I want to talk tonight
a little bit about the work that I did in Cinderella Ate My Daughter and then some
of the ways that we can push back and sort of just go through the ways that the
culture of little girls the media and marketing and consumer landscape that they
inhabit has changed primarily in the last decade or so I've been writing about
teenage girls for
a long time and I started writing about little girls because. I had
a daughter I became
a mom and I think for most of us with little girls you know
the first time that you hold that little girl in your arms you just think you want
her to have you know all the potential all the possibilities and you don't want
there to be anything that she feels like she can't do because she's
a girl and you don't want you to be anything that she feels like she has to do
because she's
a girl and my husband and I were going along raising our daughter that way and then
she went to preschool Oh how the mighty fall and we were walking around town
and I live in Berkeley so I sing I can just imagine what's going on where women
actually shave their legs. And. And we would go to
the local grocery store and the guy behind the checkout counter would greet her and
say you know hi princess and then we go to the drugstore and the late nice lady
behind the checkout counter would offer her
a balloon and say I know what color you want and give her
a pink one without asking and you know the tattooed peers waitress at the breakfast
place owned by Green Day would give her her princess pancakes and finally we went
to the dentist you know those tricked out pediatric dentist that charged because
they have Pac Man in the office. You do and. The dentist said to me
my daughter sees me you want to get my princess throne and I'll sparkle your teeth
and I just want my gosh to have
a princess drill too I mean seriously I remembered availing myself of my mom's cast
off tiara now and again when I was
a kid you know royal play is as old as King Arthur's court but I didn't remember
this idea that for three solid years of my life twenty four seven three hundred
sixty five days
a year I was not supposed to just like play princess in my room but actually be
a princess out in the world and I really didn't know if this was an issue or not
you know I mean on one hand girls were doing really well they were flooding the
playing fields they were going to college in greater numbers than boys and yet the
pressure to find themselves through appearance to believe that how they looked very
narrowly defined is who they are had not abated one whit and if anything it had
grown that message of growing more intense and it was skewing younger so that when
I kind of delved into the research I looked at
a study of two thousand. Kids and it found that between two thousand and two
thousand and seven the percentage of elementary school aged girls who expressed.
Intense concern about weight and appearance went up. And
thinking about that and then thinking about sort of at the other end of the
spectrum I was looking at research on college age women and I was looking at print
at Princeton University they become alarmed because the percentage of young women
in leadership positions elected and appointed leadership positions had also dropped
during the same period precipitously and when they surveyed the young women about
why they weren't willing to put themselves forward they also got the response that
the girls felt the young women felt that they had to do everything do everything
well and look hot while doing it so thinking about all of that I began this journey
through Girl Culture and it took me from Disneyland to American Girl place I went
to a Toddlers and Tiaras beauty pageant so you don't have to. I went to
a Miley Cyrus concert so you don't have to. And I
delved into twilight and I and I looked and I hung out on Facebook and all of it I
was looking at this continuum of what girls were seeing and hearing and playing
with from toddler to tween and how that was affecting their sense of self their
development of their sexuality their body image their ideas about their future
relationships and their sense of their academic and professional potential and I
started with the princess's with the question of whether the very thing that claim
to be protective of girls to protect them against premature sexualization was
actually priming them for it I'm only going to give you one slide that has text and
then read it because I know you can read and I hate when people do this but this is
important so sexualization because we bandy that term around a lot it's when
a girl learns that her value comes primarily from her appearance especially looking
hot or this can be any of these can be true or any combination of them can be true
she's held to
a narrow standard equating physical attractiveness with being sexy or she sexually
objectifies herself or as objectified she judges her body by how she thinks it
looks to others rather than how it feels to her or adult sexuality is
inappropriately imposed on her so let that marinate for
a second because you're going to need to remember it and you will be quizzed. The
American Psychological Association issued
a report on the sexualization of girlhood that showed them in that that as this has
become so and as girls excessively focus on their appearance especially
a narrow defined ideal of appearance they become at risk for the vulnerabilities
that we worry about with girls obviously it's not a plus because see but there's
a vulnerability there for distorted body image eating disorders depression
low self-esteem poor sexual choices all the things that we worry about so cute so
keep that in mind and now I'm going to go back to the princess
a. So when my daughter came home and said that she there were these Disney
princesses I don't know what she was talking about and it turned out that there was
a reason for that the Disney princesses did not exist until two thousand and I know
you're all thinking yeah they did but they didn't there were those movies right
there was Cinderella snow white maybe if you're
a little younger there was beauty and the Beast. And they would come out and they
would be in theaters for maybe two weeks and they'd be available on V.H.S.
