The Little Mermaid Is Not an Affront To Feminism

1. Ariel is an anthropologist. Full stop. She was a scientist before Jane entered the scene a decade later and as an anthropologist, going above the sea and exploring would have been a dream come true. If she gets the hot Prince too… well, that’s a bonus.

Even if she went up to land for Eric, now Atlantis has a solid relationship with their closest human neighbours. Ariel might have been a teenager, but she was also a Princess, probably raised with all the knowledge she could ever need to rule a kingdom of her own one day like she ends up doing in the sequel. She only seems ditzy from our human viewpoint, of course she wouldn’t know what a fork is, her ‘human emissary’ is a seagull with a screw loose.

2. Triton was abusive. He clearly had some trauma from his wife’s death, but that’s no excuse to destroy Ariel’s collection of human stuff. That she even had to hide a hobby from her dad is a red flag. Yes, he loves her, but his behaviour was unacceptable. The reason she fled to Ursula was, yes, to go up to land. But she only does that when her father destroys the collection of human things she’s clearly been collecting for a long time. Flotsam and Jetsam come to her after the argument when she’s emotionally vulnerable but even then she protests: “I’ll never see my father or sisters again.”

3. Ariel protests about Ursula taking her voice, “But without my voice… how will I-” Ursula was the one who made the comment about body language and she is the villain! This is Disney explicitly saying that character is important in a relationship. In context, this was the late eighties, when such attitudes would have been held by a significant number of the population, but Ariel makes up for her lack of voice with her charming personality. Eric fell for her. He was enchanted by the seashell, but that didn’t matter when he broke out of it. He saw Ariel as she truly was, tail and all, and accepted that.

4. Ariel saved her man before he ever saved her and the way it’s shown in the film makes it clear their differences are a good thing, otherwise Eric would have drowned and Ariel would have been dragged back down to the sea, way better than the modern interpretation that differences are weakness and pretending you don’t see it is the polite thing to do.

5. Ariel is the first feminist princess! ‘Bright young women, sick of swimming, ready to stand.’ These lyrics spoke to me as a thirteen-year-old, and it still brings out emotion now as a twenty-year-old. This is such a good line.

6. Really, the criticism of Ariel comes down to she left her family to go after a man. But that’s false. We see in the sequel that Ariel sees her family all the time, and she’s happy. Wanting love is not anti-feminist, and it’s time we stop pretending it is.