TORONTO, March 13, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) — Jordan Peterson, an authority on the psychology of religion and myth, may love stories, but he’s not so keen on propaganda. And as far as he’s concerned, Disney’s Frozen is propaganda.
“I could barely sit through Frozen,” Peterson told Time magazine. “There was an attempt to craft a moral message and to build the story around that, instead of building the story and letting the moral message emerge.”
“It was the subjugation of art to propaganda, in my estimation.”
Peterson explained that classic fairy tales have an underlying dynamic of archetypes (symbols expressing human psychology), and this aspect was completely missing from Disney’s “modern fable.”
In his bestselling 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Peterson praises Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid, for their attention to the “masculine” symbol of consciousness.
TELL DISNEY: Don’t make Elsa a lesbian in Frozen 2! Sign the petition here.
Observing what happens to Sleeping Beauty because her parents shelter her too much from “the dangerous and dark side of reality”, Peterson writes that by puberty the girl is still “unconscious.”
“The masculine spirit, her prince, is both a man who could save her, by tearing her from her parents, and her own consciousness, trapped in a dungeon by the machinations of the dark side of femininity.”
The dark side of femininity is represented by the Evil Queen, who turns into the “Dragon of Chaos” itself.
“The symbolic masculine defeats her with truth and faith, and finds the princess, whose eyes he opens with a kiss.”
Peterson concedes that some would object that a woman does not need a man to rescue her, an objection he found in “Disney’s more recent and deeply propagandistic Frozen.” The professor suspects a woman really does need it, however, at very least if she wants or has a child and thus needs masculine aid and support.
That said, Peterson believes the real point of the ancient story of “Sleeping Beauty “is that a woman needs consciousness to be rescued and “consciousness is symbolically masculine and has been since the beginning of time.”
“The Prince could be a lover, but he could also be a woman’s own attentiveness, clarity of vision, and tough-minded independence,” the psychologist writes. “These are masculine traits–in actuality, as well as symbolically, as men are actually less tender-minded and agreeable than women, on average, and less susceptible to anxiety and emotional pain” (page 324).
Peterson goes on in the chapter to describe Disney’s The Little Mermaid approvingly, for there too both the goodness and darkness of femininity are acknowledged and masculine consciousness wins the day.
In his interview with Time, Peterson explained that the the genre of folk tales to which Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid belong goes back 13,000 years. Far from being propaganda, such “properly balanced” stories provide an equal representation of the negative and positive attributes of a being.
“In the propagandistic story, you don’t see that,” Peterson explained. “You see the darkness all being in one place and the light all being in one place.”
Peterson, whose advice is helping a generation of young men find their way in increasingly anti-male western society, particularly objected to the sudden transformation of “a perfectly good guy” in Frozen into “a villain without any character development.”
In a lecture about the psychological dynamics of Sleeping Beauty, Peterson called Frozen an “appalling piece of rubbish.” He believes that Frozen was written merely to counter the age-old story of the rescuing prince.
“Well, you think, how sexist can you get? Well, seriously, that’s the way that [“Sleeping Beauty”] would be read in the modern world: ‘She doesn’t need a prince to rescue her!’,” he mimicked, throwing his arms about in mockery of this view. “That’s why Disney made Frozen, that absolutely appalling piece of rubbish.”
Watch Dr. Peterson discuss Sleeping Beauty and Frozen:
Peterson argued that it was wrong to read “Sleeping Beauty”–or anything else–as “patriarchal.”
TELL DISNEY: Don’t make Elsa a lesbian in Frozen 2! Sign the petition here.
“Really,” he said, “we can do better than that, man.”
Frozen, a hit with little girls throughout the English-speaking world, is believed by some LGBT activists to be “metaphor” for secret homosexuality, and speculation is rife that its heroine will be “outed” as a lesbian in a forthcoming sequel.
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