Later on and there would be
a little bit of merchandise around that but then what would happen is they would
come out of the theaters and Disney would say they go back in the vault that's what
they talk about with their languages and they all the merchandise would disappear
and you wouldn't see those characters again for seven years until
a new generation of children came along so what changed was that around about two
thousand there was
a guy who became the new head of consumer licensing and he went down to Phoenix
Arizona to familiarize himself with the brand and he saw all these little girls
coming to this ice show and they were dressed in princess outfits but they were not
official Disney licensed products they were making their own costumes huge profit
potential lost so he went back and for the first time in the history of Disney he
pulled these characters out of these different movies and group them together to
market separately from the film's release and call them Disney princesses now this
movie was incredibly controversial within Disney and I'm going to tell you my very
favorite piece of Disney trivia now. Roy Disney who was Walt's nephew was totally
against this because he said you know if you put Cinderella and Snow White on the
same T.
Shirt it's like mixing mythologies and you know I don't know the world implodes I'm
not I'm not really sure what they what he thought would happen but I can't do it so
to appease that faction. When you see multiple princesses on an item
you'll notice that they're all looking slightly different directions and that's
because they're not supposed to know the other ones are there and now that you know
that it's going to drive you crazy every time you say yeah. Yeah it also has this
weird thing after like staring at this for several years now of of isolating the
prince and you know I mean Prince this is don't have girlfriends right you know God
forbid you know Cinderella should give Sleeping Beauty
a little support. So it does sort of also have this kind of subtle effect of
communicating you know it's all about you and it's not about anybody else and it's
not about any other girls so you know there is that aspect of it too I think that's
my take anyway and so anyway they put these out there they put these characters out
there in the first year they did
a three hundred million dollars business which you know pretty good lunch money
right. Ten years later it's a four billion dollars
a year business there are twenty six thousand plus Disney princess products which
when you consider that they can't put them on. Cigarettes liquor cars or
antidepressants. You know how to even think about twenty six thousand products
which is why you start getting things like Disney princess grapes Yes those are
grapes and when you know as Disney goes so goes childhood they define childhood
especially when they're making four billion dollars
a year off of childhood so that's why everything from the T.
Shirt vendor at Etsy to bookstores this is I don't know if you can see this but now
in bookstores they have a princess section and
a pretty pink and fancy section Pink has become a apparently a John wrote
a book. To Dora the Explorer have all gone princess
I do really love this one. Says future princess underneath that says President.
Princess is crossed out but I also think that it sort of points out you know what
the difference is in those two messages on the T.
Shirt and I was thinking about this the other day I got this is
a little far afield but I got
a piece of research that went across my desk was. By an economist from MIT who had
gone to four hundred ninety five towns and villages in India and she was looking at
the differential between how. The aspirations parents have for their sons and their
daughters for education and in most places she found that parents were forty two
percent more likely to. Want their son or assume their summer graduate high school
than their daughter and with what we know about the importance of educating girls
for alleviating poverty that's concerning the only place where that was not true
was in West Bengal where for the last several decades they have reserved thirty
percent of positions on local in local government for women and only
there were parents aspirations for their kids' education equal between boys and
girls and you know although it's
a little far afield I also think it's shows how important women's leadership is to
little girls for their aspirations something beyond princesses because you know
they really if they can't see it it's really hard for them to be it so. You
can't look at girls culture without talking about the color pink and you know I
want to be clear here because Pink is not intrinsic pink is just
a color right it's nothing really in transit about about pink It's just that it's
such a strain
e slice of the rainbow you know and it just kind of goes on and on and on one hand
you could say that it celebrates girlhood. But on the other hand it it
fuses. If uses girlhood with girls
a girl's identity to an obsession with appearance and then it presents that not
only as innocent but as evidence of innocence so you start having things like. The
pretty pretty princess board game where this is the Sleeping Beauty version where
you connect you collect a ring a bracelet a necklace and
a crown to match your gown and then you win the game and now you're ready to meet
your prince. One of my favorites here's Princess with
a loving heart make up kit What gives you your loving heart is your make up this is
really my favorite reponse will escape from the tower lip and nail set. Because
that's what that character was about and that's what you see is that as as these
products have proliferated they become
a lot less about maybe some of the better lessons from the movies some of the more
admirable character traits that some of the princes You don't see Cinderella
anymore in her rags you just see it being about the bling and it may seem like Pink
is is naturally in coded in girls' D.N.A.
Like they go for it like heat seeking missiles but in fact that's not true and if
you look back historically
a little over one hundred years of the turn of the last century you find that back
then all small children and babies were white as
a practical matter because they didn't have made tag and they had to boil close to
get them clean and when color first came into the nursery pink was actually
assigned to boys because it was seen as the more the pastel version of Red and read
was associated with masculinity and the God of War and all of that and blue was
assigned to girls because it was associated with constancy and faithfulness and the
Virgin Mary and when and where that switched is not really clear but as late as the
one nine hundred thirty S.
The New York City department store Lord and Taylor did
a poll of its customer base and thirty percent of them still said Pink was for boys
and blue is for girls so I don't think anybody would get that you know wrong today
and even in well what Disney movies Pink was. Was the color for boys and blue for
girls so if you look at this is. Peter Pan when he's wearing
a blue dress and Michael has his pink P.J.
