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An article about dietitians in last week's LA Times took me back to watching Disney films with my kids. Among all the Disney rubbish that I sat through over the years, I must confess that I love Lilo and Stitch. Despite Disney’s troubling track record when it comes to issues of gender and multiculturalism, in this movie, the animators seemed to have broken their own patterns not only by enchantingly capturing the Hawaiian music and atmosphere, but also by the way they depict the main character.
Lilo is the rare example of a female heroine who is short, plump, awkward, doll-hating, untrendy, opinionated and even angry (!) – yet, she is treated with an adoring respect and compassion by certain key figures she comes into contact with. It’s the kind of setting that gives comfort to those of us who were not, shall we say, typical ‘girls’ growing up. It has the potential to be, on some level, almost healing for girls (and women) who tend not to fit societal expectations.
Yet, there is one aspect of the movie that for me remains troublingly stuck in the typical Disney Cinderella/Belle/Snow White paradigms of gender, and shows just how stuck American culture of gender and body really is. The issue is the portrayal of the background hula dancers in the opening scene. The group of dancers is in a certain way atypical of Disney in that the WASPish blond and blue eyed bimbos have been replaced by actually dark skinned creatures. Beyond the color, however, the women are unfortunately identical not only their cookie-cutter appearance, but also in their picture-perfect body.
The reason this is so troubling is because of how purposefully and intentionally this was done. Writer and director Chris Sanders explained in an interview that in order to sketch these dancers, the animators observed real hula classes in Hawaii, in which the dancers were actually quite realistic, and varied in their body shapes and sizes. One of the dancers was interviewed and quite movingly said that one of the most beautiful aspects of hula dancing is that it does not matter what a person looks like, how old or young, how fat or how thin – everyone can do it, and everyone in Hawaii apparently does.
But for Disney, this was not a viable message. Rather, Disney’s crews
decided that the American audience needed to see only “flawless”,
characterless – and in fact completely unrealistic – background
dancers. How the writers expected Lilo to get her positive body image
in such a fake culture, one can only surmise.
What is telling here is not only the extent to which American culture revolves around thinness, but how completely intolerant and despising Americans are of even the slightest “imperfection” of body. I think many Westerners truly hate fat people. Because in Western culture thin is not only correct, but it is equated with goodness, purity, and righteousness. I would say that the contribution of Disney to world culture is this exact message: Beauty and thinness equal goodness. Ugliness and imperfect body equal evil. Hence studies show that kids as early as kindergarten, when shown photos of women who are thin and beautiful alongside those who are not, will describe the beautiful ones as “nice” and the less beautiful ones as “mean.”
I thought about this as I read in last week’s LA Times a new study that shows that there is a new population of fat-people-haters: dieticians. Sure, we all knew that employers prefer thin blonds. Not only do thin people get better jobs and more promotions, but thin people are also assumed to be smarter and more competent. Study after study has shown the same thing: when people see two identical resumes, and the only difference is the accompanying photo, where one is someone thin and “beautiful” (by American standards) and the other is someone not, the person who is thin is assumed to be better all around. Yet, this new study places this deplorable habit squarely in the camp of those who are supposed to be sympathetic to overweight people. Dieticians, whose job is to sit with people who are trying to improve their lifestyles and their health, are guilty of the assumption that people who are overweight are “lazy”, “unmotivated”, “slow”, “inactive”, “insecure,” and of “low self-esteem”. No wonder people hate going to dieticians!
I mean, picture this scenario: A dietician walks into a room full of
