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Having Courage and Being Kind: Rethinking Cinderella and Bravery as a Whole

Written in 2017 for The Scroll

Disney princesses are pretty much inescapable; they’re everywhere. No matter where in the world you live, you’ve most likely seen movies like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, leaving you with a remembrance of the iconic images featured in the movies. An example of this is the rose from Beauty and the Beast. Most young girls wanted to be a princess like Belle at least once in their lives. Even with these stories being deeply ingrained into our culture, there’s been a fierce backlash of the Disney princess movies. With feminism pushing for better representation of women in the media, a lot of people take issue with the classic stories, saying that the princesses aren’t the best influences on young girls because they rely on the men around them instead of themselves.

This has led to movies like Brave, Moana, and Frozen, which don’t have love interests, and they make the leading ladies solve problems on their own. While I think it’s great that the Disney movies are trying new things with their female leads, some of the criticism may be unwarranted.  

People focus on Cinderella as the epitome of a weak damsel in distress character. Leah Holstien, owner of a blog called themagicalworldof.com wrote an article explaining why she thought Disney’s Cinderella was problematic. The writer claims that the movie teaches girls to be ‘martyrs’ and care for everyone before themselves.

“Cinderella never once complains or fights back… She never complained, never showed any sort of weakness, or any form of meltdown,” the writer states.

It seems as though the writer hasn’t seen Cinderella since she was a child  because she has gotten so many facts about the plot wrong.

Cinderella does fight back. More than once.

If you don’t remember, when Lady Tremaine locks Cinderella inside her room in order to stop her from trying on the glass slipper, Cinderella fights back. She doesn’t fight Lady Tremaine, but she bangs on the door and tries to break out the bedroom. Not to mention the fact that Cinderella even attended the ball in the first place is already an act of rebellion. If her stepmother and stepsisters saw her at the ball after they already tried to stop her once, she would’ve been in big trouble. But, she decided to go anyways. She could’ve told the fairy godmother she didn’t want to go because it was too risky, but she didn’t. She even asserted herself  to her stepmother by telling her she wanted to go to the ball.

The writer also claims Cinderella never has any human meltdowns, even though she breaks down in tears after her stepsisters tear apart her dress.

You have to keep in mind what kind of environment Cinderella lives in. Holstein acknowledges that Cinderella’s family is abusive. Even the movie does. In the very first scene, the narrator tells us this: “Cinderella was abused, humiliated, and finally turned into a servant in her own house…”

The idea that Cinderella isn’t strong enough because she doesn’t fight back against her abusive family the right way is just infuriatingly small minded. Cinderella’s been made into a servant in her own home, she faces mental abuse every single day, and yet people think of her as weak because she can’t stand up to her abusers. Those people never take time to consider how hard it can be to confront someone in a position of authority, especially when that authority figure ridicules them every day. To imply that it’s Cinderella’s job to stop the abuse would be victim blaming, which is maddeningly problematic.

Cinderella was given a fairytale ending because even though she had such a difficult life she remained positive and brave. She was brave enough to tell her family she wanted to go to the ball,  brave enough to try to break out of the attic, and brave enough to stand up for herself by trying on the glass slipper. Wielding a sword and fighting a dragon isn’t the only way to be brave. You don’t have to fight a bear like Merida or join the army like Mulan to be heroic.

Cinderella is heroic because even when she’s living in a pressure cooker environment, she’s optimistic and kind. The narrator tells us this:“For with each dawn, she found new hope that someday her dreams of happiness would come true.” Cinderella looks out for the animals that live around her, defending the mice from Lady Tremain’s cat, saving Gus from a mousetrap, and making clothes for the animals even though she doesn’t have to. This isn’t the movie telling girls to care for everyone else before themselves, this is the movie telling children that they can survive a stressful situation if they stay calm, stay positive, and face the problem like Cinderella. She doesn’t allow her tormentors to change her outlook on life, and actively fights back against them.

More recent princesses like Tiana, Moana, and Elsa have hardworking and outspoken personalities, and that’s great. I think Disney should have more variety with their characters. But I don’t think that automatically negates the heroism of other princesses. To me, Cinderella is so much more than just a damsel in distress. Cinderella teaches us––in the words of the 2015 adaptation––to have courage and be kind.

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What Would it take for iPhones to go Out of Style?

