By Bailey Shoemaker Richards
Ask any girl who her favorite Disney princess is, and she’ll likely have an answer, along with a detailed explanation. Disney princesses are a ubiquitous part of childhood for millions of girls, but it wasn’t always that way, and it wasn’t even that way very recently. That’s one of the biggest things Peggy Orenstein discovered during the course of writing Cinderella Ate My Daughter, which has recently been released in paperback.
The Disney princesses weren’t a trend until 2000, when Andy Mooney realized that there was an untapped marketing opportunity. Since then, Disney has created over 26,000 princess products – let that sink in. 26,000 princess products from Disney alone.
Disney isn’t the focus of Orenstein’s book, although I’m sure it’s possible to write a book solely on their marketing. Instead, she navigates readers through trying to raise her daughter, Daisy, in a way that didn’t force her into the princess narrative. However, a week after starting preschool, Daisy’s Thomas the Tank Engine toys were at the bottom of the toy box and she could name every Disney princess. Orenstein started to wonder: is it just genetic?
Short answer: No – genes do play a role, sometimes, but the differences among girls and among boys are often much greater than the differences between girls and boys. One of the best things about Orenstein’s book is that it combines developmental psychology with relatable, personal examples, putting them in an accessible framework. For example, kids start self-segregating their play by gender at preschool or kindergarten age. This is a cross-cultural phenomenon. However, this is also the age at which girls’ verbal abilities start to outpace boys’, and boys’ spatial abilities start to outstrip girls’.
Orenstein talks to researchers who are encouraging cross-sex play without forcing it, or overriding kids’ natural tendencies. Girls who don’t have boy friends and vice versa at that age are less able to relate to one another as they grow up, and these attitudes can become fixed in adulthood. On the flip side, kids who do have cross-sex friendships growing up have longer, more stable relationships as adults. How kids play matters. And it’s easy to help kids play together: all it takes is for teachers to talk about and positively reinforce it.
Marketing and its effects are another factor in Orenstein’s narrative. Here’s a useful tidbit: kids under 6 cannot tell the difference between TV advertising and programming (and, I would argue, the difference between the two is constantly shrinking). When the annual Toy Fair (a national event that brings in 100,000 products) showcases girls’ toys under a banner reading, “Beautiful, Pretty, Colorful,” and boys’ under a banner reading, “Energy, Heroes, Power,” it’s clear there’s a problem.
One of the most common arguments is that marketers are delivering what kids and parents want – that’s all! Orenstein challenges this notion, asking throughout the book, at what point does a child’s ‘want’ become something that is coerced? When the narrative of advertising starts from birth and delivers the same message to girls constantly, what choice do girls have other than to want what they’re told they want?
Many marketers rely on the argument that they are creating what sells, and responding to a “range” of girls’ play styles. Orenstein retorts that, “Abby [a stereotypically feminized Muppet] would trouble me far less if there could be a female Muppet as surly as Oscar or as id-driven as Cookie or as goofy as Grover: if there were more ‘play patterns’ to ‘honor’ than just this one.” To look at what is offered to girls, the range that marketers insist they’re honoring is nonexistent. When every company offers the same types of toys, in the same colors, with the same rationale, it is apparent that the range is in fact missing. What is being “honored” is a specific idea of what it means to be a young girl. The “old-school stereotypes [are being] recast as the source of liberation rather than an impediment to it.”
This issue becomes a problem for Orenstein in trying to find options for Daisy. As she says, she was trying to offer Daisy more options for exploring her interests and femininity by saying ‘no’ to everything Daisy asked for. Orenstein found a workable method through extra digging, finding more complex storylines to read to Daisy (including Grimm’s fairytales – the chapter on fairytales is especially interesting), focusing frequently on mythology.
Another great thing about Cinderella Ate My Daughter is that Orenstein isn’t setting out to disparage girlie-girl femininity. There’s nothing wrong with liking princess dresses, ink or romance. But it’s not the only way to be feminine, and Orenstein is concerned that girls are sold short when it’s the only option presented. She also takes a look at what the outcome of total saturation in this type of girlie-girl culture can be.
The other side of Disney princesses – the Mileys and the Britneys – has a big impact on girls. The Disney girls ride high on a standard of purity-with-a-wink, but oh, how fast they fall once they cast off the image of innocence. She makes a point of deconstructing the virgin-whore dichotomy, and worries about girls whose only access to models of sexuality is to see it made it performance for the approval of onlookers. “The virgin-whore cycle of the pop princesses, like so much of the girlie-girl culture, pushes in the oppose direction [of being able to explore sexuality in a healthy way], encouraging girls to view self-objectification as a feminine rite of passage.”
