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We watched Peter Pan a lot when I was a kid, but it’s been years since I’d seen it, and I already an the inkling that it was going to be rough going. “It’s pretty racist, right?” I said. “Like, there’s that whole song, ‘What Makes the Red Man Red’?”
You’d think that remembering the existence of the song would have prepared me, but reader, it did not. I did not remember the horrible caricatured design of every single Indian except Tiger Lily (her design draws on stereotypes too, but at least she looks like a human person), or the fact that every other verse in that song is just as bad as the title verse, or just… the entire design of the whole encampment.
It also didn’t really strike me, as a child, the way that the film sets Wendy up in opposition with every single other female that she meets in Neverland. Tink convinces the Lost Boys to shoot her! (Fortunately, the Lost Boys aren’t good shots.) The mermaids try to drown her! Tiger Lily… well, Tiger Lily doesn’t try to kill her, but Wendy is still green with envy when she sees Tiger Lily dancing for Peter and kissing him. And all the while, her brothers are having a jolly good time bonding with the Lost Boys.
Of course, Peter Pan is hardly the only Disney film to present women as inherently antagonistic toward each other (in fact, it’s something of an outlier in that it does show one strong female bond, between Wendy and her mother), but the fact that Wendy has so many antagonistic encounters with so many different women really hammers the message home. It’s not just an evil stepmother, or an evil stepmothers and her daughters who are under her thumb. It’s every woman she meets, almost at first meeting.
You’d think that remembering the existence of the song would have prepared me, but reader, it did not. I did not remember the horrible caricatured design of every single Indian except Tiger Lily (her design draws on stereotypes too, but at least she looks like a human person), or the fact that every other verse in that song is just as bad as the title verse, or just… the entire design of the whole encampment.
It also didn’t really strike me, as a child, the way that the film sets Wendy up in opposition with every single other female that she meets in Neverland. Tink convinces the Lost Boys to shoot her! (Fortunately, the Lost Boys aren’t good shots.) The mermaids try to drown her! Tiger Lily… well, Tiger Lily doesn’t try to kill her, but Wendy is still green with envy when she sees Tiger Lily dancing for Peter and kissing him. And all the while, her brothers are having a jolly good time bonding with the Lost Boys.
Of course, Peter Pan is hardly the only Disney film to present women as inherently antagonistic toward each other (in fact, it’s something of an outlier in that it does show one strong female bond, between Wendy and her mother), but the fact that Wendy has so many antagonistic encounters with so many different women really hammers the message home. It’s not just an evil stepmother, or an evil stepmothers and her daughters who are under her thumb. It’s every woman she meets, almost at first meeting.
