding for themselves what they enjoy.

So there I am.  My kids will be allowed to watch Disney.  They'll learn about relationships between men and women from seeing the good and the bad between their parents and other influential couples in their lives.  My kids will be allowed to watch MLP and they will still develop their own personalities.  If they have a certain pony they identify with because the personality matches their own, that's fine with me.  My kids can like any color they want.  Colors are beautiful, the more the merrier.

When they're babies, I'll decorate the nursery however I want.  The girls will probably be super girly, because that's what I like, and the boys will probably be monkey themed, because that's what my husband likes.  Will the kids probably grow out of pink and monkeys?  Sure, and that's fine by me.

I like My Little Pony.  Like a lot.  If you can a little vinyl horse, then I do.  I'm probably going to get a kick out of Googling, "Why Unicorns are Evil" for a good long time . . .

[LadyMoondancer]

I should be a mess, right?

So how did I actually turn out?

Well, but no one is arguing that watching / not watching a show will make 100% of girls have no ambitions, though.  An influence is not the same as brainwashing.  But the tropes of the society and time you live in will effect you, no matter where/when you live.  Why else would societal views change over time?  Slavery in America didn't end because white people suddenly started being born anti-slavery, it was because the conversation around black people started to change and the idea that black people were inherently "savage" or "animals" was weakened.  (Mind you, even a lot of abolitionists were terribly racist by modern standards.  I'm not judging them, because they were incredibly progressive for their time, I'm just saying.)

Ideas are powerful, especially ideas about what's "normal."   The trouble with "pink girls section" and "blue boys section" is not that pink is an inferior color, but that it normalizes the idea of "some toys are for GIRLS and others are for BOYS, and here is how you can tell them apart" instead of "anyone who feels like it can play with this toy pony and anyone who feels like it can play with this Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle."  I mean, why else would there BE categories, if that was not the message behind it?   We don't have different toy sections for blond-haired people versus brunettes, do we? 

[ashes]

You probably turned out okay because of having solid parents and other good adult role models.  That's the thing that I take away from all these articles - what matters most in children's lives is having excellent real life role models.

[Sonata]

When I was a child, I remember hating pink and being quite annoyed at the whole girly pink girl toys that I just hated. There was no interest in them and they were all about the same things: either being a housewife, loving fashion and being fabulous or dreaming of princesses and princes. Back then, I wanted to play with action figures, cars and other toys that made me imagine big epic adventures ! But those are meant for boys. I haven't stopped looking around the toy sections for the whole of my life and guess what? This is still the same.

I could write a lot about the Disney films and how they were accused of diminishing women and whatnot (there are whole books on the subject, too), but I won't even bother. The animation world is a totally different issue here - and believe me, as an animator, I get pretty pissed off at the animation kids watch nowadays (most of it is... well, lets put it this way: RETARDED). But this will be left for another day.

It is pretty obvious that there is quite a distinction between boys and girls and what society demands they like and don't like/play with and don't play with. But in the end, it is all about the parenting and how well they let kids decide, in a way, what they enjoy playing with or not. When I was a small child, I'd rather play with Micromachines than Barbies. And noone ever said anything about it. What DOES bother me, is how society STILL has the same mentality that it had since... well, forever. Girls still aren't meant to play with action figures and boys can't play with dolls at all - people will find it odd and even inappropriate. The only fun part of this all is seeing kids rebel against this and gain a mind of their own like I did. But, to me, it's still a sad subject.

[Elisto]

Pretty much what Lady Moondancer said; influence is not brainwashing, and not everyone is going to be affected by the same things. And of course, parenting and upbringing matter too. You, me, and probably most others here turned out fine. But some people ARE affected by these things, and society as a whole is more of an average of everyone. I think we're able to say "I liked MLP and video games and toy trucks" because of people who fought those gendered stereotypes in the first place. And it's not like problems associated with it are all gone now that we can say we like a range of things. Guys still get seem as odd if they like "girl" stuff, or even just the color pink, even by people who know better (like my own parents, for example, who made a point of raising me outside of the pink/blue dichotomy), and society does seem to treat women who like traditionally feminine things differently from women who like other things. Why should people be treated as strange or different just because they like something someone else decided is not "for them"?

So sure, most girls (and boys) aren't going to grow up to be "a mess," but what they're exposed to growing up is going to help shape their impressions of what is "normal" in the world they live in and what is not, and not everyone is as able or willing to question society's norms or is even aware of it's influence on them individually. Gendered children's entertainment is just one factor of course, but it is a very prevalent one that nearly everyone is exposed to.

[Evening_Moonstone]

A few interesting things I want to mention.
Talking with my mom, she has mentioned that the idea of "girl cartoons" is fairly new.  When she was growing up, the only time there were girls in cartoons were either Bugs Bunny in drag, or the damsel-in-distress that the hero has to save. 

And a lot of the Disney movies were products of their time.  Snow White was made in the late 30s.  Cinderella was made in 1950.  Thankfully the Disney girls have gotten a lot more progressive since the early films! 