On this is the jolly pink giant and this is you know Sleeping Beauty Sleeping
Beauty had a blue dress now she's a pink one but she's still
a blue dress and prints Prince Charming was dressed in pink and for me it really
pointed out how much of what we think is natural with kids is naturalized and also
how much marketing can define how we think about kids development so when I did
a little more digging I found out that. Toddler the word toddler I
assumed like at least somebody with a Ph D.
Made that up but in fact it was
a marketing gimmick and it was. Developed because it was for boys because it was
thought that parents who thought that their child was going to be treated more like
a little man would be looser with their purse strings so this is how children dress
little boys dressed in around one thousand nine hundred and this is the thirty
second president of the United States Seattle who would that be anybody.
I like that there that Franklin Roosevelt That's Franklin Roosevelt Isn't he the
prettiest little girl you ever saw Yeah if his white dress and his patent leather
Mary Janes. So that was that was why toddler came about and it was only after it
became shoppers parlance that it became
a full on developmental phase and if that seems difficult to believe.
Think about the trajectory of the word tween tween was
a marketing construct developed in the eighty's mostly applied to girls and used
for girls I've seen it used as for girls as young as seven when. They're adept old
enough to be adept with the lip gloss wand to girls as old as fourteen and I would
said to you that that is an age range that does not and probably should not have
a whole lot in common and that's one of the main. Issues with tween is that it
raises the lines between little girl and big girl and it creates this kind of mass
of consumer little girls and removes that kind of protective layer that used to be
between childhood and teenage And yet even as on one hand there's this
a ratio of difference there's also this magnification in the other direction so
this sounds
a little contradictory but contradictory but dividing people into smaller and
smaller groups actually increases sales so an executive at Leap Frog called this
the pink factor to me she said you know if you have
a little boy first and then you have
a little girl you're so excited to have the little princess that you're going to
buy everything all over again in pink and conversely if you have the little girl
first and you buy everything in pink and then you have
a little boy loops gotta buy it all over again in boy colors but either way you
double your sales and so we're seeing this unprecedented emphasis on gender
differences at at the youngest ages so when I went to the I went to the
International Toy Fair in New York and I went into the Fisher Price room and. There
were two rooms in there one was for girls one was for boys the girls said had
a banner in pink that said beautiful colorful pretty beautiful and
pretty are synonyms they could not think of three separate words for
girls. Boys got energy heroes and power. So there
was this you know this magnification on the order of feeling like made me feel like
I was on the set of Mad Men. And
a magnifying and inventing of differences where they didn't exist so you guys
remember that little toy phone Fisher Price fun that you probably had when you were
a kid with little eyes on it now they make a girls version of that
a pink one. They make
a pink Fisher Price bust now. Remember the popcorn popper they make
a pink one of those now and here's the new Fisher Price brilliant basics teethers
it's a little hard to tell but the little glamour kit for your six month old has
a purse a diamond ring and
a charm bracelet and the fund of fix kit for your boy has a hammer that's a hammer
a saw and wrenches. So you might say what's the big deal right
boys play with some toys girls play with other toys that's the way it goes you know
yes and no so I want to take
a little moment here to discuss nature versus nurture talk about that with gender.
And the first thing to understand is that little kids don't understand gender the
way that we do. My favorite example of this is
a story that is told by Sandra Brown who's
a psychologist to Cornell about her son who's probably forty no one hates
a story but. When he was in preschool he went to preschool wearing his beloved
barrettes to class and he got there and this other little boy was just mocking him
saying you're a girl you're a girl and he said No I'm
a boy I'm going to read about in C.P.S.
Can I I just did OK so. There you go I'm a boy I have
a penis and and the other boys you know said Now you're a girl you're
a girl you're guys that know I'm a boy I have
a penis and finally this went on and germy got so disgusted that he dropped his
pants and he said See I'm a boy I have
a penis and the other little boy totally unimpressed said everybody has
a penis only girls wear barrettes. Yeah
but you know that is that's really how kids see it they don't understand that you
know for the great majority of us that the sex we're born with is the one we're
going to stay. And they think that if I left this room and I put on
a suit and tie and cut my hair short I would turn into
a man that you can either you can turn to change sex as easily as changing your
clothes which is partly why three year old girls don't want to be you can't
suddenly stuff your three year old into pants why they want to have the long hair
and stuff because they are trying to cling to the idea that they're girls with
whatever extreme representation Zz their culture gives them that's what kids need
because you know if you thought that you could just like suddenly inadvertently
change sex or choose to be a mommy or make you
a little nervous so they tend to gravitate towards these extremes which when we
were little may have been like baby dolls and baby buggies and you know playing
house and now are princesses and spawn make overs for three year olds. So there's
a way that the rigidity of little kids is natural and there's
a way that this developmental phase is is natural and being exploited but is real
however early childhood is also the time when the brain is the most plastic.
