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The acclaimed author of the groundbreaking bestseller Schoolgirls reveals the dark side of pink and pretty: the rise of the girlie-girl, she warns, is not that innocent.
Pink and pretty or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as a source—the source—of female empowerment. And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages.
But, realistically, how many times can you say no when your daughter begs for a pint-size wedding gown or the latest Hannah Montana CD? And how dangerous is pink and pretty anyway—especially given girls’ successes in the classroom and on the playing field? Being a princess is just make-believe, after all; eventually they grow out of it. Or do they? Does playing Cinderella shield girls from early sexualization—or prime them for it? Could today’s little princess become tomorrow’s sexting teen? And what if she does? Would that make her in charge of her sexuality—or an unwitting captive to it?
Those questions hit home with Peggy Orenstein, so she went sleuthing. She visited Disneyland and the international toy fair, trolled American Girl Place and Pottery Barn Kids, and met beauty pageant parents with preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. She dissected the science, created an online avatar, and parsed the original fairy tales. The stakes turn out to be higher than she—or we—ever imagined: nothing less than the health, development, and futures of our girls. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable—yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters’ lives.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a must-read for anyone who cares about girls, and for parents helping their daughters navigate the rocky road to adulthood.
An Exclusive Note from Peggy Orenstein
As a mom, I admit, I was initially tempted to give the new culture of pink and pretty a pass. There are already so many things to be vigilant about as a parent; my energy was stretched to its limit. So my daughter slept in a Cinderella gown for a few years. Girls will be girls, right?
They will—and that is exactly why we need to pay more, rather than less, attention to what’s happening in their world. According to the American Psychological Association, the emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness at ever-younger ages is increasing girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: eating disorders, negative body image, depression, risky sexual behavior. Yet here we are with nearly half of six-year-old girls regularly using lipstick or lip gloss. The percentage of eight- to twelve-year-old girls wearing eyeliner or mascara has doubled in the last TWO years (I ask you: shouldn’t the percentage of eight-year-olds wearing eyeliner be zero?). A researcher told me that when she asks teenage girls how a sexual experience felt to them they respond by telling her how they think they looked. Meanwhile, the marketing of pink, pretty, and “sassy” has become a gigantic business: the Disney Princesses alone are pulling in four BILLION dollars in revenue annually.
As I immersed myself in the research for this book, I began to trace a line from the innocence of Cinderella to the struggles Miley Cyrus has faced in trying to “age up,” which in turn was connected to how regular girls present themselves on Facebook (where identity itself becomes a performance, crafted in response to your audience of 322 BFFs). It seemed that even as new educational and professional opportunities unfurled before my daughter and her peers, so did the path that encouraged them to equate identity with image, self-expression with appearance, femininity with performance, pleasure with pleasing, and sexuality with sexualization.
So much is at stake, for mothers with girls of all ages: How do we define girlhood? What about femininity? Beauty? Sexuality? Our choices will tell our girls how we see them, who we want them to be, our values, expectations, hopes, and dreams. Do we want them to be judged by the content of their character or the color of their lip gloss?
I’m the first to admit that I do not have all the answers. Who could? But as a mother who also happens to be a journalist (or perhaps vice versa), I wanted to lay out the context—the marketing, science, history, culture—in which we make our choices, to provide information and insight that might help parents, educators, and all of us who care about girls guide them toward their true happily-ever-afters.
Review
For people interested in gender politics and how they play out in advertising aimed at young girls in America, this book is an absolute delight to read. Author Orenstein examines everything from Disney Princess merchandise, American Girls dolls, the “Twilight” phenomena, Miley Cyrus (and all the “innocent-but-sexy” singers and actresses that have come before her, and will come after her yet), pageant culture, and Facebook – all through the dual lens of her own experiences as a mother and her own research as a journalist.
“Cinderella Ate My Daughter” is wonderfully written – both informative and interesting. The author has a wonderful sense of when to intersperse daily anecdotes from her own life into the meticulous studies she references and the experts she quotes. This is anything but a “fluff” book – there’s so much information compiled here and it’s presented in an imminently easy-to-digest format. Looking back on this book, dozens of fascinating facts leap to my mind – such as the evidence that dolls were in low vogue among girls in the late 1800′s, until President Roosevelt warned the country against declining Anglo-Saxon birth rates and suddenly the race was on to prepare (certain kinds of) girls to be ‘good American mothers’. Then there’s the chapter about mixed-gender play and how to understand the difference between boys and girls playing WITH each other and them playing NEAR each other (and how to encourage the latter to blossom into the former). Especially impressive in this book is how the author always tries to give the opposition a fair say, even while making it clear where she falls on the spectrum – everything comes across as highly informative and extremely fair-spoken.
One thing I particularly liked about this book is how fallible-as-a-mother Orenstein is willing to be, and how kind and fair-minded she is towards the other parents in the book. She seems to really understand how difficult it is to meld high-minded principles with day-to-day parenting (for instance, in explaining WHY a Bratz doll is “inappropriate” to her 5-year-old, she’s frustrated that the very CONCEPT of the inappropriateness of a “sexy” doll isn’t something she wanted to get into just yet!), and I really respect that there is pretty much zero “parent bashing” here. When the author explores the “American Girls” dolls (a marketing line that she readily admits is out of the budgets of most parents and thus constitutes a minority of American girls being able to even afford the dolls), it would be easy to decry all the money “wastefully” spent on the extravagant doll clothes, but she doesn’t. Even the pageant chapter is tactfully and thoughtfully written – Orenstein seems fully aware that “parent bashing” only helps to blind us to the other forms of marketing and expression that are targeted to our girls (i.e., “Sure my daughter wears a Cinderella bridal veil to kindergarten every day, but at least I don’t let her dress like JonBenet!”), and so instead she uses the pageant concept to draw parallels, not to cast judgment.
I also want to note that this book struck me as very HAES-friendly and extremely insightful on how to encourage healthy body-image in young daughters – several of the experts that Orenstein quotes hit the nail on the head, I think, on the best hows-and-whens to tell your daughter that she’s beautiful, and how to link that “beauty” to inner character rather than outer trappings.
For people who are interested in gender studies and girl-aimed marketing, I feel like this is a wonderful book to read. The book is easy to digest, and hard to put down – I read the whole book in two days, largely because I just didn’t want to stop. Most of all, I appreciate that the author understands that the issues of gender politics and how they affect our young daughters are *complicated*, and while she tries to offer her own solutions at the end, she never sounds preachy, know-it-all, or “my way is the right way” – I think, largely because she gets that a complicated issue like this doesn’t have one, pithy solution that can be easily summed up on a bumpersticker.
~ Ana Mardoll, Amazon.Com Customer Review
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Queen of Misfortune
A Novel by Peter Carroll – Available at all good book stores by February 7, 2011
Queen Of Misfortune is the fictional story of Lady Jane Grey as told by her beloved tutor, John Aylmer. At the time of her execution a stranger is recorded to have assisted her when, blind folded, she lost her way upon the scaffold. Was it the same ‘stranger’ who was also recorded to have visited her when she was imprisoned in the Tower? Little is known of this unfortunate girl who was beheaded for treason in the 16th Century. She was only 16. She is omitted from the list of monarchs but was actually queen for nine days. Author Peter Carroll, in his novel, follows John Aylmer’s close relationship with Jane as her tutor and later, as she grows up, her lover. [More...]
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