Cohen notes a new benchmark in gender narrative
Writing in Slate, Amanda Marcotte notes that the depiction of women in Disney cartoons, notwithstanding the inherent exaggeration of animation, sends the message that "to be loveable, it's best to take up almost no space at all."
She cites work by Faculty Associate Philip Cohen, published on Sociological Images and on his Family Inequality blog, that examines how men and women are drawn in Disney cartoons. "The apparent need to make the male characters seem so much larger and sturdier than the female characters," she writes, "manifests to a comical level in how male and female wrists are drawn: Female wrists in Disney films are a fraction of the size of male wrists. But you know what else Cohen discovered while studying the wrists? In the latest Disney movie Frozen, the heroine Anna's eyes are bigger than her wrists."
In real life, the average size difference between men’s and women’s wrists is only 2.3 cm, or a ratio of 1.15-to-1.
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