An all-male a cappella group at a prestigious university will no longer sing one well-known Disney song because some audience members — and one sophomore who wrote an article about it for the student newspaper — found it to be “uncomfortable.”
Of course, this is all happening at an Ivy League college: Princeton University.
One of the school’s all-male a cappella groups, the Princeton Tigertones, will no longer perform its popular rendition of “Kiss the Girl” from The Little Mermaid after the complaints. 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.
The entire scene is harmless and done in good fun, which of course does not sit well with the modern outrage crowd.
On November 26, sophomore Noa Wollstein wrote an opinion article for the Daily Princetonian asking the Tigertones to stop singing the song because it “is more misogynistic and dismissive of consent than cute.”
“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. – READ MORE