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Kids' movies are relentlessly romantic

Recently, my children began lobbying to watch a movie called Descendants. They’d heard about it at their after-school program, where the soundtrack blared — “Did I mention that I’m in love with you?” — as the kids shot baskets and acted out the parts on the playground.To get more news about domestic first class porn, you can visit our official website.

I read up on it, quickly realizing I had a lot of catching up to do (Descendants 2 left fans hanging in 2017, and Descendants 3 was announced just recently with the exciting release of a trailer ). It sounded like a clever enough idea: The children of various Disney villains — Belle’s adversary, Maleficent, and Snow White’s nemesis, the Evil Queen, among them — go to an exclusive boarding school with the children of the royals on whom those villains have preyed (and, at first, conspire to take it over and let evil reign).

Now, I’m pretty well prepared to combat the princess media. I have had discussions with my daughters, 6 and 8, about the limits of those royalty-rooted narratives, in which huge-eyed, tiny-waisted young women — wealthy, beautiful, yet somehow powerless — must be rescued by men. I knew, also, to teach them to recognize the whiteness of those worlds, and how heteronormative they were, with almost all straight and cisgendered characters.

But I was not prepared for one consistent element of children’s media — something on full display in the endless stream of kids’ movies, from the Descendants franchise to the soon-to-be-released summer attractions Incredibles 2, Show Dogs, and Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation.
Much of Descendants, for example, centers on the budding love between Maleficent’s daughter Mal and Sleeping Beauty’s son Ben — he even asks, “Do you love me?” on the first date. (Granted, he’d been chowing on some love potion-laden chocolate chip cookies, but make no mistake, his love is real.)

To paraphrase my daughters when they see starry-eyed young boys and girls on the small or big screen about to kiss: Ewww.

Boy-meets-girl is as old a narrative device as, say, Adam and Eve. Romance novels are a billion-dollar industry. Romance-fueled narratives are everywhere, but I have found myself increasingly agitated and confounded by their presence and prevalence in kids’ media.