Hareem Qureshi

Written in 2017

In case you haven’t heard, Apple released a new phone. The iPhone X has been making waves in the technology world and is on Apple’s website with a price of $1,150. Regardless of the lofty price everyone and their mother is planning on buying it. According to statista.com, Apple has sold more than one billion iPhones worldwide from 2007 to 2017. I, however, never really understood the hype surrounding iPhones. I used to have an iPhone and thought it was fine, but never saw what made it so much better than other brands. Because of this, I decided I would simply conduct a survey. I interviewed various classmates and staff members, as well as family members to discover why they thought Apple was so popular.

Most of them said that it was the quality of the technology that made it so well liked.

“I think it’s very user friendly, everything is kind of natural, it’s easy to use… I think it makes life easier,” one interviewee said.

“I like the synchronization of all of their products. The fact that you’re able to do the same thing on all of their devices, pretty much,” responded another.

Others simply thought people got iPhones because everyone else did.

“People will senselessly buy it because of the brand recognition, and they don’t want to be alienated by their friends,” stated someone I talked to outside of school.  

I even remember a relative saying many guys only buy iPhones to impress girls when I brought the topic up in conversation.

There have been allegations in the past of Apple factories abusing their employees––something that not a lot of interviewees knew about when I asked them. BBC launched a secret investigation into Apple factories in China. Reporters went undercover as employees while secretly filming, and reportedly found working condition standards not being met. This is what the BBC reporters had to say about the experience.

One undercover reporter, working in a factory making parts for Apple computers, had to work eighteen days in a row despite repeated requests for a day off.

Another reporter, whose longest shift was sixteen hours, said: “Every time I got back to the dormitories, I wouldn’t want to move.”

“Even if I was hungry I wouldn’t want to get up to eat. I just wanted to lie down and rest. I was unable to sleep at night because of the stress.”

During my interviews, I decided to ask if they thought people would continue to support Apple if the way they treated their employees became commonly known. The answers tended to lean towards the cynical side, saying that people would most likely continue to support Apple, even with the knowledge of how they treat their employees.

“Honestly I think people would. I think people are selfish enough to like their luxuries in life to where the rest of the world becomes second to them,” answered one of the people I talked to.

Another stated: “I think we care more about our personal comforts then we do about other people.”

It’s easy to see where they are coming from, and they’re not wrong on how we treat people who are different from us. This is where I’d like to dive into a concept known as “groupthink.”

Psysr.org states that the term “groupthink” was invented by social psychologist Irving Janis in 1972. According to the website, groupthink is when “ a group makes faulty decisions because group pressures lead to a deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment” (p.9). Groups affected by groupthink ignore alternatives and tend to take irrational actions that dehumanize other groups. A group is especially vulnerable to groupthink when its members are similar in background, when the group is insulated from outside opinions, and when there are no clear rules for decision making. In other words, it’s when you make decisions based on what the people around you would approve of or disapprove of, or put your group of people before other groups.  

Therefore, according to this concept, a lot of people would continue to support Apple even with the knowledge of the misconduct going on in their factories. Since they don’t know anyone who works in Apple factories, they would rather impress their friends than worry about people they’ll likely never meet.

Even so, I don’t entirely agree. I think that people in large would stop supporting Apple, it would just take some effort. The first thing that would need to happen is for the information to spread the right way. The treatment of their employees would have to be a complete scandal, rather than a story that slowly became commonly known. Let’s pretend the videos recorded by the investigators went viral. It’s all over the news, as well as the Internet. This way everyone is confronted with the information at once, and everyone is talking about it.

Once the story is out, people will want to boycott Apple. Maybe not at first, but some people would. The complicated part is figuring whether or not this hypothetical boycott would work. I think it would. A smaller scale boycott to compare this would be the boycott around the movie Exodus: Gods and Kings. The movie was set in Ancient Egypt, but had a predominantly white cast. A lot of people took issue with the whitewashing, and the hashtag #BoycottExodus was started. With all the outrage combined with people avoiding the film in droves, The movie tanked commercially and critically.

If a boycott on Apple grew large enough––and even celebrities and other public figures joined in––eventually Apple would go out of style, which is where groupthink comes back into the picture. How would you justify supporting Apple to your friends if they all suddenly disapproved of it? You’d end up switching to a new brand so that you don’t have to worry about them disliking you.

My thoughts are that people would stop supporting Apple products if it went out of style. For that to happen, someone with influence would have to stand against it first until enough people started following them.

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Why is Anxiety so Common in Teenagers?

