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.
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 there 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 was thinking like I can just
imagine what's going on where women actually shave their legs.
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'd go to the drug store and the nice lady behind the checkout counter would
offer her a balloon and say, I know which color you want and give her a pink one without
asking.
And, you know, the tattooed and pierced 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 dentists that
charge double because they have Pac-Man in the office.
You do.
And the dentist said to me, my daughter, excuse me, you want to get in my princess throne
and I'll sparkle your teeth?
And I just went, oh my gosh, do you 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, 24-7, 365 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 number than boys.
And yet the pressure to define themselves through appearance, to believe that how they
looked, very narrowly defined, is who they are, had not abated one wit.
And if anything, it had grown, that message had grown more intense and it was skewing
younger so that when I kind of delved into the research, I looked at a study of 2,000
elementary school aged kids.
And it found that between 2000 and 2007, 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 aged women and I was looking at Princeton University.
They had become alarmed because the percentage of young women in leadership positions, elected
and appointed in volunteer 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 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 princesses with the question of whether the very thing that claimed
to be protective of girls, to protect them against premature sexualization was actually
priming them for it.
I'm only gonna 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 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 is 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 gonna need to remember it and you will
be quizzed.
The American Psychological Association issued a report on the sexualization of girlhood
that showed 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 B equals C, 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 keep that in mind.
And now I'm gonna go back to the princesses.
So when my daughter came home and said that there were these Disney princesses, I didn'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 2000.
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 VHS 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'd
go back in the vault.
That's what they talk, what their language is.
And 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 2000, 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 grouped them together to market separately from a
film's release and call them Disney princesses.
Now this move was incredibly controversial within Disney and I'm gonna 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
I don't know, the world implodes.
I'm not really sure what they, what he thought would happen but 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 gonna drive you crazy every time you see it.
Yeah.
It also has this weird thing after like staring at this for several years now of isolating
the princess, you know, I mean princesses 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 and the first
year they did a $300 million business, which you know, pretty good lunch money, right?
Ten years later, it's a $4 billion a year business.
There are 26,000 plus Disney princess products, which when you consider that they can't put
them on cigarettes, liquor, cars or antidepressants, you know, it's hard to even think about 26,000
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 $4 billion 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 apparently a genre of book.
To Dora the Explorer have all gone princess.
I do really love this one.
Says future princess, underneath it 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 that 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 495 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 42% more likely to want their son or
assume their son would 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 30% of positions 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 shows how important
women's leadership is to little girls for their aspirations, something beyond princesses,
because you know, 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 intrinsically bad about pink.
It's just that it's such a tiny 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 fuses
– it fuses girlhood with – 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 is Princess with a Loving Heart makeup kit.
What gives you your loving heart is your makeup.
This is really my favorite.
Yeah, Rapunzel, 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 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 naturally encoded in girls' DNA, 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 a hundred years to the turn of the last
century, you find that back then all small children and babies wore white as a practical
matter because they didn't have Maytag and they had to boil clothes to get them clean.
And when color first came into the nursery, pink was actually assigned to boys because
it was seen as the pastel version of red.
And red 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 1930s, the New York
City department store Lord & Taylor did a poll of its customer base, and 30 percent
of them still said pink was for boys and blue was for girls.
So I don't think anybody would get that wrong today.
And even in Walt Disney movies, pink was the color for boys and blue for girls.
So if you look at, this is Peter Pan.
Wendy's wearing a blue dress and Michael has his pink PJ on.
This is the Jolly Pink Giant.
And this is Sleeping Beauty.
Sleeping Beauty had a blue dress, now she has a pink one, but she used to have a blue
dress and 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 PhD 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.
And this is how little boys dressed in around 1900.
And this is the 32nd President of the United States, Seattle.
Who would that be?
Anybody?
Uh-oh.
I like to throw that out.
Franklin Roosevelt.
That's Franklin Roosevelt.
Isn't he the prettiest little girl you ever saw?
Yeah, with his white dress and his patent leather Mary Janes.
So that was why toddler came about.
And it was only after it became Shopper's Parlance that it became a full 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 80s, mostly applied to girls, and used
for girls.
I've seen it used for girls as young as seven when Bonnie Bell says they're old enough to
be adept with a lip gloss wand, to girls as old as 14.
And I would submit 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 erases 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 erasure of difference, there's also this magnification
in the other direction.
So this sounds a little contradictory, but dividing people into smaller and smaller groups
actually increases sales.
So an executive at LeapFrog 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, oops, 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 the youngest ages.
So when 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 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.
Girls got energy, heroes, and power.
