Dynamique
01-25-2011, 07:50 PM
Are Disney Princesses Evil?https://mjcdn.motherjones.com/preset_12/cindy300x200.jpg
Author Peggy Orenstein on raising daughters in an age of
gender-branded diapers, tiara-toting toddlers, and
sexed-up preteens.
By Michael Mechanic
Mother Jones
January/February 2011 Issue
https://motherjones.com/media/2011/01/peggy-orenstein-cinderella-ate-my-daughter
Where do Disney princesses fall on a 1-to-10 scale of
harm to a girl's identity? How about Bratz, pink mania,
Facebook? "All of this stuff seems 1, but might be 10,
and you don't really know," says author and New York
Times Magazine essayist Peggy Orenstein [1] as we chat
about her new book. "It's not any one thing. It's the
whole onslaught." Cinderella Ate My Daughter [2] is a
highly entertaining (and disconcerting) romp. Orenstein
hangs out with teachers, teenyboppers, marketing execs,
social scientists, tots in tiaras, and her own seven-
year-old to probe the beguiling contradictions of our
growing girly-girl culture. Referring to the nearly half
of six- to nine-year-old girls who wear lipstick or
gloss, Orenstein tells me, "I don't know why the
percentage is not zero." Read on for her lowdown on
gender-branded diapers, Facebook's dark side, and how
the parents of preschool beauty queens are more like us
than we'd care to admit.
Mother Jones: You wrote that you had originally wanted a
boy because you were afraid you might not be able to
handle a daughter. Is having a daughter really that much
more precarious than it was, say, 20 years ago?
Peggy Orenstein: I think part of it was that I had been
the supposed expert for the last 20 years, so I had 20
years of anxiety. [Laughs.] But yeah, I think it's a
funny time, because on one hand there's all this good
news about girls in education, girls in sports, they're
doing great in college and all that, but at the same
time the pressure hasn't abated at all on them. And I
would (and do) argue that's the pressure has grown much
more intense to define themselves and gain all their
self-worth from the way that they look, and the way that
they look is supposed to be, increasingly and
increasingly younger, sexy. And femininity becomes
defined for them by sexiness (you know, at the age of
four), narcissism, and consumerism-all three of which
are problematic for me.
MJ: Now let's see, 20 years ago there was-
PO: There's a couple differences. One is the market has
gotten increasingly segmented. The girl stuff has gotten
more girly; the boy stuff has gotten more boy-y. Two is
that you have internet culture, which is 24/7, 365 days
a year. And as they get older you have, not with
littlest girls, but you have social media and all of
that, and this very deep concern generated from that
with how you present yourself. And your image becomes
your self-image and your brand-there's a study where
kids use that word to talk about their online persona.
[2]MJ: So basically, kids have to be little marketers
themselves.
PO: Yeah, marketing themselves. Or becoming their own
little mini-Mileys or whatever the latest one is-their
own little icons.
MJ: I found interesting your observation about how
marketers of girly-girly culture rationalize their stuff
as empowering, when it fact it's kind of limiting.
PO: Well, yes. It can feel like it's empowering because
you think, well, girls are freer to express their
femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping
that down or denying it anymore. But it ends up putting
them, first of all, in this box. And secondly, premature
sexualization of girls actually does the opposite of
what people think it might; it actually disconnects them
from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual
health as they get older. My kind of nightmare quote is
from Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and
desire and is, I think, brilliant. She told me that by
the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them how
sexual experience made them feel, they respond by how
they think they looked; they think that how they look is
how they feel.
MJ: Yeah, that bit kind of blew me away.
Then there are the other Disney Princesses: Miley and
Lindsey and Britney and now Demi Lovato, who just went
into rehab for eating disorders and cutting.
PO: I just found that very striking, and very much of
this era. I think there's a lot of effort into making us
think it's benign, or that we can't do anything about
it. But the mythology that this represents more freedom
for girls, and more power and greater sexual health and
greater self-efficacy, all of that; I think the evidence
is really very much to the contrary. And nowhere do you
see it really like writ large more than in these other
Disney princesses. You know, Miley and Lindsey and
Britney and now Demi Lovato, I don't know if you've
heard of her.
MJ: No. [She's a teenage pop singer who portrays a
teenager in the Disney Channel comedy series Sonny With
a Chance.]
PO: She just went into a rehab for eating disorders and
cutting and other sorts of things. It's an embarrassment
for Disney. I mean, I don't know why they don't think
they have to respond to what they're creating, but
apparently they don't. They put the blame on the girls,
or on families, or on stuff like that, not on the ideas
that they're trying to make those girls embody-
literally.
MJ: So beyond just the girl stuff, a lot of today's toys
feel so prescribed to me. Like the building toys come in
these specific kits, and the dolls come with these
defined stories-
PO: I know!
MJ: Are we sending this message that kids needn't use
their imaginations?
PO: My biggest surprise as a parent, or one of them, was
how much of my job is about protecting my child's
childhood. And when I think about what that means, in
addition to her not wearing makeup when she's three
years old, it's about imagination and making sure that
her imagination isn't colonized by these prescribed
scripts. I'm personally concerned with the script for
girls. And for boys, too, but that's not what I write
about. I don't mind that Daisy plays a little bit of
princess now and again, or did when she was littler;
that's fine. But if she's walking around doing the
Cinderella story, and not even the Cinderella story, but
the version which is all about getting the most stuff,
then that's a problem. And there is evidence on
violence, kids are acting out a prescribed script over
and over and over-homogeneously across the country in
their play-after they've been exposed to these TV shows
or Internet stuff or robotic toys or whatever. I find
that disheartening, and I'm sure it must contribute to
this drop in creativity scores we're seeing.
MJ: Are we?
