review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

My gender-myth-busting holiday reading this year was the entertaining Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Line of the New Girlie-Girl Culture (2011) by US author Peggy Orenstein. Orenstein not only questions the narrow, gendered nature of products aimed at young girls, but also the commodification of their nascent sexuality.

Perfect Christmas reading.

With a rapidly growing and increasingly independent daughter to guide, Orenstein navigates her way through literally thousands of gendered products that peddle narrow and confining definitions of girlhood. They seem to offer the pursuit of physical perfection (for later pursuit of a perfect prince) as virtually the only route to female empowerment. Mass commercialisation has spread that message faster and younger than ever before (or so I’m told in the book’s dust-jacket). Knowing all this - or, at least, fearing it - what do you do when you’re confronted with the reality of young daughters who want princess dresses, glittery make-up, Bratz dolls and Hannah Montana CDs?  

This book is Peggy Orenstein’s attempt to answer that question.

Orenstein’s mode of address is intriguing in its mix of the confessional and investigative. She opens by confiding to the reader ‘why she wanted a boy’. As a noted public commentator on raising girls in a number of earlier works, she was suddenly stricken at the thought of having to put her money where her mouth was. Or, as she puts it, ‘What if, after all, I was not up to the challenge myself? What if I couldn’t raise the ideal daughter? With a boy, I figured, I would be off the hook (pp 1-2).’ In an earlier post, I blogged  about how I had had similar, if temporary, misgivings.

The more personal parts of this book are tales of her ‘trial-and-error’ approach and rueful admissions of what appears to be failure (e.g. finding out that her three-year- old daughter was fully conversant with the story of Snow White - when Orenstein herself had never told her the story - and was able to use it to manipulate other kids to find her ‘the right princes’ among the little boys present pp 11-12). As the review in the New York Times noted, she argues with herself, questions her assumptions, attempts a answer and then has second thoughts. It’s as if you’re right there in the consciousness of a another parent, not a detached ‘expert’ of the kind I’ve discussed in a previous post.

Orenstein traverses a number of topics in this book: 

• the pinkification of a little girl’s world as represented in an annual industry toy fair displaying thousands of pink products (‘why has girlhood become so monochromatic?’ p 35); 
• the craze for princess-everything (considered by a number of parents to be a ‘safe’ outlet that ‘fends off premature sexualisation’ p 24); 
• the development of Disney Princesses from 2000 onwards (ever noticed how they never look at each other when they’re pictured together? Disney Princesses are emphatically not about friendship and female solidarity p 23); 
• fairy tales (including the ways in which their narrative tropes recur - particularly, as the title makes clear, that of Cinderella, who is swept off her feet by a handsome prince. Twilight, anyone?)
• child beauty pageants - admittedly well-trodden ground but Orenstein takes a different angle: reality programmes like Toddlers and Tiaras offer audiences a voyeuristic experience: ‘They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualisation of little girls - way  over the line - where, exactly, is the line, and who draws it and how? (p 76)
• and, bringing the book right up to date, electronic media including the gendered use of virtual worlds and social media (which can lead to increased bullying - and studies have shown that girls are more subject to online victimisation than boys)

Adding up all these things, Orenstein (and the reader) can’t help but conclude that conventional cultural scripts concerning femininity for girls are ambivalent at best, and an impediment to healthy development at worst.

But, having identified all that, what is a parent to do? Lock her daughter up like a latter-day Rapunzel? Be the parent who says ‘no’ to everything? Or makes her daughter into a figure of fun - or, worse, a target for bullies - amongst her peers?  Orenstein doesn’t offer firm or glib answers, but a narrative of her own attempts to answer those questions.

One example of Orenstein’s confusion is when she learns of a friend’s 14-year old son’s nonchalant response to a topless photo from one of his female classmates (and not even one he knew well). Orenstein was initially torn between amazement at the girl’s bravado and apparent body confidence but also a nagging suspicion that ‘something didn’t sit right’ and that this might be old-fashioned sexual objectification dressed up in the more modern guise of Facebook and (pseudo-)empowerment. An expert in human sexuality studies helped her articulate what was behind her mixed feelings:

Girls like the one I have described are not connected more deeply to their feelings, needs or desires. Instead, sexual entitlement itself has become objectified; like identity, like femininity too, it, too, has become a performance, something to ‘do’ rather than to ‘experience.’ Teasing and turning boys on might give girls a certain thrill, even a fleeting sense of power, but it will not help them understand their own pleasure ... [or] allow them to assert themselves in intimate (let along casual) relationships. (pp 170-171)

I enjoyed this book a lot, although it had some limits. It sometimes spoke a little too much of its own bubble - a privileged, Californian, liberal enclave - to be totally relatable. It also focussed almost exclusively on the gendered experience of girls, something Orenstein acknowledges at the outset. This is largely because she has a daughter and not a son, so the issues are more personally pressing for her in a way that those affecting boys aren’t. I’d be interested to read a similar account that focussed on boys. 

