Playing Princess
simargl_wings posted an article today by Peggy Orenstein entitled What's wrong with Cinderella? (New York Times magazine, December 24th 2006)
She is narrating the difficulties she faces raising her daughter in a world with a returning princess-craze. The old female stereotypes are exploited by various companies and make girls feel that all that matters is fancy accessories and trendy clothes. What's wrong with a girl that doesn't like shopping or make-up but prefers sports and other colors than pink?
Because the article is big (I encourage you to read it, it's amazing), here are some highlights:
If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen?
There are no studies proving that playing princess directly damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. On the other hand, there is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs - who avoid conflict and think they should be perpetually nice and pretty - are more likely to be depressed than others and less likely to use contraception.
“Her face is all right,” I said, noncommittally, [to her daughter] though I’m not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”
What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?
“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”
The relentless resegregation of childhood appears to have sneaked up without any further discussion about sex roles, about what it now means to be a boy or to be a girl. Or maybe it has happened in lieu of such discussion because it’s easier this way.
When colors were first introduced to the nursery in the early part of the 20th century, pink was considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy and faithfulness, was thought to be dainty.
Step out of line, and you end up solo or, worse, sailing crazily over a cliff to your doom.
They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, I can help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female.