Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2015

SHARPAY WEARS
SHORT SKIRTS;
GABRIELLA WEARS
T-SHIRTS
the false dichotomy of disney’s female characters
by Simi Best
The first time we see High School Musical’s Sharpay Evans,
she’s dressed head to toe in pink, strutting through the halls
of East High, texting on her pink flip phone as the crowd parts
around her. Even before Zeke calls her the “ice princess” and
proceeds to high five his laughing bros, we already know all we
need to about Sharpay: she’s The Bitch. Aspiring star Sharpay
loves shopping with Daddy’s credit card, wearing short skirts,
cozying up to Troy Bolton, and trying to manipulate anyone
and everyone who might stand in her way—like, for instance,
Gabriella. Gabriella is different. She has brown hair and she
reads books…for fun.
And so we have our opposites. In what is familiar territory
for the Disney Channel, we’re tipped off to the fact that we’re
supposed to identify with Gabriella not just because she’s
the sympathetic antithesis to Sharpay’s “ice princess,” but
also because she’s modest and quietly intellectual. We’re
conditioned to hate one and identify with another very specific
type of girl, and by creating this opposition Disney pits us
against girls with certain characteristics and encourages the
same bias we see on TV in our own lives.
Character pairs are all over Disney Channel. Camp Rock’s
Tess Tyler (resident Camp Bitch) bears a striking resemblance
to Sharpay—blonde, rich, fashion-obsessed, boy-obsessed, and
in possession of a temper and a drive to make it to the top.
But Mitchie is different. She comes from a modest family: her
dad owns a hardware store and her mom is a cook. She’s got
brown hair to match the earth tones of her casual outfits and
a shy, unpretentious personality despite her beautiful voice. Of
course, Tess is the sequined villainess pitted against our downto-earth
heroine. Take, too, Lizzie McGuire’s ex-best friend and
later enemy, cheerleading captain and evil queen bee Kate
Sanders—Kate came back from summer camp one year with a
bra and consequently, a new attitude. In addition to displaying
her unfortunate personality, our antagonist tends to check her
hair in the mirror and refuses to eat carbs. And of course, it
follows that we hate her.
According to Disney Channel, cool girls are allowed to be
beautiful, smart, and talented, but they can’t be boy-crazy, wear
pink, shop at the mall, care about dieting, or, apparently, require
a bra. Why does Disney Channel consistently use stereotypes
of popular-girl femininity as shorthand for “bad”? This isn’t
just lazy TV and film writing—it is part of impressionable
childhoods. Content like this makes kids think that “girly”
interests are an invitation for mockery. We grow up knowing
that we’re meant to identify with modest, casual Gabriella and
not sparkly, over-the-top Sharpay, because Gabriella is good
and Sharpay is evil. To anyone watching those characters, girly
is equated with mean.
The concept of “girly” as shorthand for “mean” is more lazy
than vindictive. Maybe the intent is to give credit to the girls
who don’t fit the stereotypical teenage popularity norm, so
that while caring about appearances is equated with vanity,
girls who don’t feel like they fit the beautiful, popular girl
image (read: pretty much all girls) can feel proud of their
own diffidence. Instead of encouraging self-esteem, all Disney
Channel does with these stock characters is reinforce the
notion that we should be proud of our assumed superiority over
Sharpay’s vilified characteristics. It feels good to feel superior
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