In most open to change and then kids are laying down tracks that will last the rest
of their lives about gender about everything so every experience a little you know
a child has and the younger the child the bigger the effect the first time they
speak they learn to walk then or to talk they would laugh they cry they fall down
they run everything affects their brain and their neurological level strengthening
some neurons at the expense of others so when children play in gendered worlds and
are only exposed to the ways styles and experiences that are attributed to their
SATS it has an impact on them and when they're exposed to
a broader range of styles and and. Experiences that has an impact too
so there was
a study of more than five thousand three year olds and they found that among those
three year olds that the girls who had older brothers had better spatial skills
than girls with older sisters or boys with older sisters so there was
a way that exposure to whatever it is that older boys do. Changed the little girls
brains and made them more. Strengthen their stock with their spatial skills so
rather than thinking about nature or nurture the issue is actually how nurture
becomes nature how what we expose kids to becomes natural to them
and if we don't want those little inborn differences to become big gaps and we want
children to be able to realize the whole range of their potential it's really
important for them to experience the whole range of play styles and there's also
some indication that kids who experience cross sex play who have friends of the
opposite sex when they're in preschool or kindergarten or early elementary grades
have better dating relationships when they're older so it's really hard though to
do that when you know when there's this hyper segmentation So here's a box
a Lego box from the one thousand nine hundred fifty S.
It's yellow There's two little girls. On the little boy playing together this is
Lego aisles today it's very clear who's supposed to play with what and it's just
really hard when
a girl is sitting in an all pink room reading pink Alicia's in her pink princess
dress looking at her pink magic eight ball to make those cross sex friendships
happen and they do happen to really easily the upside is that it's easy your kids
will naturally choose to play in their own groups but they often do play together
and when preschool teachers comment on it they do it more so these things that
separate them unnaturally just drive them apart and make them other to one another
. So back to the world of toys as girls move from two to three to five there's
a shift that happens in
a new idea starts to be attached to that fusion of the inevitability of pink pretty
and in a sense and that shopping. So this is
a pizza place mat this is all the same placemat that was sent to me by
a reader in Philadelphia and you'll see you know there's the pink rim around in the
upper The first picture you can see that there's. A purse and nail polish It's all
to be colored in your cell phone there's the word search where you're looking to
find mall Queen born to shop. Diva party shopper sales that's
OK. And then down is the unscramble where you can unscramble shoe and
hat and sunglasses and then there's the ever popular help the high heeled shoe find
a shopping bag maze. I know right and you know I'd like to tell you that that was
unusual. But not so much here's the Hasbro has made pink versions of classic games
so all the things girls love is the tagline for the pink monopoly where you can
wear instead of houses they have shop. And instead of hotels they have malls.
That's on the bottom there that's those are Scrabble racks from pink Scrabble and
guess what's a seven letter word F.A.S.H.
Iowan Yahtzee They've replaced the numbers on the dice with flip flops hearts
flowers dresses and cell phones. And we first came across this kind of shift
in the in what happens post princess when my daughter was given a make
a run messenger bag for his sixth birthday and you know it had like iron on
transfers hearts flowers that kind of stuff and then it had iron on transfers that
said spoiled and Brat. And you know to her credit my daughter said mom why did they
want me to put spoiled on my purse and I said you know I don't know honey let's
throw that out get
a cookie. And. But I thought
a lot about it you know and I came up with this idea of of girls Power Girls with
a Z.
Because anytime you see that. You've got trouble. Where is girl power that we used
to talk about in the one nine hundred ninety S.
Celebrated ability over body the new girl's power casts physical perfection
as not only
a source but the source of empowerment for girls and it sells girls self-absorption
self-confidence and the kind of hope Prince part drops out and female independence
empowerment and identity are expressed through materialism and narcissism and
putting spoiled on your purse So another way that I think about this is the car
dash in ization of girlhood. And you start walking through Toys R Us and the tone
of the toys and the time in the color of the pink begins to change and it becomes
a lot less Cinderella and
a lot more wicked stepsister So you start seeing the new dolls tie girls remember
those ones on the upper left fuse put those in your minds and talk about them again
later. Brats Moxy girls Monster High That's the new line of undead sesame street
walkers that. Mattel has put out most popular toy for Christmas last year sassy
which is sexy with training wheels there's been
a rise of birthday parties for little kids so that's the bit. In the upper left.
Disney World where you can pay two hundred dollars for your daughter to be made
over here as her famous favorite princess upper right is sweet and sassy
a mall store over store another one called raspberry lips and that little girl on
the right she's. I took that off to somebody is blog she was on
a hope you know here I. Did it without permission. But that she's been to
a raspberry lips party so you see sort of the girls power thing in this. Craft
kits for girls has started to be about this too so you have make your own lip ball
make your own pedicure nail art flip flop that's creativity for kids science kits
for girls are perf human lab beauty pampering boutique baths just as
a comparison science kits for boys physics and chemistry. Go go go
figure right perils of the deep rocket slime so and then there's the pink in the
purse and let's. Just go the pink. Pink.
