As with any cult, the work of escaping American evangelicalism often extends into a lifelong process of acquiring something like a normal frame of cultural reference. As an adult in 2025, I'm fascinated by the canon of the late 20th century less out of a sense of nostalgia and more because brushing up on it gives me context for both the generational experiences my peers wrongly assume I share and the generational experiences my parents chose to leave unsaid because they thought they'd left them behind by getting saved. Some of the church moms I knew would make you cover up a t-shirt with Disney's Ariel on it because of her bare shoulders and midriff - an anti-sex kneejerk to be sure, yet when I saw The Little Mermaid for the first time in middle age I too found it repulsively skeezy; what they would call the consequences of unchecked promiscuity I would call the male gaze emboldened by the ways the sexual revolution transformed rather than relieved gender inequality. Other animated blockbusters of that period did achieve a family-friendly eroticism that this transgender communist thinks ought to be acceptable in general-audiences entertainment - Beauty and the Beast's Harlequin paperback undertones and The Prince of Egypt's sword-and-sandals sex appeal come to mind - but the textually teenage female leads in Mermaid and Aladdin (to say nothing of both films' gaggles of tittering cheesecake extras) are presented with a wink and a leer that feel like bones thrown to adult chaperones alongside the shock jock celebrity casting and Delilah-bait adult contemporary numbers, to the point of uncomfortably calling to mind the contemporaneous softcore boom enabed by cable TV and home video.