Compared to all of that, I think the new MLP cartoon is extremely progressive, and not just for girls.  My husband pointed out that he was impressed in the Baby Cakes episode that Mr. Cake is shown changing diapers and caring for his babies just as much as Mrs. Cake, and both of them run the shop together.  In a previous decade, Mr. Cake (if he was there at all) would have been the businessman and Mrs. Cake would have done all the baby-related care.

[LadyMoondancer]

I thought of a good example this morning in bed!  Growing up I was very anxious about the size of my feet.  They were big.   No one ever specifically told me "Girls should have dainty feet", no one made fun of me for them, but nevertheless I had definitely internalized this idea . . . Small feet good, big feet BAD.   And that idea did not randomly pop into head out of nowhere.  It came from a million advertisements where the models have small feet (and probably the models with big feet where cut off at the knee to avoid showing their shoe size!), cartoons where all the female characters have small feet, etc.  "Cinderella" is probably the most blatant example, Cindy has dainty little feet, her wicked step-sisters have gigantic ones.

I didn't get this idea (big feet bad) from one watching of Cinderella, though.  It came from all over.  And at the time, I didn't think it was an idea that was "coming from" anyplace at all.  I thought I was finding my big feet ugly because big feet were inherently bad and ugly.  "Of course they are shown to be bad in commercials," I would've thought, "because they ARE bad."

I hope that makes sense.   What people think of as "natural" is often constructed, and those constructions can change over time.

I do find MLP FIM to be a progressive and positive influence, and in a lot of ways "MLP & Friends" was too.  So I am not "against" girls cartoons or anything.  Sadly, the tropes of "strong MEN save the weak women" or "this woman on the team is really the token girlfriend" are really hard to overcome if you have a mixed cast of men and women.   So I fully understand why cartoons specifically for girls sometimes downplay or even remove male characters.

[Betelgeuse]

This is a very touchy subject for me. I agree with what you've said. Let them try to make our children and ourselves fit into gender roles.
It all comes down to us thinking and choosing for ourselves.
Because they can't stop us from doing that.

[StarlightGaze]

When I was little, maybe around 7 or so, I suddenly decided that I hated Barbie dolls and baby dolls. I asked my mom to get rid of them all and also asked my relatives not to buy me any as presents. I didn't like the fact that I had to like dolls because I was a girl, or that I had to wear make-up and wear dresses and take care of babies. None of this was influenced upon me. I was a very stubborn child though, so I wasn't easily pressured by gender roles, even if my mom tried to push it on me!

In high school I told myself that I never wanted to have a baby, and nearly every older women I told this too said I WAS going to change my mind later on. Well I'm almost 29 now and I STILL don't want to have a baby. Just because I'm a female, it doesn't mean I have to do what society says a female should do.

[PitterPatter]

Stereotypes are not new though, they just become more prominent through the increasing presence of media in our lives.  And stereotypes change, I do believe in Victorian Britain pink was for boys and blue for girls, and it all had something to do with showing wealth and family status (boys carrying family name, work etc?)

I watched all sorts of things as a child. I had an extensive collection of Disney videos (ahh, video tape!), but then I also watched Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles and Power Rangers (although that did have boy and girl power rangers). I loved Spiderman, then Pokemon. I had access to whatever was on TV or video for children at the time.

 Toys were my choice too, I had a small small Barbie phase, then I turned to science based toys and wanted telexcopes and glow in the dark stars. When I was even younger I played with Duplo/Lego more than I did the ponies I had as I enjoyed being able to create things. The only time I remember not getting something specifically was when I wanted Micro Machines. But I think this was more to do with my age than my Mum perceiving it as the wrong gender!

But no matter how progressive *we* are, or what some scholars and critics say, stereotypes help us define the world into something more understandable. This is how we can choose whether we agree, how we form opinions and begin to think for ourselves. There are plenty of people out there who encourage their children to fit the stereotype, and that isn't necessarily wrong. In their social circles it is probably normal and it is us who are weird for not conforming.

I'm 25, my family think I'm too old for Ponies - which would be a stereotypical assumption based on the fact that toy = children - but it doesn't stop me. My 3yr old nephew likes to play with a dolls pram his Gran bought him, much to the disdain of his parents, but they don't stop him.

 FIM may well be progressive in comparison to many other programmes, the Mr Cake example being a case in point, but it is still quite frilly with princesses and pinks, and perhaps even just because it's ponies - every little girl loves horses and ponies (allegedly). 

My point really is that stereotypes aren't inherently bad in my opinion, it's just when they are used in an out of control manner (bullying, discrimination etc), and I'm not sure animation or toys is really that.

(Oh, and Starlight - I don't want children either and am constantly told by my family I will change my mind . I too wonder why it is an expectation women will have children)

[Marigold]

Small feet good, big feet BAD.   And that idea did not randomly pop into head out of nowhere.  It came from a million advertisements where the models have small feet (and probably the models with big feet where cut off at the knee to avoid showing their shoe size!), cartoons where all the female characters have small feet, etc.  "Cinderella" is probably the most blatant example, Cindy has dainty little feet, her wicked step-sisters have gigantic ones.