So there was this magnification on the order of feeling, 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 do you guys remember that little toy phone, Fisher Price phone 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 bus 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 fun-to-fix kit for your boy has 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, because I think
we always have to 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 Bem, who's a psychologist
at Cornell, about her son, who's probably 40 now and hates this story.
But when he was in preschool, he went to preschool wearing his beloved berets 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 on the radio, but I can say penis, can I?
I can say penis.
I just did.
OK.
So there you go.
I'm a boy.
I have a penis.
And the other boy said, no, you're a girl, you're a girl, you're a girl.
And he said, no, I'm a boy.
I have a penis.
And finally, this went on and on, and Jeremy 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 berets.
Yeah.
But you know, 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 a tie and cut my hair
short, I would turn into a man.
That you can either, you can 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 representations their culture gives them.
That's what kids think.
And if you thought that you could just like suddenly, inadvertently change sex or choose
to be a mom or a dad, you know, it would 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 in spa makeovers 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 natural and being exploited, but
is real.
However, early childhood is also the time when the brain is the most plastic, dorsal
limb, and 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, they learn to talk, they laugh, they cry,
they fall down, they run.
Everything affects their brain on a 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 sex, it has an impact on them.
And when they're exposed to a broader range of styles and experiences, that has an impact
too.
So there was a study of more than 5,000 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 that exposure to whatever it is that older boys do changed the little
girls' brains and made them more, strengthened their spatial skills.
So rather than thinking about nature or nurture, the issue is actually how nurture becomes
nature.
How would 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 are older.
So it's really hard, though, to do that when there's this hyper-segmentation.
So here's a box, a Lego box from the 1960s.
It's yellow.
There's two little girls and a little boy playing together.
This is Lego Isles 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 Pinkalicious in
her pink princess dress, looking at her pink magic eight ball, to make those cross-sex
friendships happen.
And they do happen really easily.
The upside is that it's easy.
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.
And a new idea starts to be attached to that fusion of the inevitability of pink, pretty,
and innocence, and that's shopping.
And so this is a pizza placemat.
This is all the same placemat that was sent to me by a reader in Philadelphia.
And you'll see there's the pink rim around it.
And 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 its shopping bag maze.
I know, right?
And I'd like to tell you that that was unusual, but not so much.
The Hasbro has made pink versions of classic games.
So all the things girls love is the tagline for the pink monopoly, where instead of houses,
they have boutiques.
And instead of hotels, they have malls.
As on the bottom, those are Scrabble racks from Pink Scrabble.
And guess what's a seven-letter word?
F-A-S-H-I-O-N.
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 what happens post-Princess, when my daughter
was given a make-your-own-messenger bag for his sixth birthday.
And it had iron-on-transfers, hearts, flowers, that kind of stuff.
And then it had iron-on-transfers that said spoiled and brat.
And to her credit, my daughter said, Mom, why do they want me to put spoiled on my purse?
And I said, I don't know, honey, let's throw that out and get a cookie.
But I thought a lot about it.
And I came up with this idea of girls power, girls with a Z. Because anytime you see that
Z, you got trouble.
Whereas girl power, that we used to talk about in the 1990s, celebrated ability over body,
the new girls power casts physical perfection as not only a source but the source of empowerment
for girls.
And it sells girls self-absorption as self-confidence.
And the kind of whole 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 Kardashianization of girlhood.
And you start walking through Toys R Us, and the tone of the toys and 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.
High Girls, remember those ones on the upper left.
Put those in your mind because I'm going to talk about them again later.
Bratz Moxie 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 the rise of spa birthday parties for little kids.
So that's the Bippity Boppity Boutique in the upper left at Disney World where you can
pay $200 for your daughter to be made over as her favorite princess.
Upper right is Sweet and Sassy, a mall store, makeover store.
Another one's called Raspberry Lips.
And that little girl on the right, she's...
I took that off of somebody's blog.
She was on a Raspberry...
I hope you're not here.
I, you know, did it without permission.
But that she's been to a Raspberry Lips party.
So you see sort of the girls' power thing.
And this craft kits for girls have started to be about this too.
So you have the make your own lip balm, make your own pedicure, nail art, flip flop.
That's creativity for kids.
Science kits for girls are Perfume Lab, Beauty Spa, Pampering Boutique, Bath Bomb.
Just as a comparison, science kits for boys.
Physics and chemistry.
Go figure, right?
Girls of the deep rocket slime.
And then there's the pink poodles in the purse.
It's endless pink poodles in pur...
They just go, the pink poodles in the purse.
Pink poodles, pink poodles.
You notice it everywhere now, pink poodles in purses.
Do you feel bombarded by those pink poodles?
