Feminists Now Claim this Disney Song Celebrates Rape (Yes, Really)

At Princeton University, don’t expect their all male a capella group to perform “Kiss the Girl,” from the Little Mermaid.  The Princeton Tigertones have vowed to no longer perform their popular rendition of the song after a complaint that their live performance promotes…  wait for it…  rape culture.  The Daily Wire has the details of this nefarious show:

During their performance, the group invites a woman from the audience to join them as they sing and “playfully dance with her for a bit,” according to Inside Higher Ed. As the song reaches a close, the group invites a male audience member, pretend to groom him, and then put the two together, asking that they kiss, as the song suggests. The random couple complies, “sometimes on with a peck on the cheek, sometimes briefly on the lips,” Inside Higher Ed reported.

How awful!  College students having innocent fun!  Call the authorities.

Well, that’s exactly what one student did, essentially… since the “authorities” now on college campus are those with the biggest grievances. Sophomore Noa Wollstein wrote an opinion article for the Princeton paper that declared this performance “is more misogynistic and dismissive of consent than cute.”

Oh really?  Explain this to me more, oh wise sophomore.

“Its lyrics raise some serious issues. The premise of the song, originally sung in the Disney film The Little Mermaid, is that the male Prince Eric, on a date with the beautiful female Ariel, should kiss her without asking for a single word to affirm her consent. Despite the fact that an evil sea-witch cursed Ariel’s voice away, making verbal consent impossible, the song is clearly problematic from the get-go,” Wollstein wrote.

She claims that if you take away the mermaids and the magic, the “message comes across as even more jarring.” She cites the lyrics “It’s possible she wants you too/There’s one way to ask her/It don’t take a word, not a single word/Go on and kiss the girl, kiss the girl” and ““she won’t say a word/Until you kiss that girl,” as problematic. These lyrics, she insists, “unambiguously encourage men to make physical advances on women without obtaining their clear consent.”

Well, if you take away mermaids and magic, everything becomes troubling, no?  The Daily Wire rightly points out that verbal consent is not the same as consent.  Anyone who has ever has kissed someone — or had sex with someone — in real life knows this.

Kiss the girl, or not… but don’t pretend like this complaint is anything other than petulance camouflaged as concern for women.  And really, it hurts everyone.

Image Credit: PNGIMG

Hat Tip: The Daily Wire