The kind they warned you about.
11 hours ago
#6
The queen is back from jury duty now. You may now rejoice!
My thoughts? Y'know, there's just nothing more appealing to the ladies than grown men who can't even manage to put their dirty clothes in the hamper or microwave their own Dino Nuggets and have erectile dysfunction at age 25 from their porn addiction going around complaining endlessly on the internet with MAGA hats on that women are too picky these days. There's nothing more appealing than that. No?
As to this whole debate about girls' media from the '90s vs. the modern era, yeah, I think it's fair to say that there was definitely a more conservative attitude about the importance of marriage and kids that got pounded into your brain from a young age. Most of the toys for girls were baby dolls, all that sorta thing. That was the atmosphere I grew up in. And I didn't want to get married. (Full disclosure: I eventually got married, but to a woman.) I mean I just think that somewhere along the way, a generation of girls grew up and figured out that Titanic ain't for real and actually your dating pool looks much more like what I have just described above and frankly they'd rather go extinct than marry that! Today's young women are stressed by economic precarity as things are and don't want to have to raise a husband and teach him that women are human beings. I would say the reality is that our media climate has changed in response to that. Now the popular movies for girls and young women rarely center on finding a guy because fact is that the market for romance (heterosexual in particular) has diminished. What they used to call "chick flicks" don't sell too well with chicks anymore. The demand today in fact is for more narrative emphasis on platonic relationships, like friendships. It's K-Pop Demon Hunters for today's girls, not Twilight.
NOW: Being a winner myself, I know my cartoons and Tangled was very much the opposite of a feminist movie. I mean it was supposed to be about navigating an abusive parent-child relationship, but the gender dynamics are exactly what you'd expect from old Disney: our protagonist Rapunzel escapes the grip of a narcissistic, controlling mother by finding a man, the end. The problem is a woman, the solution is a man. It was notably followed up the next year by what I'd characterize as one of the most blatantly misogynistic pictures Disney has ever released: Mars Needs Moms, which is about a human boy who helps male Martians rise up and overthrow an oppressive, technology-driven matriarchy that doesn't do natural childbirth or have use for their males, teaching these aliens the importance of mothering. I'd rank it up there with 101 Dalmations in degrees of explicit contempt for the female sex. Fortunately, Mars Needs Moms tanked hard at the box office and the thematic experiment was accordingly not repeated.
I tend to locate the beginning of the modern era in girls' media as beginning with the popularity of The Hunger Games, particularly after the first novel was released as a theatrical motion picture in early 2012. Protagonist Katniss Everdeen survives a futuristic, gladiator-style game show and shows up its game-makers by pretending to be in love with a boy simply because the audience likes the performance. The film's box office success always struck me as the beginning of the change. The next year you had Frozen, which made it a central plot point that Princess Anna must prioritize her love for her sister over and above that for her man. Sisters before misters. In stark contrast to Mars Needs Moms, Frozen became the Disney animated hit of the decade! But to point out something perhaps even more significant about that moment, the generally more popular of the two princess sisters in that film furthermore was Elsa, who never develops a love interest. Young girls specifically wanted to be Elsa more than Anna. Sisters without misters. The theme generally kept rolling from there (including in what has become my favorite movie of all time, 2015's Mad Max: Fury Road; don't let the title of which fool you, it's really Furiosa's movie.). Perhaps that just reflected the mindset of prepubescent girls though, you might think. Naturally girls wouldn't be interested in romance before hitting puberty after all. And yet a full decade later, this same generation had graduated not to romances, but to the Barbie movie, making it the biggest blockbuster of the year. So much for that theory of the case.
ANYWAY, I also also gotta say that I agree with Magpie's thoughts above just in general, including about modern social media having a polarizing affect on women. There's definitely both more class consciousness among today's young women, yet also, at the same time, a whole pickmesphere that's emerged adjacent the "manosphere". You get a mixture of both of those elements.
![[Image: SR_25.11.14_MarriageAndFamily_3.png?resize=260,521]](https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2025/11/SR_25.11.14_MarriageAndFamily_3.png?resize=260,521)
(Also lmao at "asking them when they're older" as if that would somehow change shit, when even more older women 
)
