Having written about girls' adolescence, journalist Peggy Orenstein is quite the expert in parenting of young girls.
Her attempt in raising her daughter free of the girlie-girl stereotype, however, was nuked when - in what seems like an overnight transition - her 3-year-old daughter became enamored with being a princess.
And so began Peggy's journey in understanding the "princess phase" - and the corporate drive to foster and cash in that phenomenon.
Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center in New York, at which the merchandise for girls seems to come in only one color: pink jewelry boxes, pink vanity mirrors, pink telephones, pink hair dryers, pink fur stoles. “Is all this pink really necessary?” Orenstein finally asks a sales rep.
“Only if you want to make money,” he replies.
The toy fair is one of many field trips undertaken by Orenstein in her effort to stem the frothy pink tide of princess products threatening to engulf her young daughter. The author of “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,” among other books, Orenstein is flummoxed by the intensity of the marketing blitz aimed at girls barely old enough to read the label on their Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. “I had read stacks of books devoted to girls’ adolescence,” she writes, “but where was I to turn to understand the new culture of little girls, from toddler to ‘tween,’ to help decipher the potential impact — if any — of the images and ideas they were absorbing about who they should be, what they should buy, what made them girls?”
Link | Peggy's Book: Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (Photo: Clipart.com/unrelated)
Disagree? Of course you do. Put this note aside and re-read it in 20 years. Then write another book about how to reclaim your child.
Yes, that'll help. Take her to a toy fair to expose her to tonnes of things she never even knew existed but now suddenly will think she can't live without. Rather than stemming the princess complex, it'll probably just make it even stronger.
Let girls be girls, or boys. Claiming, that girls like princess-clothes because they absord ideas about who they should be from Disney, is like claiming that gay sex causes homosexuality.
It has been quite the media cause celebre.
http://cherylbycheryl.blogspot.com/2010/10/cheryl-kilodavis-loves-her-son.html
You can't force these things.
It amazes me in this day and age we are still all weirded out when a child doesn't fit into our projected gender archetype. Can't we just get over it? Lord knows my life would have been a lot simpler if my mother would have been open to the fact that my tomboyish leanings fit into an archetype that tends to lend itself to potential same sex attractions.
In short if your kids aren't the gender stereotype YOU like, then get over it and work with what you have. Wouldn't most parents rather have a tomboy or a princess or a dress wearing son or an athletic boy than one that wasn't born healthy and happy with their princess, doll loving, dress wearing, football playing selves.
The feminists don't want their daughters to be girly, and the traditionalist men don't want their sons to be girly. What gives?
“Is all this pink really necessary?” Hell, yeah!