Apparently this is not an unfounded fear Peggy Orenstein, a “girl behavior” expert, just published a book called Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. While I don’t find this behavior disturbing - some of it, like her nursing her dolls, is incredibly touching - I do worry how to let Coraline be a girl without letting her become a princess. It does seem that Coraline is getting girlier by the day, from her continued insistence on wearing pink and purple to her deepening obsession with baby dolls.
She talks about Jay Giedd, of the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, who argues that statistically there is as much.A couple weeks ago I posted about my shock at how “girly” my girl is despite my best efforts to promote gender neutrality. (If this is true, then Planet of the Apes is a documentary, and we have some explaining to do about our zoos and laboratories.)Ī good journalist offers both sides of an argument, though, and Orenstein is a good journalist. Others, such as the description of the study that purports to show that male rhesus monkeys prefer "boys' toys" while the females prefer feminine items, are patently ridiculous, implying not only that objects (such as toy police cars) are inherently gendered but that monkeys recognize a cooking pot as (a) a cooking pot and (b) for female use. Some of those narratives, such as the preschool that is deliberately reinforcing positive cross-gender interactions between children, are fascinating. Orenstein, like many journalists who write pop culture critiques, carefully balances personal narratives, such as her 3-year-old daughter's consumer-culture requests (for Barbie dolls, pink clothes, and Disney Princess toys) and her own internal struggles with both hyperconsumerism in general and pink-princess-girliness specifically (she also occasionally includes her husband's takes on the struggle), with statistics, studies, and interviews.
It is not, though, particularly about fairy tales. Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a fast-paced and articulate, if not always rigorously scholarly, indictment of the "girlie-girl" culture of twenty-first-century North America. Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.
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