Notice it everywhere now. Do you feel bombarded by those girls are you know they're
really bombarded by this stuff and you know the thing about girls power is that
with disease it's not collective change through community through gathering with
other girls through leadership through engagement it's individual change through
make over and the ultimate achievement of girls power is fame which becomes kind of
a value in its own right independent of hard work and skill you know famous for
just being famous.
So one of the terms marketers talk about when they talk about all this is K G O Y
which is kids getting older younger and. That's the idea that kids are more
sophisticated at
a younger age than they used to be and so they want more sophisticated playthings
and media and it's an interesting concept because they're also saying adults are
staying younger or older. So if kids are getting older or younger and adults are
staying older younger or older our kids are going to be older than we are at some
point. Or we're all going to need it forever twenty one right. Which is
not irrelevant because I think there is
a piece of this that is about how we adult women talk about and view our own bodies
and beauty and how we talk about it in front of our girls and how we deal with our
own issues around these and it's complicated I mean I'm very clear in the book I am
contradictory I'm hypocritical as
a mother I go against my own beliefs sometimes because you know that's part of
navigating this world. So I'm very much in the soup with you know with with all of
you and with everybody that I talk to but anyways
a part of K G O Y is age compression and that's the idea that products are pitched
to older kids and then younger kids wanted to be cool like their older brothers and
sisters reach up and grab them and then the older kids immediately don't want to
anymore so Barbie is
a really good example when Barbie first came out she was pitched
a ten to twelve year old girls and now if you're still playing with Barbie when
you're six kind of
a baby so. For girls that age compression that
attempt to be cool increasingly means looking hot so that explains the growth
market that we've seen in cosmetics for
a twelve year old girls market research independent market research showed recently
that close to half of six to nine year old girls say they regularly use lipstick or
lip gloss the percentage of
a twelve year olds who regularly use mascara or eyeliner doubled between two
thousand and eight and two thousand and ten the biggest cosmetics growth market
right now and really the only one is eight to twelve year old girls so Wal-Mart
just came out with I swear to God an anti-aging line. Last year for eight year olds
and it's not like makeup that you play with you know to like try to be look like
mommy and then wash it's like I missed my bus to third grade because I was putting
on concealer kind of thing and here's Nair pretty which is fruit flavored hair
removal for your unwanted hair when you're nine. And and you know remember that
premature sexualization and early focus on appearance puts girls at risk I think
that yeah I did you know so you can look at that slide again talking and it also
takes tremendous mental resources so there's just
a couple studies that I like to try to just kind of. Illustrate this point one is.
Was at Stanford and they took two groups of young women in advanced calculus and
they saw girls who were good at math and they showed them each for thirty each
group for
a thirty second answer the first group saw just kind of generic neutrally ads and
the second group saw two ads that were neutral and two ads that were more were
either stereotypically or overtly sexist in their depiction of women and
afterwards they gave them
a survey gauging their interest in STEM careers science technology engineering math
and the young women who had seen the sexist ads reported
a lower interest in pursuing those careers after just seeing two ads and it seemed
like I read that I thought really could that be but there's this idea of stereotype
vulnerability that when the stereotype of your group is presented to you you
conform to it so if I told you that you know girls don't do very well on this math
test you would not do as well that math as does he would have if I told you that
girls do well on this Methodist so another study that showed this was I actually
really like this one even better they took four groups two men two women college
age and put them in dressing rooms and they had half the men and half the women try
on a sweater and half the men and have two women try on
a bathing suit and then they gave them
a math test I don't know who funds the stuff but you know and. The
young women who were wearing the bathing suit their scores were lower compared to
all the other groups and there was no such difference with no difference in the
scores with the men between the sweaters and the being suits so you know maybe they
were cold I don't know but I tend to think that there's something for young women
that happens when their mental resources or their attention becomes focused on
their appearance and on the vulnerabilities of their parents that can directly
affect their performance so when we talk about what girls are playing with what
they're watching what they're absorbing it does become really relevant and
girls are focusing on an ideal body image at
a younger and younger age so. I don't know if you guys remember Strawberry
Shortcake that doll from the so. She got
a remake this is the new. This is the new rainbow bright.
Holly Hobbie trolls with a Z.
. Care Bears on
a diet My Little Pony Lego one thousand nine hundred.
Eighty. And Dora so I know Dora this new
Dora is for tweens which Nickelodeon described to me as five to eight year olds.
So but we know with age compression which we just talked about that you know old
Dora is probably going to be given the boot along with boots. Pretty soon. You know
so there's no Dora It's not that she's sexy but she's pretty and she's skinny and
that's part of the package and it's telling little girls that they better get with
that program at
a very young age and they are because they're already rejecting things that don't
fit that image when I when I talk to manufacturers about why they had done this to
these toys they said that little girls won't play with the little chubby child like
looking toys they want pretty skinny dolls so they are realizing at
a very very young age now that that is the way to go so we've talked
a little bit about. Cognitive issues about nature versus nurture.