This, combined with the ‘kids getting older younger’ advertising trend, creates a confusing environment for girls. They are bombarded with messages that tell them they must act (or look like they act) older than their age, and perform the budding sexuality of their bodies, but not given an opportunity to grow naturally into a healthy sexuality that can be safely expressed.
Girls who are ushered into a performance of eroticism at young ages “do not – and may never – learn to connect their performance to erotic feelings or intimacy. They learn how to act desirable but not how to desire, undermining rather than promoting healthy sexuality.” That is the core of the problem with media’s embodiment of girls’ behavior, specifically with regards to the manufactured “knowing naïf” Disney stars, and their inevitable downfalls. Orenstein says, “I suspect that you cannot commodify a girl’s virginity without, eventually, commodifying what comes after.”
The sexualization of childhood, and the pushing of older behavior at younger and younger ages, is a big topic of discussion at SPARK and many of our sister organizations. Learning to deal with these issues in a productive way requires that parents, educators and even people without kids get on board (as Orenstein confesses at the beginning, she’d been writing about how to raise girls for years before she had Daisy). Whether you’re looking to find tools on dealing with sexualization, raising girls, or just starting to learn what it is, Cinderella Ate My Daughter is an excellent place to start.
If there’s one thing I was tired of the first time I ever heard it, it’s the tendency of writers with no scientific background to categorize observed behaviors as “inborn,” “genetic,” or “hard-wired into DNA” without any reason to believe that’s the case. More often than not, behaviors are formed by culture, parenting and exposure to similar behaviors.
Leaving out an analysis of what environment these toddler “Mean Girls” are playing in, what shows they watch, and how kids establish a pecking order to jump right to the “it’s genetic!” canard is not only lazy thinking, it’s insulting. Girl hate is a problem of culture, not of gender. Saying it’s inborn and that women are just “wired” that way is an excuse for justifying and perpetuating that stereotype.
The Race of Hunger Games
By Crystal Ogar
Yet when it came to the casting of this film, the casting call asked for white actresses only. Women of color were excluded for a role that reads as a woman of color! Olive skinned is a broad term: it can describe the skin color of a range of people, from the Mediterranean and some other parts of Europe, to the Middle East, to regions of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, and Latin America. The playing field for Katniss was so broad, but what do the casting directors and directors decide to do? Choose to tan up a white woman and actively exclude anyone who doesn’t fit into the white actresses category.
This is not about Jennifer Lawrence’s acting abilities at all. She’s a fantastic actress and did a wonderful job. What it is about is the sad fact that the casting pool was so narrowed and discriminatory. Whitewashing is a really dangerous thing that occurs not only in Hollywood, but in every form of media. White people do NOT have to worry about seeing themselves represented in the media, it’s commonplace. But what about the fact that many children always see people who don’t look like them? That isn’t fair and it isn’t right.
Having strong characters of color is so important for EVERYONE–not just people of color, but for white people as well. What white people need to think about is this: what if your favorite book series made sure that everyone had dark brown skin and kinky black hair? What if the only actors/musicians/tv stars that were getting accolades for their characters looked nothing like you? What if the world was flipped around on it’s head? We all know common and accurate representations of women are important, and just as important are common and accurate representations of people of color. It’s vital.
I know from personal experience that I have internalized racism in that if a character’s race isn’t mentioned in a book, I automatically read them as white. For white to be the default and for everyone else to be the “other” is unacceptable. The Hunger Games takes place in a distant future, yet when it comes to the film, even most of the Districts are whitewashed. For me, it felt like the decision was made because “if we market a heroine who is a woman of color and market it to an audience of teens and young adults? No one would see that film!” In fact, it’s just the opposite. The filmmakers had and wasted an amazing opportunity. The opportunity to give young black girls, American Indian girls, Hispanic, and Asian girls a heroine that they could relate to in more ways than one. Someone they could see themselves as.
All we can do right now is to keep talking about it and keep on hoping that someday soon, the big wigs will see that whitewashing is harmful. Until then at least, I have tumblr to dream up amazing recasts like these:
The Seam Recast
The Hunger Games Raceswap