Elyse doesn’t understand why Rosa Parks needs to have pushed-up cleavage

I recently saw David Trumble’s “Woman You Should Know,” an art project that depicts female role models like Hillary Clinton, Rosa Parks, and Anne Frank as Disney princesses. The renditions were inspired by Disney taking its most un-princessy of its princess stock, Merida in “Brave,” and re purposing her into a sexy Halloween costume version of herself. Thus, taking away the only alternative princess company has ever offered little girls (which isn’t necessarily true, Pocahontas, anyone?).

Personally, my gut reaction was nausea. I like that he’s calling Disney out for its BS, but he’s doing it at the cost of using women who are way more significant than his message to make a fairly obvious point. And essentially, while doing it, he’s stripping these women of their power.

An image of Gloria Steinem and reading a phrase like “This space is intentionally left blank” on a piece of paper simply makes me chuckle. It doesn’t provoke deep thought of shift my world views.

 I remember my dad driving me to preschool every day as a kid, and every day I would ask him to tell me a story.

“About a princess,” I would demand. “Who has blonde hair, blue eyes, and talks to horses.”

Thing was, I wasn’t a princess kind of girl. I enjoyed making weird dolphin noises, pulling the heads off of all my Barbies, and hunting garden snakes with my next-door neighbor, Adam.

Yet, I couldn’t escape the spell cast on me by watching “Sleeping Beauty” about three dozen times.

And I’m not sure if it was a result of dating boys that viewed me as an accomplishment, being denied promotions as an adult, or just waiting in way too many hour-long lines at Disney World that severed my devotion to Aurora (who, by the way, is the most anti-feminist princess of the lot – she makes none of her own decisions, passively sleeps for most of the movie, and needs to be saved by a man) but it eventually happened. My penchant for princesses faded and I became my own person; a woman, who frankly, thinks princesses suck.

And I’m pretty sure I’m not the first woman who has come to this conclusion without the help of silly visual aids.

I do appreciate that this artist is trying to make a statement about the ridiculousness of taking a powerful woman and having to gloss her over to make her more appealing to society, but is an image of Anne Frank in a glittery gown really doing that? Is it fair to call something like that “art?”

One thing I do know for certain is that last thing Anne Frank would have wanted to be when hiding from Nazis was sparkly.