About body image I want to talk
a little bit about the ex the impact of sexualization and on girl sexual health
because when girls are encouraged to play sassy when they're encouraged play sexy
too soon even if they don't understand what they're doing and maybe especially if
they don't understand what they're doing it undermines their sexual development and
it can be because they are old enough to understand to connect that Iran that
performance with any kind of authentic erotic feeling the risk becomes that that
disconnect becomes permanent and that girls continue to see sexuality as
a something that they perform rather than feel and eventually make choices that are
against their own self-image interest me and I think it's really important for us
as adults not only to protect the littlest girls from that but also to help older
girls by helping them distinguish and disentangle the ideas of sexualization from
sexuality because you know and this is how you can help to not feel like
a prude which I know
a lot of people think you know I just I just don't know how to talk about this but
sexualization is something that's externally foisted on girls and sexuality is
something that's developed from within and the way that I think about it is the
different kind of Rorschach to use is the difference between learning that you are
supposed to be desirable and that your focus should be on being desirable versus
learning to understand and connect to your own desire. And I think that that bait
and switch is really nowhere more evident than in what Disney wants girls to go to
after the animated princesses which is the flesh and blood princesses like Miley
Cyrus being you know the most famous but not the only example and initially these
girls it's the same cycle every time they're marketed as wholesome right and they
wear those true love waits rings that promise that they're going to be
a virgin till they get married. And Miley you know when she was fourteen right
before she was fifteen she was on Oprah and she said you know I look way young and
I want to stay that way and I try to choose clothes that moms will approve of and
girls will love and you know three months later the remember that Vanity Fair shoot
that raise that this was an image of her in Vanity Fair the one on the left. Where
she looks kind of like she just got out of bed with
a lover that was the thing that made parents man I think the other image is way
creepier That's her dad you know that's really weird. But anyway that was my late
fifteen This is Miley at seventeen this is Miley it eighteen and again the issue is
not sexuality right sex is OK it's that Disney made Miley's virginity into
a marketing gimmick and so inevitably what came after became
a marketing gimmick as well and that virgin whore transformation that those girls
go through over and over and over again when they make this big statement teaches
girls over and over over again that self objectification is
a feminine rite of passage so you take that thirteen year old girl who has been
marinating in the Princess industrial complex since she was
a toddler and you set it loose on Facebook. With her six hundred twenty two B F F's
. And suddenly she becomes her own mini Miley complete with the adoring fan base
that she has to maintain and there's this research from the Children's Digital
Media Center in U.C.L.A. At U.C.L.A.
Which is found that college students are beginning to talk about identity about the
self as something not cultivated from within but something that you developed as
kind of
a brand that your marketing and your friends become the equivalent of fans or
consumers or now on Facebook and subscribers and building that brand they found
that girls are rewarded with the most positive feedback when they post pictures
that are provocative but not too provocative so just like the stars just
like Miley and all those girls girls become engaged in the super public negotiation
that used to be you know maybe as perennial but didn't used to be so out there and
voted on so clearly between being sexy but not slutty
and I think that that gives the lie to any idea that the pervasive sexualization of
girls in any way empowers them or gives them more control over their are their
sexuality and you could even argue that it gives them less because now you know
their photographs and such can spread further faster and speaking of that spreading
in two thousand and nine I wrote a poll by A.P.
That said twenty two percent of teenage girls had Center posted nude or seminude
photos of themselves online or or texted and my initial response to that was come
on really that just sounded like a sex panic to me and then just
a couple days after that one of my dear friends called me up was of ninth grade boy
and she was looking at his computer you know snooping around and she found
a. Picture on there of a classmate of his that he didn't even know very well
a girl naked from the waist up and she called me up to say look. I'm trying to
teach my boy to respect women I'm trying to teach him that girls are not playthings
How am I supposed to do that when some girl sending him
a new tee shot and I really wrestled with it because I really you know I tried to
be sort of open mind and I thought like is there some way that this could be spun
as positive. Seriously like you know maybe she's feeling comfortable in her body
maybe she's you know we have
a double standard and she's transcending that you know I'm not really sure but it
you know just didn't really say what was she getting out of this Exactly and and so
I called Tallman who is at Hunter College in New York in
a sort of the guru of female girls' desires she is working female desire and she
said that what they've been seeing is that increasingly sexual agency the idea that
you're you have untitled to entitle me to express sexuality to be sexual you know
to have an erotic life that that in itself has become the latest performance for
teenage girls so it becomes singing that they have to do or prove rather than
authentically feel and that makes it really tricky to talk about to girls about
sexuality and about their desire and about something authentic and she said that
what she was finding was and she was interviewing teenage girls and asking them to
describe how. Experience of of
sexual arousal felt to them they would increasingly respond by how they felt they
looked and she had to tell them that looking good was not
a feeling and what I think should be a T.
