Book Review: Cinderella Ate My Daughter
I feel like I should preface this whole review with the disclaimer that I am a childless adult who has deep nostalgic ties to Disney films and is a fan of the Disney Princess franchise. I bring this up because this book focuses on parenting and developmental psychology and I am not an expert on either, nor do I claim to be.
So Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter boils down to this:
Little girls are mass-marketed Disney Princesses from an early age. This limits their creative play, instills in them a trust for corporations that do not have their best interests at heart, sexualizes them too early, and inspires them to aspire to misogynistic, retrograde role models that limit their own growth and potential.
This books is not so much an exploration of Why Disney Princesses Are Bad, but why Archaic Societal Standards and Conglomerates Selling To Your Children Are Bad. It's a snapshot of the current parental woes: early childhood consumerism, limited toy options for girls, the sexualization of children, glitz pageants, female development vs male development, worrisome psychological studies, original and gruesome fairy tales, controversial Disney Channel stars, comic super heroines, and voyeuristic Internet culture.
What Orenstein really means is she doesn't like the idea of Princess, that it's more limiting to girls than empowering. Disney in this case just gets to be the biggest target, but they're hardly the only one creating problems.
It's clear that Orenstein sees Princesses in one light and one light only: they are bad for her daughter and bad for little girls at large. She makes some attempts to seem unbaised or cautiously optimistic about Princesses* but her disdain and disapproval rises like bile a few paragraphs later.
You can practically hear Orenstein grinding her teeth when her daughter wants to play Cinderella or Snow White. Her daughter asking, "What's wrong with Cinderella?" prompted Orenstein to write a New York Times Magazine article about her fears for Millennial girls to both acclaim and notoriety. What she never really sets down definitively is: What is wrong with Cinderella?
Does idolizing a Disney Princess reduce all your aspirations to wanting to be thin, obsessed with clothes, and be subservient to men? Can a girl not grow up a feminist and a Princess, or does one inhibit the other?
Orenstein theorizes Princesses are the earliest form of lowering a girl's self-esteem by using studies that were around before the Princesses were ever a franchise. Her fear is that Princesses will increase or at least maintain those unfavorable results, but there's no long-term proof of it yet. She's lumping old results in with new fears as if one retroactively causes the other.
There's also the materialism and limited play aspect (girl toys :: pink :: fashion) that's not limited to Disney but toy makers at large. Interesting consumer reports claims making pink duplicates of toys means a parent will buy a the neutral one for son and the pink one for a daughter. So parents buy pink for their girls and girls buy pink to cement their identity as female. It is disappointing that pink is the only definitively girly color identity, but it still begs the question: Is the tail wagging the dog, or the other way around?
I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned Disney Princesses in their suicide note or says they know Disney Princesses were the first time they felt bad about themselves. I'm in contact with a lot of older fans who glean nothing but inspiration and empowerment from those films, but I do wonder about the casual watchers who don't lurk in communities. Does Disney impact us negatively, even if it's only one more straw on the camel's back? And if so, is it really fair then to paint Disney as the entire monster?
I understand this book wasn't written for girls of my generation - the teenagers and adults who were kids during the Disney Renaissance and who are enjoying the Princess resurgence now. Orenstein's book was written for mothers and fathers born several decades ago wondering how this new culture will affect their children, especially their girls. They feel anxious, overwhelmed and unprepared.
What's disappointing is this book doesn't offer any solutions beyond prescribing Talk With Your Kids in the last few paragraphs. Orenstein's happy conclusion is having her daughter think critically about Disney characters and while that is a great moment, after 9 chapters and 178 pages of corporate immorality and depressing statistics, shouldn't the reader be left with more than a feeling of free-fall anxiety?
Orenstein comes across as domineering yet fallible parent. She's trying to do the right thing by her own standards and I admire her for that. She wants her daughter to reach her fullest potential but is adamant that culture - especially that of little girls - is poisonous to that potential.
What troubles me though is the message it implicitly sends to her daughter: if you enjoy something I disapprove of I will disapprove of you. How much exploration can this child allow herself if she feels she must always look to her mother for approval? Will she have the same need to "be perfect" as the little girls with pageant moms?
However, I don't know anything more about their relationship than what I've read in the book so I couldn't say that's certainly the case. It does feel like an undercurrent within the book with Orenstein's slinging implicit accusations of bad parenting at everyone else - so what about her? Orenstein is apparently vocal about her beliefs to the point it exhausts her friends. How much has her daughter heard and absorbed? Will her daughter also look down on little girls who like Princesses and believe they'll never be fulfilled as women?
That's the snag. Feminism is often what you make of it with one equality being the most common denominator. For the most part, feminism tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Here, lines are drawn and camps are pitched: if you approve of Princesses you're regressive and you're holding your daughter back. If you disapprove you're progressive but denying them a part of their childhood because you fear the possible implications.
The book is an easy, informative read. If you know a bit about Disney Princesses, American Girl, Barbie, glitz pageants, marketing to children, developmental psychology, Grimm's fairy tales, Disney Channel celebrities, etc. you're probably not going to learn much more than you knew before. It's a well-researched overview of these subjects but it doesn't amount to more than facts and the author's narrative navigating her daughter through those treacherous girly-girl waters.
At some points I was annoyed by her phraseology - describing a doll as "slutty" and toddlers as "Sesame Street Walkers." Now there's a fine line between calling a girl's clothes slutty and calling a girl a slut (Distinction: they both deserve to get raped for being provocative!) so I don't think it's in any way appropriate to refer to children as such. She also uses Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan as bad influences and my objection is basically the culture surrounding them is more nuanced than your daughter can understand at this age (Yes, Virginia - an actor of equal stature could commit the same crimes or worse, violent crimes and still not be as gleefully reviled or dissected as these girls [and then the lie] but don't worry, baby - when you achieve any modicum of success they won't do that to you). I recognize it's her style of writing - sort of punchy and glib, easily read and smirked at - that's entertaining but not always palatable.
* Exerpt from page 81 - "I could only imagine how difficult the family's path has been, the lifelong burden Taralyn will carry: the mixture of resentment and protectiveness, love and guilt. She did deserve something of her own, a place to be free, to be a child--maybe even, for a moment, to feel that she, or at least her life, is perfect. And isn't that, at it's core, what the princess fantasy is about for all of us? 'Princess' is how we tell little girls that they are special, precious. 'Princess' is how we express our aspirations, hopes, and dreams for them. 'Princess' is the wish that we could protect them from pain, that they would never know sorrow, that they will live happily ever after ensconced in lace and innocence."
ETA: Here's another quote from the book I found in my notes that sums up a lot of Orenstein's opinions.
"I often wonder what the long-term results of that change will be: rather than raising a generation of Cinderellas, we may actually be cultivating a legion of step-sisters - spoiled, self-centered materialists, superficially charming but without the depth or means for authentic transformation." (p 104)
And here's basically my reaction to the book:
"Does enjoying Disney Princesses when you're younger lead you to be an underachieving, depressed, dangerously sexual woman? Does rap music make you kill people? Does heavy metal make you kill yourself?"