Women Now Claim This Popular Disney Song Promotes Sexual Assault
An all-male a cappella group at a prestigious university will no longer sing one well-known Disney song because some audience members — and one sophomore who wrote an article about it for the student newspaper — found it to be “uncomfortable.” . . .
One of the school’s all-male a cappella groups, the Princeton Tigertones, will no longer perform its popular rendition of “Kiss the Girl” from The Little Mermaid after the complaints. During their performance, the group invites a woman from the audience to join them as they sing and “playfully dance with her for a bit,” according to Inside Higher Ed. As the song reaches a close, the group invites a male audience member, pretend to groom him, and then put the two together, asking that they kiss, as the song suggests. The random couple complies, “sometimes on with a peck on the cheek, sometimes briefly on the lips,” Inside Higher Ed reported.
On November 26, sophomore Noa Wollstein wrote an opinion article for the Daily Princetonian asking the Tigertones to stop singing the song because it “is more misogynistic and dismissive of consent than cute.”
“Its lyrics raise some serious issues. The premise of the song, originally sung in the Disney film The Little Mermaid, is that the male Prince Eric, on a date with the beautiful female Ariel, should kiss her without asking for a single word to affirm her consent. Despite the fact that an evil sea-witch cursed Ariel’s voice away, making verbal consent impossible, the song is clearly problematic from the get-go,” Wollstein wrote.
She claims that if you take away the mermaids and the magic, the “message comes across as even more jarring.” She cites the lyrics “It’s possible she wants you too/There’s one way to ask her/It don’t take a word, not a single word/Go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl” and ““she won’t say a word/Until you kiss that girl,” as problematic. These lyrics, she insists, “unambiguously encourage men to make physical advances on women without obtaining their clear consent.” (Read more from “Women Now Claim This Popular Disney Song Promotes Sexual Assault” HERE)
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