Cinderella and Snow White: The Stereotype of Beauty and Ugliness

I spent a lot of time watching Disney cartoons on the Cartoon Network during the Mid-autumn long weekend holiday. After watching a series of Cinderella, Belle, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, I suddenly realized that there was a pattern in most of the so-called classic fairy tales. Cinderella has a gentle heart and she is beautiful. Her sisters are both evil and ugly. Snow white is a kind person and she is the most beautiful person in the world. Her stepmother is ugly and also an evil witch. In the world of classic fairytale, it seems that beauty always belongs to nice persons, and the not-so-beautiful person is always evil. I really don't know who started this terrible trend of stereotyping, and puzzled over why such kind of nonsense in children's comics, cartoons and merchandise for so many years without anyone realized that there is a series problem in this. We were told that we shouldn't judge a person by his/her appearance in textbooks, but that's what our kids has been told repeatedly in the television. What a paradoxical world we're living. Maybe Shrek and Fiona has done something to reverse the trend. But it's simply not enough. More work has to be done to fight the century-long stereotyping surrounding our children.