In a society full of gender discrimination, there are a variety of mediums that women are discriminated against. Some of the typical forms of discrimination stem from politics, the workforce, and education. However, the form least expected would be in animated movies made for children.

In Sarah Boxer’s article, she really opened my mind to concepts that I have never considered. I do agree with the majority of the claims in her article against absent motherhood; however, I feel like some of them are a little farfetched.

For example, when discussing the film Despicable Me, Boxer says, "He wants to shrink the moon and steal it. (Hey, wait, isn’t the moon a symbol of female fertility?)” I highly doubt that the creators of Despicable Mewould think so far into writing about female fertility into their script because the target audience is children, and they would not necessarily comprehend the underlying message (if there was one).

What really struck me at the beginning of the article, was when she listed off all of my favorite childhood movies and said how the mother was “…either gone or useless”

For example, she lists how famous animated films like Nemo and Lilo and Stitch fall into this category. Nemo’s mother as eaten by a barracuda and Lilo’s mother was killed in a car accident.

Then, I really started to think about how true and saddening that was.

After doing further research into this topic, I read a response article to “Why Are All the Cartoon Mothers Dead?” that “The cartoon mothers are dead because our culture has killed its own mother. Kill a child’s Mother and you create pain and conflict in that child’s heart. Kill the Mother in a story and you have a plot that resonates strongly with our culture”.

I feel like this perfectly describes why a cartoon mothers absence is significant.

When pondering the question “Why does it matter if cartoon mothers are absent?” a thousand thoughts rushed through my head, but the main one being that a motherly figure is something that nobody can replace.

Admittedly, in our society’s past and present, we have found ways to discriminate against age, race, sexual orientation, gender, and the list goes on and on. It is truly depressing that filmmakers have created a world without mothers in their productions.

However, if people start to become more educated about how others are discriminated in the subtlest ways, we can challenge the false perception of reality and can change the world for a better future.