After a five day weekend, with the weather beautiful outside, school is just about the last place I want to be right now. With the end of school so near we must trudge through to the finish line, although we may not be thrilled about it. I am so happy that we got our final paper out of the way and now we can deal with the more creative aspect of our final projects. My presentation is on friday which feels extremely soon but it will get done like everything else seems to. I am going to use the thesis and main points from my paper, and use video and picture examples to give a clear argument of why and how disney women are depicted so poorly in their animated films.

Having our final paper done and out of the way is definitely a huge relief. I am happy that I can now fully focus on the marking period project and end on an easier note rather then a more difficult one. This week I will be focusing on my presentation for the Final Project. It will consist of a combination of talking and showing clips of what I am talking about from various disney films. I will find the clips on youtube.

This week real progress will be made on my essay. I already have a full outline describing paragraph by paragraph the direction of my essay. Also I have a strong intro paragraph with a clear thesis statement. Recently I found an essay written online in 1996, right after the release of Pocahantas that goes into detail about the retail stradegies involving the disney princesses and possible explanations as to why they have become so popular in recent years. My first paragraph will describe the anti-feminism present in the films. The second paragraph will explain these and why they are harmful to their target audience. And the third paragraph will show how Disney has used this collection of princesses to market a business worth billions of dollars.

This past week I made a clear pre-writing plan for my research paper that details paragraph by paragraph all evidence I will be using to support my claim. The women in Walt Disney's films (more specifically the princesses) are shown to be weak and useless without their strong men to protect them. It was a hard decision between having each paragraph be about a different movie or a different anti-feminist example but I decided on the second one. Each paragraph will have a different example and multiple movies will be used to back up each. Last Friday I wrote an introduction paragraph and hope by Wednesday I will have two body paragraphs done. I hope to finish my research paper completely by next Monday so that I have some time to edit and revise it before its due date next Friday.

For my research paper, I will be arguing that Disney portrays it's female characters in a condescending, and demoralizing light. They set a bad example for the little girls that dream of being a princess like Cinderella. Disney portrays its women as little Daddy's girls chasing after their "prince charming". The chase is extreme and they show very little respect for themselves and have few redeeming qualities albeit high voices and big eyes and flowing hair. There is a multitude of evidence to back me up in this claim, and once observed it is fairly obvious in every film. By the end of this week I hope to have a detailed prewriting plan to follow paragraph by paragraph and hopefully an introduction paragraph. My research will be done and I will have a more specific picture to what my final project will look like.

I just finished Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gillman and was so inspired by its strong, clear message. It is very clear that starting out, no matter what they have or aspire to accomplish, women are looked at as the lesser sex. They are deemed less capable then the men, when in fact this is far from the truth. Women are bogged down by their domestic responsibilities and the men’s attitudes of superiority making it difficult to work to their full potential. This near utopian society is filled with reason and understanding. Crime, hate, and poverty are unknown to this society and they function more as a family then as a country. All things are done for the greater good of the community, not for individuals. The women are raised this way, to have unselfish values so that everyone profits from ones hard work. This novel shows that women can function extremely well, if not better then a society with men. Feminists have been fighting this point for years. Women can function at a completely equal level as men when given equal opportunities. Feminism is an idea that is broad, as explained by Rachel Wiesel in her blog ”The Happy Feminist” . Rachel explains that the only thing you need to believe to call yourself a feminist is that “ensuring women’s freedom and equality of opportunity in all spheres of life is a crucial priority”. There are organizations all over the world such as the Women for Women International Foundation . Which helps women with no chance, rebuild their lives after ravished by war or poverty. Anti-Feminism is an ever present problem, as are all forms of prejiduce, but if enough people want change, it will come.

Something that has always interested me was the possibility that Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead was based off real life architect Frank Lloyd Wright. There are the obvious connections; Wright was a well known, arrogant architect who had an affair with a client’s wife. But then there are the more subtle ones, like the fact that he left college without a degree siting that that the “paper didn’t matter, it was the knowledge gained that will continue to be useful through my professional career” (New York Times, 1912). In the Fountainhead it is implied that Roark left college months before his graduation for the same reason. Wright started his school of architecture, as did Roark with his modern works. The Usonian home was possibly Wright’s most notable work, and it was a complex of low income housing that was very cheap to build, and also inexpensive to keep and maintain. In The Fountainhead Roark takes on an identical task, building low income housing. Others have had this same opinion, an entire article was even written about it in the magazine The New Individualist. I think this parallel is very interesting and could serve for an excellent senior paper