Although she never has to run away from anything our move a lot, her movement still suggests that she wouldn’t be able to if she needed to.Īnother tactic used to separate women and men is the use of the “feminine touch.” This is demonstrated throughout The Polar Express. She seems to “waddle” as pregnant women are often described as doing, and she is frequently shown holding her belly. In the beginning of the film the boy’s mother is shown with a large pregnant belly.
Clothing, such as dresses and high heels, inhibits movement, but there are also other ways in which this is done. Related to this first feature is the ways in which female characters’ freedom of movement is expressed in films. Not only does this sexualize, creating a clear distinction between men and women, but it also encourages young girls to wear similar clothing, which in turn limits their movement and activities.
If they’re not dressed in this stereotypically feminine way then they are usually playing a character that is in some way “weird”, according to societies gender rules. Female characters are almost always shown wearing dresses, skirts, and heels and they are likely to be tight, short, and revealing. This is something one can see pretty consistently with women’s clothing in movies. While wearing a dress she must constantly be worried and conscious of how she’s moving because she doesn’t want to be too revealing. Most women can probably attest to the fact that wearing dresses isn’t typically the most comfortable thing. Karin Martin (1998) would argue that the clothes that children wear “shape the experiences of their bodies in gendered ways.” 1 Girls are encouraged to wear dresses when they see most of the female characters in movies wearing dresses, but dresses limit a girls’ physicality in many ways. So what implications does this have for young girls? When young children watch g-rated films, such as The Polar Express, the get the idea that girls and women are supposed to wear pink dresses and have their long beautiful hair carefully done and that anything outside of this is considered abnormal. The physical appearance of the female characters in this film plays into many of our stereotypes about women and girls. Not only were they in dresses, but also the majority of the girls were dressed in stereotypically “feminine colors”, such as pink and purple, with their long hair “done” with a bow, a clip, pigtails, or braids. One of the first things I noticed in this film is that every female character is wearing a dress, more specifically a nightgown. Although the main focus of this film is on the boy, there is one female character who plays a significant role in the storyline and then there are numerous other girls and women shown throughout the film. The Polar Express is a G-rated film about a young boy who goes on an adventure to the North Pole.
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