Let me stipulate up front: this is a stupid controversy, but not that stupid. I don’t care about Minnie Mouse and never did, I don’t care what she, or it, wears, and I am certain that most of the conservatives now complaining over Minnie Mouse’s “new look”—which isn’t permanent, comes to us from France’s Disneyland, and would probably go unnoticed absent the Streisand Effect triggered by the complaints—care about Minnie either.
However, one of the ways that the extreme Left got such a dangerous foothold in this nation is through ingenious incrementalism…little, teeny-tiny moves to radicalize the culture and indoctrinate rising generations that sane people just shrugged off as not worth making a big deal about until it was too late. Or almost—we shall see.
Minnie will debut the blue tuxedo in Disney’s Paris entertainment resort in March for Women’s History Month. In the unisex pants suit Minnie looks like Mickey wearing make-up, not that there’s anything wrong with that. This is open pandering to the trans/fluid gender mob, or if it isn’t, then the timing is a remarkable coincidence. Disney has shown itself to be willing to go to any lengths to appease the Woke, including consulting with little people advocates to avoid “stereotypes” in “Snow White.”
Sometimes a pants suit is just a pants suit, but if this outfit isn’t political, why did designer Stella McCartney (Disney, like “Jurassic Park,” spares no expense) announce the get-up by saying, “This new take on her signature polka dots makes Minnie Mouse a symbol of progress for a new generation” ? What’s “progress” about a pants suit? Laura Petrie wore pants on “The Dick Van Dyke Show” 60 years ago.
You have to hand it to the values- and institution-topplers: they are clever. You can’t even point this stuff out without sounding like a lunatic. Tucker Carlson (whom I have now mentioned in two straight posts, and am awash in shame) proved that when he sounded the culture alarm on the green M&M ditching “her” high heels for androgynous sneakers. Whining that M&M’s was on a mission to make the one female candy bit “less sexy” and “deeply unappealing” to the point that “you wouldn’t want to have a drink with any one of them,” the Fox News pundit said, “That’s the goal. When you’re totally turned off, we’ve achieved equity.”
You were turned on by the sexy M&M, Tucker? Uhhhh…
But I know what you mean.
Ethics Alarms 
Death by a thousand cuts. Torturing someone with one drip of water at a time. Slowly cracking a bridge bit by bit. All makes the same point that little changes eventually add up to big changes over time. You can always accuse someone of making a bill deal about nothing because each individual step is almost always a small one.
It reminds me of what communism quote about the long march through the institutions.
So why do we who know better continue to participate in proglibocrat Orwellian doublespeak by using their word progressive, when regressive is considerably more accurate?
I mentioned this not long ago on this forum but no takers.
Every act of resistance serves to educate anyone exposed to that act and shows others they are not alone. Why surrender the small stuff especially when it is so easy not to?
Defiance and resistance are the watchwords. Take back the language!
It’s a valid point. “Progressive” was substituted for “liberal” when the patter started being regarded as a negative label. But progressives increasingly aren’t liberal, and regressive implies going back to something, when that something never existed, and for damn good reasons.
We need a better term.
I don’t think so Jack. You are looking at this as a scholar but that isn’t the arena or audience.
It is the connotation that counts here and does not have to be perfectly accurate. Part of the efficacy of the word reversal is how much alike the words sound/appear but with opposite meaning. Everyone understands what is being done. Not so with a completely different unattached new word.
Coopting the radical Left’s Orwellian tactics against them drives them batty and has the added benefit of being most satisfying.
Perhaps people will come up with another word that defeats my argument.
I think what you are both referring to is aggressive “Digressives”. Their answer to ANY problem is to simply change the problem. Thus, addressing crime involves a myriad of hypothetical “systemic” causes, while avoiding personal responsibility, morality, administrative indifference, (etc). Academic failure is the result of inherent “racism” in the subject matter, math, spelling, et al., while absolving the individual of fault. This theme plays itself out in everything that they do, and in everything they believe.
There is a reason for the phrase “out of LEFT field”.
Progsheviks?
Re: “we need a better term” I agree. My daughter, the beginning of “Gen Z”. Those kids… they know how to slap labels on things and they will absolutely define them to the most detailed nuance, given time. She calls them the ‘damaging woke’. I call them what Jonathon Haidt calls them. “The illiberal left.” I haven’t read his books, but I did see one of his lectures on YouTube, and several interviews, and a ted talk and a discussion panel… (this is also why kids don’t see the need for books, fyi, but that’s another discussion)
That outfit looks like pajamas. Ugly pajamas. In the age of Covid when white-collar employees are mostly working from home and often do so in their pajamas, dressing a cartoon in pajamas might make a certain amount of sense. A pant suit and pajamas are not actually equivalent, however, and calling that outfit a pant suit is just a lie.
I thought so as well. Marketing teams and artists go through a lot of debate and work before they make a change like this. I suspect that cartoons will be more and more androgynous as time goes on. There is going to be less focus on what makes men and women different.
Pantsuit? I thought that was pajamas…
Unfortunately, the first thing that came into my mind seeing Minnie’s new outfit was Hillary Clinton in a pantsuit. They’re turning Minnie into a mini HRC. And of course, HRC is about Minnie’s size. She’s only 5’3″. How do the media make midgets such as HRC and Kamala Harris appear to be of normal height?
I agree with Jack, that IS Mickey with make-up and false eyelashes. In 1960 my parents took me to Anaheim, and I saw the real Mickey Mouse, (Spoiler Alert: His head comes off, and he smokes Lucky Strikes) Seeing him in this picture, he is almost unrecognizable. But, after 62 years, I look a little different too. We obviously took very divergent paths.
Hasn’t Minnie Mouse always been Mickey in a dress? The character design was never unique, it was a lazy cut-and-paste from the beginning.
I’m with those who say it looks like pajamas. I shudder to think what they paid Stella McCartney for this half-ass, tossed-off effort. How many hours of Asian sweatshop labor could Disney have bought with that money?
Yes, that was always my view of Minnie, with Daisy Duck being in the same lazy category. Thank god they didn’t ever come up with a female Goofy….
Goofy was Walt Disney’s *intentional* character to stereotype Southerners.
There were no female Southerners back then? In any event, he was easily the funniest of the Disney characters. Do Southerners really say “Gorsh!” and “Yaaa hoo hoo hoo hooey!” when they fall great distances?
Goofy’s just sort of a standard issue village idiot, a rustic. Sort of a proto–Gomer Pyle. Comic relief. Verging at times into idiot savant territory. A ready foil to elicit a belly laugh when one’s needed. Standard character.
The modern Goofy is a development on what he was intended to be: a stupid hick that causes more trouble than he’s worth. And in the end, he ends up being pretty much the only heartfelt character who can sit down next to another suffering character and suffer with them – a character who knows the limitations imposed on him by the animators and isn’t angry about it.
Mrs. Goof was invented to be Goofy’s counterpart. Though she rarely appears. Many times, Clara Belle the cow became Goofy’s sort of female counterpart though with much less “romantic” association in the way Daisy and Minnie are with Donald and Mickey. Clarabelle Cow is intentionally associated with “Horace Horsecollar”.
But, there are a handful of characters specifically designed to stereotype hicks. And I’ve recently learned that Goofy was designed not just to spoof the animator’s ideas of hicks but *also* the animator’s ideas of black people:
One Link from the Google Search:
TV Tropes
Female Goofy…
https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Mrs._Goof