Arguably one of the toughest things about being a woman today is living in the shadow of all these fictional women we have been brought up to idolize. “Disney Princess” culture has poisoned, time and again, any progress for which forward-thinking or “feminist” people have toiled. At the end of every Disney animated movie, even the later ones featuring “modern” women, the worth of the female character is ultimately defined by her ability to land a dude. Even the ones who are “spirited” and “courageous” are primarily characterized by their beauty and sex appeal. So when Pocahontas threw herself in front of her father’s club to save boyfriend John Smith, she got to look like an enlightened advocate of racial harmony and non-violent communication, who just happened to be a busty sexpot. That’s cheating. It’s a lot easier to be spunky when you can distract people with your boobs.
My generation outgrew Disney just in time to catch reruns of HBO’s Sex and the City, which I would argue has done more to help and hurt women than any other show on television has so far. I believe the show certainly reduced its characters to needy women, compelled to always see themselves primarily as sex objects, or more specifically sex objects at a sex auction where the bids were growing sparser as they were growing wrinklier. I also believe that viewers, such as myself, who devoured Carrie Bradshaw’s life lessons during their formative years, are finding there is a difference between taking ownership of one’s sexuality and being defined by it.
What was progressive about the show, however, was the fact it acknowledged the precepts that Cinderella force fed us and used Carrie and her friends as a kind of case study of what has happened to the collective psyche of women who have melded the Princess myth with the philosophy of women’s liberation, having emerged believing they can have it all. The show follows each woman’s slow education in her own self-worth, each learning to accept that professional, financial and personal successes are not diminished because she is single. And of course, Sex and the City spawned the popular self-help book, Greg Behrendt’s “He’s Just Not That Into You.”
I own a copy, and it is more dog-eared than any dictionary or textbook I own. As someone who has struggled with self-esteem and those Disney expectations, the book was valuable because it bluntly exposed the truth in many situations: men like the chase, men like confidence, men (and really everybody) don’t value things they don’t have to work for, and if they like you, they will find a way to let you know. Successful relationships can and do happen when, and usually only when, we are busy with stuff that’s actually important. The overarching theme is simply this: live your life, and stop letting the one thing you don’t have keep you from appreciating the things you do have.
And that is why the movie version of the book, as well as its horrendously lame counterpart, The Ugly Truth, have angered me so. Here’s a synopsis of He’s Just Not That Into You, the movie: Ginnifer Goodwin gets love advice from Justin Long (the Mac guy), begins to see him as a potential boyfriend, proceeds to act like a desperate psycho and break every single rule IN the actual book, scares Mac guy away, and finally, gets him back anyway because viewers would hate to see her sincerity go unrewarded. The Ugly Truth, the worst-written movie I’ve seen in ages, follows a similar pattern: Katherine Heigl is the most unsympathetic female character pretty much ever created. She has no sense of humor and no imagination...she’s essentially socially retarded (but, luckily, she’s hot.) Gerard Butler’s foil character is unnecessarily crude, stupid and also not funny - I suspect he is Dane Cook in disguise. Butler gives Heigl love advice concerning her handsome neighbor, all of which essentially boils down to “wear a push-up bra and try not to talk too much.” That’s what men want, he tells her, and that’s the “ugly truth.” It works, until she cracks and explains to Dreamboat she has been faking from the start, and she predictably ends up with Butler. Critics mangled this film, the best review I could find calling it “shallow and fleeting.” But many online reviews by your average movie-goer gave it raves, probably because Heigl’s not single in the end, which would be such a tragic failure.
Both of these movies feature protagonists who are extremely successful, beautiful women who have every reason to respect themselves. They blindly follow rules that are, ostensibly, designed to help them own their sexuality and work the system, but they are no closer to self-acceptance in the end. They bag a boyfriend even after they displayed such overwhelming self-hatred and are suddenly fulfilled. Finally, they can enjoy their careers, nice apartments, designer clothes and friendships because they have proven their feminine skill by scoring a living trophy. If they’re going to keep making these “modern” comedies, meant to riff off of Sex and the City’s theme, it would be nice to see some progression, not regression. It’s hard enough to keep men from seeing women solely as sex objects, without the women thinking it of themselves.

Robbie Wright is a senior in English. She can be reached at rwrigh24@utk.edu.