Fed-Up Dad Censors Outdated Gender Stereotypes In Daughter’s Disney Books

Yes! If people want something to be present in art, they need to express it themselves.

You are a voice for the future. Why are we adapting old stories when we could be discovering new ones?

That’s exactly what fanfiction is for!!! (BTW, I totally agree with you.)

EXACTLY!!!!

But Disney didn't write these stories they just made changes to them so he's doing exactly what they did

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A better "fix" would be to fix your f*****g selves and stop thinking that the world deserves your expectations. Consider the possibility that your standards are inferior. Consider the probability that they're context-based and time-limited. Consider the perspective that your objection and suggestion may be comparable to the action that is referred to as menstrual synchronisation.

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I'll explain that last comment. Paraphrase it. Might make more sense. When my mum died, I drove up into the mountains where she and her dad would sometimes take us bushwalking, her dad, my pop, having died two years prior also. And I sat on the bonnet of my car, while the sun sank and cicadas began to emerge in their hundreds and thousands - cicadas I guess are kind of symbolic to me, I associate them with visiting my grandparents, we'd find the discarded shells in trees and wear them on our clothing like badges, little brooches, something my pop showed us. And the cicadas flew about in a massive swarm, settling in turns in the trees, droning out a titanic cacophony, and as I sat there I felt rain falling on me, which I much later comprehended as being not rain at all and it gave me a good laugh, because that's kind of f*****g gross and what the f**k can I do about it now and I'm kind of dopey sometimes - just sitting there in their spattered orgy. But that noise, them all emerging at the same time, which apparently happens only once every couple of decades, and making that deafening f*****g noise all at the same time while flying about and f*****g the way such animals do all moments, no more than hours before retiring once again beneath the ground, to lay their eggs and as I understand also to die, having fulfilled their purpose, and all having nothing to do with reason or rationale but just being an instinctive impulse facilitated, stimulated and invoked in part by the activity and noise of their peers, is exactly what you all remind me of, with your displays of virtue and your ritualistic incantations and motions and your public communal ejaculations. Also reminds me of the satanic panic of the eighties. Particularly irks me. It'd be me and my friends being targeted by the do-gooders, the virtuous. For what? For having a different taste in music to them. For having long hair. For differing from their customs. Because they all knew better. Their values were superior. Ours inferior. I think history has proven that not only was that untrue but nor could or can they distinguish fact from fiction. Just conceited, self-interested bullshit born of a cloistered, coddled mind, a chronically irritated sensitivity, and a resulting fear of the real world and all of its greatest dangers, both the imagined and the exaggerated. I recall my mum, who abandoned Christianity when she was training to be a nurse because of how the nuns treated her, who was more attracted to hippy culture, who certainly didn't entertain any religious nonsense that I ever witnessed - I never even knew of the concept of god growing up outside of it being the magical man that the family down the road believed existed in the clouds, the parents of which constantly bringing the children, friends of ours, to tears over things of such trivial enormity as not managing to turn the TV off before the Simpsons theme song started for reasons that I could not then comprehend and though now I can my disdain is only increased and sharpened with knowledge - I remember her denying me a D&D book that my dad gave me - literally the only thing he had ever given me, along with a copy of The Silmarillion that he'd also had lying around - because she'd heard it makes people deranged. Meanwhile, she was apparently yet unaware that I was playing AD&D for several days and nights straight pretty much every week with friends, and it was just a lot of fun, telling, and interacting with stories, in the form of a game. It was very similar to something else we did which we called "straight trips", basically guided meditation through a narrative. That was very similar to the meditation we did several nights a week every week as part of a warmup or cooldown at Shaolin Kung Fu, that our teacher who trained for five or seven years in the Philipines, who ranked 3rd in the world, and attained 5th dan in Modern Arnis, would teach us and guide us through. But they knew better. Even not knowing. It was their conceit, their hubris, and their chronically irritated sensitivity that informed them and made them more virtuous and instilled them with better values. My friends even ended up in the newspaper as part of a story about Satan worshipers sacrificing animals on a property in town. Because: long hair; wear black clothes, often with morbid imagery; were in a band; made heavy metal music ...about Norse mythology; lived together in a house and had a pentagram on their bin. Newspaper story never mentioned that the bin was covered in band logos, not only the Slayer pentagram, or that they only did that because bins were going missing at that time, they were expensive then, and they wanted theirs to stand out as a deterrent. That's it. That's all there was to that story. The town, the entire country, was never even particularly religious. It was just obviously a very pressing issue, one carcass in a circle in a town full of bored kids, and that their paper needed stories, and their readers craved gossip, sorry, news of urgency and significant consequence. Issues of such importance need a focus for fingers to be pointed towards. I mean, they could be writing about issues relating to that town being known then as the drug and crime capital of the nation. They could be relating significance concerning any crime that my mum had heard on the police scanner which never appeared in any news story, such as the white woman who had been held captive by her aboriginal boyfriend for weeks or months, bits cut off her, cheek, tongue, breast, vagina, raped repeatedly, then eventually raped in the street and left bleeding on the road. As far as I know she survived, which in my mind is perhaps the most horrific thought. Things like this obviously speak of several significant problems: drugs; the psychological effect of jail; racial hatred being condoned and excused in the community; the cause and effect of an entire neighbourhood, an entire extensive housing estate, being one of several areas where aboriginal people were not exclusive though concentrated (the other being my neighbourhood), which was inhabited by a population of whom 80% were of or under the age of 18. Where I was forbidden to enter when I delivered pizzas, though I had friends that lived there and might stroll through there alone at times, but deliveries were frequently targeted either by idle thieves or by people who just wanted to cause damage, and even the police declared it a no go zone and would not enter it lest a riot occur as had happened on several occassions. But generally they didn't write these. They had newspapers and shows to produce. Stories to tell. Things the community need to be informed of. Similarly, my school considered very important to teach me all about aboriginal people. As though I couldn't go next door. Or interact with a friend. Or their family. As though being taken by my mum's boyfriend to the reserve where we'd camp with other families and eat together and fish and burn down noxious invasive bushes, or hanging out at the river and staying over at other friends', or being at school together, or playing music in bands together, wasn't exposing me to aboriginal people and aboriginal culture. Teaching me bout my friends and neighbours, and people I shared homes and meals with. Just, it's really important that us white kids understand the black kids, so our government insisted that our teachers tell us about them because otherwise we would just never understand. That's what you people are. You're the current iteration of all of that conceited, arrogant nonsense. Slavish to fears of shadows and boogeymen and their equally tangible solutions. You're today's satanic panicked bible bashers and idle gossips passing off inane, exaggerated and sensationalised everyday humdrum as newsworthy issues of urgent importance pertinent to the very fabric of social wellbeing, crusading to "fix" what was never broken. Always knowing what's best. Never knowing any better. It's a f*****g story, a f*****g fiction, and it reflects perfectly things that were important to communicate in its f*****g time. Things that still have some validity today. If you can't communicate that to your kids, then there's something right there that deserves fixing and is yours to fix. You look at a historically significant story about personal choice and responsibility and see it as a critique on modern society? And you think the fix needs to happen somewhere external? There's this phrase we have where I come from, kind of an unspoken part of our ethos, though it's been uttered often enough throughout history and the world, and I reckon a common revival of it might "fix" so many of the "problems" that emerge in the pareidolia that you people obsess over. It's short, to the point, rolls right off the tongue, and should be very easy to put into practice: mind your own f*****g business.

