The distorted way Disney depicts male and female bodies isn't good for us

The differences between men’s and women’s hands and arms in these pictures are more extreme than almost any you can find in real adults. The men’s hands are routinely 3- or 4-times larger than the women’s. For comparison, I checked a detailed report that the Army commissioned to design its equipment and uniforms. In real American adults, for example, men’s wrists are on average only about 15 percent larger in circumference than women’s. In that scene from Frozen, not only is Ana’s hand tiny compared with Hans’s, but in fact her eyeball is wider than her wrist.

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In the Hercules scene, his bicep is about 2.8-times wider than hers, while the very biggest man in the Army report had a bicep just 2.1-times bigger than the very smallest woman (that bicep difference is also greater than that observed between Shaquille O’Neal and his former wife, Nicole Alexander). The same is true of their neck and wrist measurements.

In the case of Hercules, we can actually compare the Disney depiction to ancient renditions of the demigod and his mistress. From 4th Century mosaics to Alessandro Turchi’s 17th Century painting, the demigod is portrayed relative to Megara in much more normal human proportions. I know Hercules is not supposed to be a regular human, but if he’s really a different species, maybe Disney shouldn’t feature him kissing a girl in a children’s movie.

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