Confession Time

27 Cartoon Characters who gave us the Hots as Kids

This article in Huffington Post made me laugh. I remember only too well destroying my bumper Disney book so I could have a badly cut-out picture of Peter Pan stuck on my wall. My first pin-up!

But there’s a serious side too – apparently the type of cartoon character you fell in love with as a child can set up a precedent for the type of person you’re attracted to later in life. So if it was Gaston, you’re in trouble!

FROM THE HUFFPOST ARTICLE

“Do you remember, as a kid, watching your favorite cartoon and realizing that you were focusing a little too much on one of the characters? Lots of the characters were great, but there was one in particular who was so smart, so cool, so good at vanquishing bad guys. 

You probably didn’t tell anyone at the time, but you had a crush. And it was on a fictional and perhaps non-human cartoon character.

The tiny torches of love you carried might now seem like an embarrassing, aberrant blip on your path to adulthood. But after surveying The Huffington Post offices, we can safely say you’re not alone. Lots and lots of us had cartoon crushes.

What’s more, having those nascent infatuations is totally normal. “It happens all the time. Kids have crushes on comic book characters, and why shouldn’t they?” said Amy Lang, a parenting and sexuality expert and the founder of Birds+Bees+Kids, a Seattle organization that helps parents talk to children about sex. Lang said that kids’ crushes on cartoon characters are a natural extension of imagination-based play that permeates so much of young development.

“Kids’ imaginations can take them to places that adults can’t go,” Lang said. “Maybe we [adults] feel weird about the fact that we have a crush on Spider-Man, but kids don’t have those filters.”

Watching fictional relationships on screen can help young people form social ideas as they grow and test out romantic ideas in a safe way, too. “My first crush was on Mighty Mouse, and I remember fantasizing being that little mouse tied up on the railroad tracks and that he would swoop down and save me,” said Sharon Lamb, professor of counseling psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

But Lamb said that can be part of the problem, too. If our cartoons enforce stereotypical gender roles early on, they’re hard to get rid of later in life.

“It wasn’t very good for me to have these fantasies of being a helpless victim all the time, even if it’s a mouse, right?” Lamb said. “I think these early crushes do sort of orient you to culture … I think they teach you norms, cultural norms of attractiveness and sexuality.” “