November Blog Post

I found the most interesting concept for this month’s blog post was the Mickey Mouse Monopoly documentary and in particular the notion that Beauty and the Beast taught children, young girls in particular to “keep being sweet” despite the fact you’re in a, what we will consider at least emotionally abusive relationship. In the documentary it pointed out a sort of alarming notion to me that the relationship Belle and the Beast have very much seems like an abusive one when analytically looking at it and no longer just enjoying it as a kid’s movie. What was even more shocking to me was when they asked young girls’ what advice they would give to a friend in that situation, most of them said to keep being nice and “he will eventually change” sort of mentality. It made me take a step back and think about that harder than normal because that’s something I feel like a lot of women suffer from nowadays. I personally have seen a lot of my friends stay in relationships and waste time and energy by “being sweet” and hoping their significant other would finally treat them right, and am guilty of it myself. But not only am I guilty of it according to thehotline.org, “1 in 3 college women report they have been in an abusive dating relationship”. One in three seems like a huge number when you really think about it. Not only is it a bad mentality for women and girls to experience we also have to take a look at the men who experience this well, as this is usually not a sought-after topic to talk about. According to ncadv.org, “one in four men have been victims of some form of physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime” One in three and one in four are huge numbers when you take into account just how many people experience domestic abuse of some sort either reported or unreported and really brings to light where we learned that this is a normal situation and experience to stay in when it’s not.