When it comes to talking about the construction of gender, however, focussing on girls is not an intrinsic weakness. The process of gendering girls and boys is linked. In her landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble, theorist Judith Butler describes gender not only as performative but also as productive: it forms part of a heterosexual matrix, which juxtaposes ‘approved’ heterosexuality with ‘subversive’ homosexuality. In the normative view of the relationship between sex, gender and sexuality, conventionally masculine males are meant to desire conventionally feminine females. Masculinity and femininity - which comprise the 'gender ' part of the matrix - are most heavily policed as the visible signifiers of sexuality. A feminine male therefore becomes suspect, as does a masculine female. This is called the shaming and policing of gender, and it affects boys and men as much as girls and women. Orenstein’s book might focus on the gendered world of little girls, but this also impacts little boys, not least in how they will perceive their female family members and friends, and, later, potential partners (well, if they’ve got the script ‘right’, that is ...)

On the plus side, I appreciated Orenstein’s wit and self-awareness: in ‘It’s All About the Cape,’ she lamented the dearth of female super-heroes who could provide alternatives to the mania for princesses. Looking back with nostalgia on her own Wonder Woman phase, Orenstein wanted her daughter to experience a similar sense of invincibility, freedom and power. A little later, however, she admits: ‘I did a little digging about Wonder Woman. It turns out her real name was Diana, daughter of Hera, queen of the Amazons. That makes her, of all things ... a princess.’ (p 158)

What I most appreciated about this book, however, is that Orenstein put herself out there: her ideals, her rude awakenings, her daughter’s (sometimes unwitting) challenges to her deeply-held beliefs. She doesn’t advocate total abstinence from a gendered, consumerist culture - as if that were possible - but rather taking an informed and aware approach (advertisers are not your friend). She closes by sharing the insight she has gained along the way:

Our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so that they can thrive within it. That involves staying close but not crowding them, standing firm in one’s values, while remaining flexible ... I’m not saying we can and will do everything ‘right’, only that there is power - magic - in awareness. If we start with that, with wanting girls to see themselves from the inside out rather than the outside in, we will go a long way toward helping them find their own happily-ever-afters. (p 192)

Let's see how it works out ....

La vie en rose?

This morning, the baby - or the toddler, as I should henceforth call her - made a beeline for her one pink top and insisted on putting it on. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought, trying my best not to make it seem like a big deal. ‘It’s started. She’s about to cheerfully undo all my attempts to give her a life in technicolour.’ Teenagers with a penchant for black have nothing on the monochromatic world little girls are encouraged to inhabit these days.

On the way to the supermarket, we stopped at a second-hand toy and book sale. The community hall was bursting at the seams: parents tried to stop their kids running off with toys before they’d paid for them, kids tried to wheedle their parents into just one more toy, and everyone frowned at those foolish enough to wheel strollers through the narrow lanes either side of the trestle tables. Wading through this sea of humanity, toddler long since abandoned somewhere behind me, I couldn’t help but notice by the meerest of glances which stalls had stuff for girls and which didn’t. Three guesses how I managed this feat of deduction? Yep, they contained items that were predominantly pink and glittery. There were pink dolls-houses and wands. Pink tea-sets and vacuum cleaners. Pink phones and tiaras. Gender-stereotyping, what’s that?! 

‘To the books,’ I thought. ‘They won’t let me down!’

I finally found a table that mainly sold books and started thumbing through them. One box was full of ‘girls’ books’.  Without exception, every one was about fairies or princesses or fairy princesses. I felt depressed and, remembering the pink shirt preference of the morning, a little worried. Of course, no-one was forcing me to buy these books, but the fact that there were so many of them all together, clearly intended for another little girl just to love really bothered me. 

It was not always the case that books aimed at little girls so blatantly inhabited the role of fantasy (and not the Tolkien-kind either). ‘When I was a kid’, to wheel out a hackneyed phrase, stories for girls seemed to be dominated by horses and ballet. If you had two X chromosones, you were apparently pre-programmed to dream of Follyfoot or Sadler's Wells. Of course, these were manufactured gender preferences too, but at least they were a bit more real and, more importantly, active. The girls in them had to work hard to succeed at their dreams, they had to do stuff in order to try and be successful - and they didn’t always succeed either. 

Now, it may well be the case that these fairy princess stories are about the one fairy princess who rebels against her royal fairy upbringing and redefines what it means to be a fairy princess - I feel ridiculous even writing that - but, here's my issue, why are they fairy princesses at all? Can’t a girl be rebellious or ambitious or whatever other defence is usually given for stuff like this without first being represented as either an ephemeral imaginary creature or an ephemeral technically-real-but-totally-Disneyfied-to-the-point-of-unreality creature?