You want to read kids stories in which the main character usually dies? I know there are at least a few different versions of the little mermaid in which Ariel dies. In gruesome ways. Not a good idea to read that to little kids, unless you want them to have nightmares

That said, not even the skills are needed. I occasionally invent stories for my daughters in which I weave in some adventues from our everyday life. It is effortless to have the right values in these without explicitely focussing on gender balance and undesirable tropes.

I used to read Jack and the bean stalk a lot to my son when he was younger. We now jokingly refer to it as "Jack the murderous thief and the innocent giant" 😃 Considering jack goes back the third time out of sheer boredom (had the goose and money), and the giant hadn't chased him too far the other times. Maybe he had bad experiences with humans, so said his 'fee fi fo fum' to scare off intruders. And then Jack takes the harp, his last treasure, that he needs to get to sleep. It loves him too coz it calls out to him. He just wants it back. So jack kills him. And the whole 'Oh the giant stole all that from your dad' is a poor excuse considering the mother didn't know about magic beanstalks . We reached this conclusion after reading it so many times, and some interesting questions from my kid 😆

It's your kid, do whatever you want. But my parents never withheld or censored any books. They just encouraged me to read everything, question everything, and make up my own mind. I very much appreciated that. Yeah, I'm a girl, but I can indeed read things that I disagree with and make up my own mind about it. To me, editing problematic texts is akin to tearing down Confederate statues. I say leave them up. We need to know where we've been, in order to figure out where we need to go next. And your girl just might be smart enough to see the whole picture and analyze the situation for herself

Mac, I consider myself pretty darn woke and even I have to roll my eyes so back far into my head that it hurts. This isn't "woke"-- this is just plain performative parenting for "kudos" on the Internet.