Oh, I didn't think I was going to contribute anything to this thread, but this struck a chord.  Not with feet, but hair color.  When I was a little girl all the available princesses had blonde hair (except Snow White who wasn't marketed that much).  All the main dolls were blonde.  In cartoons the main beautiful girl almost always had blonde hair (sometimes they had red or black but only Velma had brown hair and she was not supposed to be traditionally pretty).  It wasn't until Ariel that we had a leading lady that was not blonde and by then I was older so the image of "blonde = princess" was set in my head.  The villainous women almost all had black hair.  Even in my favorite musicals the ingénue is often designated as a blonde on stage.

I still see myself thinking that people make blondes into the princess or main character automatically because it was ingrained in us.  The newer generations probably won't have this issue because redheads and brunettes are now main characters.  But for the longest time it seem like blonde = good, princess, hero, leading lady, light.  While black or dark hair = evil, ugly, frumpy, old, witch, dark.  Redheads were all superheros back then to me.  And most shows did not have true brown haired girls.  As a note, we still only have one Disney princess with brown hair (Belle), unless you count Rapunzel when her hair is cut.  Everyone else has shades of blonde, red, or black hair.  Although you could argue that Cinderella's true hair color is a mousy brown/dirty blonde.


For some random yet related background:   As a kid I did not like action figures but I loved Lego's, cars, transformers, sticks, bugs, and mud.  I also liked dolls (but not baby dolls), ponies, dresses, and frilly things.  I did not like pink at all (although I really do now). 

[Evening_Moonstone]

Small feet good, big feet BAD.   And that idea did not randomly pop into head out of nowhere.  It came from a million advertisements where the models have small feet (and probably the models with big feet where cut off at the knee to avoid showing their shoe size!), cartoons where all the female characters have small feet, etc.  "Cinderella" is probably the most blatant example, Cindy has dainty little feet, her wicked step-sisters have gigantic ones.

Oh, I didn't think I was going to contribute anything to this thread, but this struck a chord.  Not with feet, but hair color.  When I was a little girl all the available princesses had blonde hair (except Snow White who wasn't marketed that much).  All the main dolls were blonde.  In cartoons the main beautiful girl almost always had blonde hair (sometimes they had red or black but only Velma had brown hair and she was not supposed to be traditionally pretty).  It wasn't until Ariel that we had a leading lady that was not blonde and by then I was older so the image of "blonde = princess" was set in my head.  The villainous women almost all had black hair.  Even in my favorite musicals the ingénue is often designated as a blonde on stage.

I agree with this SO MUCH.  As a brunette (with a blonde sister), it was hard to find dolls that "looked like me" when we were kids.  Barbies were blonde, but the "friends" who weren't as pretty had other colors.  Princesses were always blonde.  The main good girl was always blonde.  Even MLP wasn't immune to this - Megan and Molly were blonde, but the two young witches were red and black haired.  I can't tell you how excited I was when Belle had brown hair! Finally a princess who I looked like!  I personally love that Disney has branched out into different hair colors and ethnicities for their princesses - little girls now have SO many more choices than when I was little and the girls in media were mostly blondes.

When I was very small, I saw the blonde dolls as "that's not me", and usually wound up choosing the more "ethnic" looking character instead:  Indigo from Rainbow Brite, and Orange Blossom from Strawberry Shortcake.  While I did have the main girl doll as well, my favorites were the darker skinned gals because, even though I'm very pale, I identified with the dark hair they had.

[Marigold]

When I was very small, I saw the blonde dolls as "that's not me", and usually wound up choosing the more "ethnic" looking character instead:  Indigo from Rainbow Brite, and Orange Blossom from Strawberry Shortcake.  While I did have the main girl doll as well, my favorites were the darker skinned gals because, even though I'm very pale, I identified with the dark hair they had.

I still always got the blondies because they were the prettiest with the best face and clothes.  The friend's never had the same beautiful face molds.  When I discovered collector's Barbies as an adult I went crazy over them because they come with all shades of hair but still look like Barbie.

I did love Lady Lovely Locks dolls because the two friends looked as beautiful as Lady but with brown and red hair (and the evil Duchess was MORE beautiful than Lady herself).  However, the blonde still was the leading character and she was the only one to have rainbows in her hair.  In my mind this meant the world was saying over and over again that blondes were more special.

[Evening_Moonstone]

Interestingly, when I was in HS/college, I dyed my hair blonde (in retrospect, it was not the most flattering).  It seemed like guys were only interested in blondes, and I wanted to look like the "pretty" characters, I guess.  It wasn't until after I got married that my husband kept saying I should go natural, that he actually preferred brunettes over blondes.  Shock.

Think about the expressions: "gentlemen prefer blondes", "blondes have more fun", etc.  And when all your shows reinforce that stereotype...

Makes me glad that modern MLP gals have ALL different hair colors!  Purple, pink, rainbow, yellow, aqua, white...

[Marigold]

And don't forget "blonde bombshell".