Because 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 a makeover.
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, fame is for just being famous.
Yeah.
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 in media.
And it's an interesting concept because they're also saying adults are staying younger older.
So if kids are getting older younger and adults are staying younger older, are kids are gonna
be older than we are at some point?
Or we're all gonna meet at forever 21, 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 am hypocritical as a mother.
I go against my own beliefs sometimes because that's part of navigating this world.
So I'm very much in the soup with all of you and with everybody that I talk to.
But anyway, so 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 wanting
to be cool like their older brothers and sisters reach up and grab them and then the older
kids immediately don't want them anymore.
So Barbie is a really good example, when Barbie first came out, she was pitched to 10 to 12
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 8 to 12 year old girls.
Market research, independent market research showed recently that close to half of 6 to
9 year old girls say they regularly use lipstick or lip gloss.
And the percentage of 8 to 12 year olds who regularly use mascara or eyeliner doubled
between 2008 and 2010.
The biggest cosmetics growth market right now, and really the only one, is 8 to 12 year
old girls.
So Walmart just came out with, I swear to God, an anti-aging line last year for 8 year
old girls, and it's not like makeup that you play with to try to 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 remember that premature sexualization and early focus on appearance puts girls at
risk.
I think I put that, yeah I did, so that you could look at that slide again while I'm talking.
And it also takes tremendous mental resources.
So there's just a couple studies that I like to throw out 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, so girls who were good at math.
And they showed them each group four 30 second ads.
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 and 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 girls don't do very well on this math test, you would not do as
well on that math test as you would have if I told you that girls do well on this math
test.
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 half
the women try on a bathing suit.
And then they gave them a math test.
I don't know who funds this stuff, but there you go.
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 bathing suits.
So 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 appearance that can directly affect a 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, do you remember Strawberry Shortcake, that doll from
the 80s?
So she got a remake.
This is the new Strawberry Shortcake.
This is the new Rainbow Brite.
Holly Hobby.
Trolls with a Z.
Care Bears.
Bears went on a diet.
My Little Pony.
Lego 1982.
Lego Friends today.
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 old Dora is probably
going to be given the boot along with boots pretty soon.
And so this new 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 talked to toy manufacturers about why they had done this to these toys, they said
that little girls won't play with the little chubby childlike 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.
We've talked a little bit about the impact of sexualization on girls' sexual health.
Because when girls are encouraged to play sassy, when they're encouraged to 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 aren't old enough to understand, to connect 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 something that they perform rather than feel,
and eventually make choices that are against their own self-interest.
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.
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 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 kind of Rorschach I 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 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 weights rings that promise that they're going to be a virgin
till they get married.
And Miley, you know, when she was 14, right before she was 15, 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, do you remember that Vanity Fair shoot that raised
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 mad.
I think the other image is way creepier.
That's her dad.
You know, that's really weird.
But anyway, that was Miley at 15.
This is Miley at 17.
This is Miley at 18.
And again, the issue is not sexuality, right?
Sex is okay.
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 and over again that self-objectification
is a feminine rite of passage.
So you take that 13-year-old girl who has been marinating in the Princess Industrial
Complex since she was a toddler and you set her loose on Facebook with her 622 BFFs.
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 at UCLA, which has 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
you're marketing and your friends become the equivalent of fans or consumers or now on
Facebook it's subscribers.
And in building that brand, they found that girls are rewarded with the most positive
feedback when they pose pictures that are provocative, but not too provocative.
So just like the stars, just like Miley and all those girls, girls become engaged in this
super public negotiation that used to be, maybe it's 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 a lie to any idea that the pervasive sexualization of girls
in any way empowers them or gives them more control over their sexuality.
And you could even argue that it gives them less because now their photographs and such
can spread further faster.
And speaking of that spreading, in 2009 I read a poll by AP that said 22% of teenage
girls had center-posted nude or semi-nude photos of themselves online 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 who was a
ninth grade boy and she was looking at his computer, 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's sending him a nudie shot?
And I really wrestled with it because I tried to be sort of open-minded and I thought, is
there some way this could be spun as positive?
Seriously, maybe she's feeling comfortable in her body, maybe we have a double standard
and she's transcending that.
I'm not really sure.
But it just didn't really sit because I was like, well, what's she getting out of this
exactly?
And so I called Deb Tolman, who is at Hunter College in New York and is sort of the guru
of female girls' desire.
She does work on female desire.
And she said that what they've been seeing is that increasingly, sexual agency, the idea
that you have entitlement to express sexuality, to be sexual, to have an erotic life, that
that in itself has become the latest performance for teenage girls.
So it becomes something that they have to do or prove rather than authentically feel.