I’m starting to get worked up again just thinking about it.

You may well think, ‘where’s the harm’?  It’s only toys and books, no-one’s forcing you to buy them, and your daughter may well totally love these kinds of books when she gets older and then what will you do? And, anyway, it’s it only natural for little girls to like this stuff?

Well, no, it isn’t. And that’s the problem.

Recent research by neuroscientists such as Cordelia Fine and Lise Eliot has shown that there are some small sex differences in children’s brains, but that they are not as great nor as 'hardwired' as we are led to believe. Eliot, for example, found after an exhaustive search that there was ‘surprisingly little solid evidence of sex differences in children’s brains.’ In fact, she found only two that had been reliably proven: boys‘ brains are larger than girls by around 8 to 11 per cent, and that this difference shows up around the onset of puberty when girls‘ brains finish growing about one to two years earlier than boys’.  Before the jokes start coming, she considers this difference to be on a par with boys‘ greater height and weight at birth and in adulthood (Pink Brain, Blue Brain, p 5).

So little girls aren’t pre-progammed to like fairy princesses after all? Woohoo! But then why do so many of them seem to gravitate towards it?

The obvious answer is money. Pink items are aggressively marketed at young girls who then use their pester power to wear down even the most intransigent of parents. How cunningly simple to gender everything so parents will have to shell out twice if they have children of each sex. In Cinderella Ate My Daughter, journalist Peggy Orenstein describes the sheer magnitude of gendered merchandise on offer: 

The annual toy fair at New York's Javits Center is the industry's largest trade show, with 100,000 products spread over 350,000ft of exhibition space. And I swear, at least 75,000 of those items were pink. I lost count of the myriad pink wands and crowns (feathered, sequined and otherwise bedazzled) and infinite permutations of pink poodles in purses. The Disney Princesses reigned over a new pink royal interactive kitchen with accompanying pink royal appliances and pink royal pot-and-pan sets (though I would have thought one of the perks of monarchy would be that someone else did the cooking). There were pink dinnerware sets emblazoned with the word princess, pink fun-fur stoles and boas, pink golf clubs, sleds, tricycles, bicycles, scooters, and motorcycles and even a pink tractor. Oh, and one pink neon bar sign flashing "live nudes" .... "Is all this pink really necessary?" I asked a bored-looking sales rep hawking something called Cast and Paint Princess Party. "Only if you want to make money," he said, chuckling. (Read more here) 

Fine, but I’ve also seen plenty of hand-knitted, hand-carved and hand-painted things to think that this isn’t only about the dollar. It seems a bit of a coincidence that the profusion of pink fairy princess products exploded in the 1980s, around ... oh ... the same time as mainstream culture mounted a backlash against second-wave feminism (detailed magnificently by Susan Faludi in Backlash: the Undeclared War Against Women way back in 1991 and, more recently, picked up in respect of the ideology of intensive mothering in Douglas and Michaels’ The Mommy Myth).

Eliot’s research offers insight here too. Her main field of study is plasticity, which is premised on the fact that the brain actually changes in response to its environment:

Simply put, your brain is what you do with it ... Learning and practice rewire the human brain, and considering the very different ways boys and girls spend their time while growing up, as well as the special potency of early experience in moulding neuronal connections, it would be shocking if the two sexes’ brains didn’t work differently by the time they were adults. So it’s all biology, whether the cause is nature or nurture (Pink Brain, Blue Brain, p 6).  

Putting on my best conspiracy theory hat, I can’t help but think then that there’s something going on when little girls are being bombarded with fairy princesses and pink irons and glittery plastic high heels with precious little else to relieve it. Namely, that patriarchy is insidiously working to disempower women from birth. And when people shrug and say it doesn’t matter, or it’s only natural, it’s sending a message loud and clear - whether it’s meant intentionally or not - that this is what little girls should like and be like. And, that one day, not too far away, this is what they will as women become (well, not actual fairy princesses, but you get the idea). Pinkification of girls can also be considered potentially damaging to little boys as well, as it defines extremely narrow notions of femininity and the ways in which girls and women should be treated because that’s what they like / are like. 

And yet ... what about agency? After all, nobody has to totally follow the cultural script that is written for them, and that applies to both parents and children.

As with most things these days, my toddler is showing me the way. She may have opted for a pink t-shirt this morning (maybe she was sick of getting mistaken for a boy too), but once we got to the sale she made a bee-line for the first thing that grabbed her attention: a blue wind-up car.

Maybe we’ve got a little while to go yet before Cinderella comes knocking.