Hareem Qureshi

Written for The Scroll in 2017

Anxiety is an emotion we’ve all felt in our lives. Whether speaking in public, taking a test, or going through another trial, we’ve all felt the distinctly tight grasp of nerves taking hold of us as a myriad of doubts and what-ifs set in. It’s a normal feeling we all learn to deal with. When anxiety becomes a problem, however, is when it becomes frequent, consuming, and interferes with daily life. Symptoms of anxiety can include rapid breathing, sweating, a fast heart rate, tiredness, and in some cases, panic attacks. This condition and it’s symptoms can become very taxing on a person as it can limit one’s ability to enjoy everyday life. Anxiety has definitely become more frequently discussed in the past few years, with everyone from celebrities to elementary school students opening up about their struggles with the illness. While we’ve all been anxious at one point or another, anxiety problems are seemingly becoming more common. 

      Psychiatrist Rob Haskell states that according to some estimates, up to 20% of children and adolescents will experience anxiety, panic, or phobias. With 18% of the adult population experiencing this condition, anxiety has become the most common mental illness in America, surpassing depression. Sciencealert.com cites a study that found 40% of Americans felt more anxious in 2018 than they did the year before. With this, it is apparent that anxiety is on the rise. 

    But what could be causing anxiety in the younger generation to become so common? The answer that first comes to mind would be school, and many psychologists point to that as well. The rise of standardized testing and college expenses have resulted in increased stress for teens that the previous generations didn’t have to contend with. According to a study by the American Psychological Association in 2014, teenagers that year were more stressed out than adults. 30% of teens reported being sad or depressed due to stress, 31% felt overwhelmed, 36% stated the stress makes them tired and 23% said that stress caused them to skip meals. On average the teenage participants rated their stress level as 5.8 out of 10, as opposed to a 5.1 average for the adult participants. According to an article by Forbes, college fees are rising eight times faster than wages. The difficulty of succeeding with school mixes with the skyrocketing college fees about as well as you’d expect, only adding more pressure to a teenager’s shoulders. Seeing as college education is often viewed as the element that will make or break an adult life, it’s a lot of pressure for a seventeen-year-old to go through. 

     The thing about school-related stress, however, is that it still isn’t new. Our parents had stress from school. So did their parents. What does this generation have that the previous ones didn’t? Well, for starters, cell phones. More specifically, social media. The Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology states that limiting social media usage actually decreased depression and loneliness. 

“What we found overall is that if you use less social media, you are actually less depressed and less lonely, meaning that the decreased social media use is what causes that qualitative shift in your well-being,” a co-author of the study said.  Another study by Sage Journals found that 48% of teenagers who spent five hours a day on an electronic device had at least one suicide risk factor (or one characteristic associated with suicide), compared to the 33% of teenagers who spent two hours a day on an electronic device. 

    Considering the rise of terms like “FOMO” or the “fear of missing out” from the things we see our friends do online, or cyberbullying and internet hate, it would be easy to simply blame it on the internet and move on. But is it that simple? Correlation and causation are not the same thing, and according to an article on gse.harvard.edu, “It may be that depression and anxiety lead to more social media use… rather than the other way around.” We’re selling teenagers short by deciding they’re unable to handle social media and it’s negatives, especially when it’s common knowledge by now that social media is a collection of the best moments in one’s life, and not reality. Emily Weinstein, a researcher focused on teens and their social media usage, stated that, “It’s probably not just social media that’s making [our] teens anxious-- it’s the normal social stressors that these platforms facilitate, albeit on a different scale.”

    “So many of the behaviors we’re talking about have pre-digital corollaries,” Weinstien continued to say. “They’re the same sort of developmental challenges that adolescents have grappled with for decades, though now they’re taking place in different spaces that can certainly amplify them and shift their quality, quantity, and scale.“But the idea of wanting to fit in, the critical importance of peer relationships, and the process of figuring out which version of yourself you want to be and how you want to express that identity to others — those features of adolescence are not new.”

Despite that, many psychologists still point to social media as a factor in the growing trend of anxiety, specifically touching on the bombardment of information that we experience daily through social media, something John Piacentini of the Child Anxiety Resilience and Support Center at UCLA calls a “non-stop dose.” Social Media is often flooded with world news, and any frequent internet user can recall the burnout of constantly having to hear about shootings, climate change, politics, war, genocide, and every other morbid and grim current event imagineable. The internet takes every noteworthy hot-button event and magnifies it. Before the era of social media, information was more filtered, meaning most youth learned of current events through family or school. The newfound accessibility of information has it’s ups, but also it’s downs, most notably that you are constantly confronted with what seems like threats of impending doom, which can very easily add to the stress one goes through day in and day out. 