Shirt. But I think that there's an arc there that is worth considering and worth
thinking about and I'm like looking out at you guys and even though it's kind of
bright and I can't see you and still sing that you're all looking like so bombed
you're saying they're going. This is sad but. So I just want to
say that you know I say all this because I really believe that understanding and
awareness are the first step to change you know understanding the culture that
girls are in helping your daughter understand and she grows demanding strange and
we you know adults in girls' lives whether your parents or grandparents or aunties
or uncles or teachers or advocates you know we have so much more power than we know
and I was thinking about that
a lot last week when or maybe two weeks ago now when. The
Susan G.
Komen Foundation pulled its funding from Planned Parenthood and it was forced to
reinstate it because collectively with one voice women and
men put down they just went no you don't. And took this huge basically corporation
and didn't let them do something and it was
a tremendously powerful moment and I think that we can you know we can really learn
from that with the Lego girls which recently came out that I showed you
a couple slides of the girls can build you know beauty parlors or cafes.
And more and fifty two thousand people signed
a petition on Change dot org saying you know we want girls to play with Lego not
like this and Lego has now called for a meeting with the heads of
a number of girls advocacy organizations to discuss how they can really shaped this
to make it something that is more you know amenable to parents and to girls and
less insulting meets better criteria so there was this way that you know the
parental pushback particularly in the consumer culture makes
a big difference and I think about it
a lot because I'm from Berkeley as being like the food movement and how you know if
I stood up here ten or fifteen years ago and talk to you guys about trans fat and
free range chicken you have thought I was
a crazy person and now I hope you don't now because of you know
really
a couple of books because of Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation that sparked
this national conversation not everywhere not everybody for sure but
a lot of places a lot of people
a lot of communities have changed or are making change to make the way we eat more
wholesome more sustainable you know more environmentally sound and healthier for us
and the way that we talk the language we use when we talk about food is the same
language we use when we talk about media and culture you know our kids consume the
junk it's unhealthy for them and I think that there's
a reason that that language is the same and you know if we could get McDonald's to
put healthier items on its menu we can change Mattel you know for going to sakes so
on
a collective level I see change and I see possibility and on an individual level.
You know no is
a good word when kids are little and it does work. It's also not
enough and I learned that the hard way remember
a long time ago I told you remember those Thai girls dolls they look like Bratz
dolls but plush. My daughter and I were walking in the Los Angeles Airport when she
was four and they had a
a rack of those at the airport and she just was like I don't know if I can emit
a gamma rays and she was like Mommy can I have one of those and something in me
snapped and I just I just I was like No no you cannot ever ever ever
ever ever have one of those and. Mommy was and he was very inappropriate like why
are they on
a program I just thought I don't want to explain why they're inappropriate you know
I just I'm so darn sick of the teachable moment you know.
So sick of it and I thought they had me over
a barrel because you are never going to be able to convince your daughter that she
has broader choices when you're always saying no and so I came to the conclusion
that you know the issue the way to go is to limit you know but not censor but also
really focus on expanding expanding girls' ideas of what and boys to of what it
means to be female and feminine and so I actually on my website which is Peggy
Orenstein dot com are Cinderella at my daughter dot com I've been developing
a resources list which you're welcome to look at and and also add to by emailing me
of playthings and books and movies and all kinds of things that offer not just the
neutral stuff you know I think and I think we tend to think either neutral or we
think binary you know you know my daughter's wearing
a princess dress or she's sleeping with a football. But I think there's
a third way and that's about creating an idea of the feminine that is positive and
strong and internally based and as an example of that again you know when my
daughter was little we started reading child friendly versions of Greek myths so
you don't like the ones where Homer Hercules killing all these kids but you know
other ones and. And she went trick or treating that you're dressed as Athena
goddess of war and wisdom so she's still got to wear like the cool dress thing and
she's got to wear like that meat thing on her head a little silver crown
a thing but it was a totally different archetype
a totally different image of what it meant to be feminine than Disney Cinderella it
was in China Lee based it was powerful it was from the inside out rather than the
outside in and it's you know it allowed her to celebrate herself as
a girl and feel that feeling of I'm a girl I'm a girl but in
a way that I could totally embrace and say yes to so I think we have to do that
kind of creative thinking also as girls get over older giving power back to them is
really great getting them involved in their own media literacy and talking back and
getting them control of reproduction. There's
a happy girls this is what we want so Girls Inc and Girl Scouts both have great
programs this way. Girls Leadership Institute. For those of you who are reading the
standards wanted to put this up there are Girls Leadership Institute org is
a great source about face dot org has ideas of things that you can do
with girls as to spark summit they have things you can download activities and
things that you can download healthy hearty girls healthy women so this is powered
by Girl which is part part of hearty girls healthy women and what they do is they
have the girls take existing ads and talk back to them so the one on the right is
it ad for Diesel jeans and it says in third grade I learned the appropriate way to
act in
a museum it didn't look like this. And on the left the person she's
saying she's thinking can't blink don't breathe and I'm cold so firing my agent.