{snip}
Continues at:
https://motherjones.com/media/2011/01/peggy-orenstein-cinderella-ate-my-daughter
Author Peggy Orenstein on raising daughters in an age of
gender-branded diapers, tiara-toting toddlers, and
sexed-up preteens.
By Michael Mechanic
Mother Jones
January/February 2011 Issue
https://motherjones.com/media/2011/01/peggy-orenstein-cinderella-ate-my-daughter
Where do Disney princesses fall on a 1-to-10 scale of
harm to a girl's identity? How about Bratz, pink mania,
Facebook? "All of this stuff seems 1, but might be 10,
and you don't really know," says author and New York
Times Magazine essayist Peggy Orenstein [1] as we chat
about her new book. "It's not any one thing. It's the
whole onslaught." Cinderella Ate My Daughter [2] is a
highly entertaining (and disconcerting) romp. Orenstein
hangs out with teachers, teenyboppers, marketing execs,
social scientists, tots in tiaras, and her own seven-
year-old to probe the beguiling contradictions of our
growing girly-girl culture. Referring to the nearly half
of six- to nine-year-old girls who wear lipstick or
gloss, Orenstein tells me, "I don't know why the
percentage is not zero." Read on for her lowdown on
gender-branded diapers, Facebook's dark side, and how
the parents of preschool beauty queens are more like us
than we'd care to admit.
Mother Jones: You wrote that you had originally wanted a
boy because you were afraid you might not be able to
handle a daughter. Is having a daughter really that much
more precarious than it was, say, 20 years ago?
Peggy Orenstein: I think part of it was that I had been
the supposed expert for the last 20 years, so I had 20
years of anxiety. [Laughs.] But yeah, I think it's a
funny time, because on one hand there's all this good
news about girls in education, girls in sports, they're
doing great in college and all that, but at the same
time the pressure hasn't abated at all on them. And I
would (and do) argue that's the pressure has grown much
more intense to define themselves and gain all their
self-worth from the way that they look, and the way that
they look is supposed to be, increasingly and
increasingly younger, sexy. And femininity becomes
defined for them by sexiness (you know, at the age of
four), narcissism, and consumerism-all three of which
are problematic for me.
MJ: Now let's see, 20 years ago there was-
PO: There's a couple differences. One is the market has
gotten increasingly segmented. The girl stuff has gotten
more girly; the boy stuff has gotten more boy-y. Two is
that you have internet culture, which is 24/7, 365 days
a year. And as they get older you have, not with
littlest girls, but you have social media and all of
that, and this very deep concern generated from that
with how you present yourself. And your image becomes
your self-image and your brand-there's a study where
kids use that word to talk about their online persona.
[2]MJ: So basically, kids have to be little marketers
themselves.
PO: Yeah, marketing themselves. Or becoming their own
little mini-Mileys or whatever the latest one is-their
own little icons.
MJ: I found interesting your observation about how
marketers of girly-girly culture rationalize their stuff
as empowering, when it fact it's kind of limiting.
PO: Well, yes. It can feel like it's empowering because
you think, well, girls are freer to express their
femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping
that down or denying it anymore. But it ends up putting
them, first of all, in this box. And secondly, premature
sexualization of girls actually does the opposite of
what people think it might; it actually disconnects them
from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual
health as they get older. My kind of nightmare quote is
from Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and
desire and is, I think, brilliant. She told me that by
the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them how
sexual experience made them feel, they respond by how
they think they looked; they think that how they look is
how they feel.
MJ: Yeah, that bit kind of blew me away.
Then there are the other Disney Princesses: Miley and
Lindsey and Britney and now Demi Lovato, who just went
into rehab for eating disorders and cutting.
PO: I just found that very striking, and very much of
this era. I think there's a lot of effort into making us
think it's benign, or that we can't do anything about
it. But the mythology that this represents more freedom
for girls, and more power and greater sexual health and
greater self-efficacy, all of that; I think the evidence
is really very much to the contrary. And nowhere do you
see it really like writ large more than in these other
Disney princesses. You know, Miley and Lindsey and
Britney and now Demi Lovato, I don't know if you've
heard of her.
MJ: No. [She's a teenage pop singer who portrays a
teenager in the Disney Channel comedy series Sonny With
a Chance.]
PO: She just went into a rehab for eating disorders and
cutting and other sorts of things. It's an embarrassment
for Disney. I mean, I don't know why they don't think
they have to respond to what they're creating, but
apparently they don't. They put the blame on the girls,
or on families, or on stuff like that, not on the ideas
that they're trying to make those girls embody-
literally.
MJ: So beyond just the girl stuff, a lot of today's toys
feel so prescribed to me. Like the building toys come in
these specific kits, and the dolls come with these
defined stories-
PO: I know!
MJ: Are we sending this message that kids needn't use
their imaginations?
PO: My biggest surprise as a parent, or one of them, was
how much of my job is about protecting my child's
childhood. And when I think about what that means, in
addition to her not wearing makeup when she's three
years old, it's about imagination and making sure that
her imagination isn't colonized by these prescribed
scripts. I'm personally concerned with the script for
girls. And for boys, too, but that's not what I write
about. I don't mind that Daisy plays a little bit of
princess now and again, or did when she was littler;
that's fine. But if she's walking around doing the
Cinderella story, and not even the Cinderella story, but
the version which is all about getting the most stuff,
then that's a problem. And there is evidence on
violence, kids are acting out a prescribed script over
and over and over-homogeneously across the country in
their play-after they've been exposed to these TV shows
or Internet stuff or robotic toys or whatever. I find
that disheartening, and I'm sure it must contribute to
this drop in creativity scores we're seeing.
MJ: Are we?
{snip}
Continues at:
https://motherjones.com/media/2011/01/peggy-orenstein-cinderella-ate-my-daughter