 So, what’s the outlook? The Anxiety and Depression Association of America states that anxiety is “highly treatable.” There is a diverse range of forms of treatment for anxiety that can be as simple as getting proper sleep, maintaining a healthy diet, and getting physical exercise. One could look into therapy and support groups, as well as journaling to help process thoughts or plan out work and tasks that are stressful. It never hurts to reach out to a trusted adult in your life if you are feeling overwhelmed and anxiety is preventing you from completing work or daily tasks in life. 

The important thing to remember is that it’s never too late to ask for help, or make a change, or start taking care of yourself. 

Free, confidential, 24 hour hotlines:

Anxiety Crisis Text Line: Text CONNECT to 741741

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)

    Mhanational.org - provides screening tests for anxiety

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Meet Brevard, A Small Southern Town Straight Out of a Fairytale. 

By Hareem Qureshi 

May 9th, 2024 

Named one of the best small towns in North Carolina by Southern Living, Brevard is a favored vacation destination within the state. While most of us imagine beachy resorts or ancient European cities when our paid time off draws near, Brevard, known to many as the “Land of Waterfalls,” can provide a swoon worthy escape to those interested in nature, the arts, and fine dining. 

Brevard is most famous for its wilderness, which looks and feels as if it jumped out of a Beatrix Potter book. The town is home to the expansive Pisgah National Forest. According to travel guide RomanticAsheville, the town boasts 300 miles of track for cycling, and plays host to intense bike races, which Pisgah Productions calls “...a mix of brutal and beautiful…” 

Those in search of a more relaxing way to enjoy the views can direct their attention toward the Looking Glass Falls. The US Forest Service states the waterfalls are sixty feet tall. If the beauty of the water is especially tempting to you, take a dive in Sliding Rock, the all-natural water slide! Insiders at RomanticAsheville state the frosty, often “...50-60 degrees…” water cascades down a “...60-foot flat, sloping boulder,...” into an “...eight-foot-deep pool,” much like the characters in The Hobbit films. It’s certainly a memorable way to cool off in the summer, and an experience that’s bound to trump any stories friends might have about their most recent six flags escapade.

According to ExploreBrevard, you can even go treasure hunting! The mountains of the region produce “sapphires, garnets, rubies, and emeralds.” You can look for gems with your family at the Crystal Mountain Gem Mine. 

While exploring the falls and forests, you may come across some of Brevard’s majestic wildlife. According to NC Wildlife, blackbears, wolves, coyotes, elk, all call the region home, along with graceful birds like swans, herons, owls, and hawks. 

After exploring the picturesque scenery, you can unwind at one of Brevard’s many stores and restaurants. The Square Root is an acclaimed restaurant, having been awarded the title of number one restaurant in Brevard fourteen times in a row by local magazine, Mountain Xpress. Matthew DeRobertis states the establishment “offers [an] eclectic atmosphere… [and] whimsy…” in the Asheville Citizen Times. Located in a restored historical building as described by their website, The Square Root’s Menu features “brown sugar mustard marinated salmon cooked on a cedar plank with fragrant jasmine rice, and a lima bean and corn succotash.” and other equally luxurious dishes like Duck A L’orange and Rabbit Gumbo. Afterwards, indulge in a sweet treat at Downtown Chocolates, which ExploreBrevard describes as featuring “...hand crafted chocolates,” as well as “fresh baked goods, ice cream… [and] fruit smoothies."

You can also visit Starfangled Press and pick up “beautifully curated” vintage inspired notebooks, screen prints, stickers, and other paper or woodcut goods, according to their website. 

There’s also the quirky White Squirrel Shoppe, created in homage to Brevard’s famous snow-colored squirrels. White Squirrel Shoppe states there’s over a thousand white squirrels roaming Brevard. They sell plushies, keychains, scented candles, picture books, clothes, and many other offbeat souvenirs. 

With pristine waterfalls, natural slides and pools, treasure hunting prospects, one-of-a-kind artists and dinners fit for a king, it’s hard to believe such a town exists in North Carolina, rather than the confines of a Miyazaki film. If you’re looking for your next hiking adventure, your next foodie discovery, or just want to make magical, unique memories with your loved ones, Brevard might be the place you're looking for.