And so there's this kind of funny way that girls can you know engage and interact
and talk back and you can actually go on their website and they have ads up there
that you can do that too and your daughter can do that too which is
a great way to I think you know it can be transformative to get control over the
culture for girls and it can really help them turn you know from Princess to hero
am. And I think our task as parents Diane Levin talks and wrote so sexy so soon
talks about these two boxes that kids carry around in their had and one is the box
that has all the popular culture stuff and all the values there and the other is
the box of stuff that we want for them you know to fulfill their potential to be
competent to be kind to be compassionate all that you know all the values that we
have and the culture box is too big right now and so the task is to kind of make it
smaller to limit it as long as you can but also to create bridges between the boxes
so that you're helping children have vocabulary and
a critical eye when they look at these things so that they can that we're with them
in it with them as allies not as adversaries and they are able to decode them for
themselves and I just want to say and by. I love the fairy tales
you know I want to talk about the fairy tales for second and I particularly love
Cinderella Cinderella the oldest Cinderella is from eight fifty A.D.
It's called the action she's Chinese and there are. Over seven hundred
Cinderella stories they it crosses all cultures it's like
a universal story and something that common I feel like it has to have something
worthy in right and one of my favorite ones is the Grimm Cinderella it's it's
actually called. But I'm going to call it Cinderella because my throat's trying to
hurt and so in that scene wrote like OK it's incredibly bloody I don't know if any
of you have read it incredibly bloody the stepsister one cuts get one cuts off her
heel to get in the shoe and blood is spinning there because of her toe and blood is
spurting and flying and then Cinderella seems to be nicely asking them to be her
bridesmaids when she finally is going to marry the Prince and they walk in on
either side of her and Central has these dogs perch on her shoulders that pack out
the stepsisters eyes like imagine the wedding photos you know. So it's really gross
and gory but it has this great you know you read these things differently at
different times of your life which I think is really the beauty of them and so when
I read Cinderella Now this is what I see
a Cinderella story about these about this father goes on
a business trip and he asks his daughters what they want him to bring back and the
you know the wicked stepsisters came and Chloe. They. Ask for bling
and. Asks him to bring back a branch that brushes his face
a twig so he brings her
a hazel branch and she plants it in the grass her dead mother's grave and she
waters it with her tears and this tree grows from that and there's no no fairy
godmother there's no pumpkin she walks to the ball. Gets on by her but
it's the tree that provides the wherewith all for her to go to the ball and there's
this way that this story is about
a mother's love transcending death to help guide her daughter from girlhood to
womanhood and when I read the story that way I think we've got to bring back the
tree I mean we whether we're women or men whatever we are we adults and girls'
lives need to be those deep roots and those sheltering branches that help them
navigate through the thicket of what this culture tells them it means to be female
you know not lock them in
a tower like the other fairy tale but help them have the tools to get through so
that they can find their real and their true happily ever after so with that
and I'm happy to take questions thank you for coming.
I have. Across the country for me and has
a wonderful. Wicked bright and gorgeous and I I just
don't know what to do sometimes because some of her talk about you know about how
she likes that she and other things just make me super uncomfortable and I don't
know how to address it without. Getting into
a business that's not mine because she's not my daughter. Without doing that thing
where you know she's at the age where if you start pushing for something she's
going to run the opposite way so I just was looking for some guidance on like how
to be positive. Without you know being there in person and without being and
actually parent right well I think there's
a couple things you know one is. One is. You know giving
her positive feedback for things that you think are great about her that are not
about her looks you know giving her positive feedback for you know her art or her
sports or her whatever it is that she does know that that are about her as
a person. And asking her questions you know I think it's fair to engage
a kid by asking open ended questions it's the best way to engage them on these
things because if you start lecturing them and saying you know this is what I think
and this is bad and you are not this is false empowerment I mean that they would
use that language with an eleven year old but essentially right. That it's not
going to it's not going to work but but just sort of trying to engage her in
discussion without having
a goal for what the discussion ought to be and how it ought to come out is your
best bet in that position and then you know having stuff when she's at your house
that you do together that is model some other things. I would say that would be the
best and then presume of the two of us step daughter you have
a daughter's father in the house with you and I just you know would want to say
a word that men's roles here fathers uncles grandfathers you know where were the
man in a girl's life as are tremendously important in how
a girl grows up and how she sees herself both in terms of how that man talks to the
girl's mother and also there's
a lot of research that girls who have support from emotional support from their
fathers not about being pretty but about who you are have
a stronger body images. You know less distorted negative body image and also that
they're more likely to go into nontraditional fields than other girls so
a fathers. Regard positive regard in
a girl's life can really be
a wonderful thing and so I'm always really pleased when men come to see me or
listen to me or call into the radio for that reason.