And that makes it really tricky to talk to girls about sexuality and about their desire
and about something authentic.
And she said that what she was finding was as she was interviewing teenage girls and
asking them to describe how an experience 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, which 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, I'm still seeing that you're
all looking like so bummed.
You're all like sitting there going, oh, god, this is so sad.
So I just want to say that I say all this because I really believe that understanding
and awareness are the first step to change.
Understanding the culture that girls are in, helping your daughter understand it as she
grows, demanding change.
And we adults in girls' lives, whether you're parents or grandparents or aunties or uncles
or teachers or advocates, we have so much more power than we know.
And I was thinking about that a lot last week, or maybe two weeks ago now, when the Susan
G. Komen Foundation pulled its funding from Planned Parenthood and then 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 really learn from that.
With the LEGO Girls, which recently came out that I showed you a couple slides of, the
girls can build beauty parlors or cafes and more.
And 52,000 people signed a petition on change.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 reshape this to make it something that is more amenable
to parents and to girls and less insulting and meets better criteria.
So there was this way that 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 10 or 15 years ago and talked to you guys about
trans fat and free range chicken, you would 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 goodness 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 to remember those
Thai girls dolls, they look like brat's dolls, but plush.
My daughter and I were walking in the Los Angeles airport when she was four and they
had a rack of those in the airport and she just was like, I don't know, it was like an
emitted gamma rays and she was like, mommy, can I have one of those?
And something in me snapped.
And I just, I was like, no, no, you cannot ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have one of those.
And she was like, mommy, why?
And I was like, they're inappropriate.
And she's like, why are they inappropriate?
And I just thought, ah, I don't even want to explain why they're inappropriate.
You know, I just, I am so darn sick of the teachable moment, you know?
So sick of it.
And I thought, they have 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 too, of what it means to be female and feminine.
And so I actually, on my website, which is peggieornstein.com or cinderellaatemydaughter.com,
I've been developing a resources list, which you're welcome to look at and also add to
it by emailing me, of playthings and books and movies and all kinds of things that offer
not just the neutral stuff.
You know, and I think we tend to think either neutral or we think binary.
You know, either 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 know, like not the ones where Hercules is killing all his kids, but you know, other
ones.
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 still got to wear like the
neat thing on her head, the little silver crowny thing.
But it was a totally different archetype, a totally different image of what it meant
to be feminine than Disney's Cinderella.
It was internally based.
It was powerful.
It was from the inside out rather than the outside in.
And 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 older, giving power back to them is really great.
Getting them involved in their own media literacy and talking back and getting them control
over production.
Oh, there's the 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 writing this down, I just wanted to
put this up there.
Girlsleadershipinstitute.org is a great source.
Aboutface.org has ideas of things that you can do with girls, as does Spark Summit.
They have things you can download, activities and things that you can download.
Hardy Girls Healthy Women.
So this is powered by Girl, which is part of Hardy 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 an 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 purse ad, 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 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
to and your daughter can do that to, which is a great way to, I think, it can be transformative
to get control over the culture for girls and it can really help them turn from princess
to heroine.
And I think our task as parents, Diane Levin talks, who wrote So Sexy So Soon, talks about
these two boxes that kids carry around in their head.
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, to fulfill their potential,
to be competent, to be kind, to be compassionate, 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 in it with them as allies,
not as adversaries, and they are able to decode them for themselves.
And I just want to end by, I love the fairy tales.
You know, I want to talk about the fairy tales for a second.
And I particularly love Cinderella.
Cinderella, the oldest Cinderella is from 850 AD.
It's called Yeshen.
She's Chinese.
And there are, oh gosh, over 700 Cinderella stories.
It crosses all cultures.
It's like a universal story.
And something that common, I feel like it has to have something worthy in it, right?
And one of my favorite ones is the Grimm Cinderella.
It's actually called Ashenputro.
But I'm going to call it Cinderella because my throat's starting to hurt.
So in that Cinderella, like, okay, it's incredibly bloody.
I don't know if any of you have read it.
Incredibly bloody.
The stepsisters, one cuts off her heel to get into the shoe, and neither cuts off 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 Cinderella has these doves perched on her
shoulders that peck 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.
Cinderella's a story 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, Kim and Chloe, they ask for bling.
And Cinderella 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 her dead mother's grave.
And she waters it with her tears.
And this tree grows from that.
And there's no, the Grimm's, there's no fairy godmother, there's no pumpkin.
She walks to the ball, there's three balls, she walks to them on her own, gets home on
her own.
But it's the tree that provides the wherewithal 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, right?
I mean, we, whether we're women or men, whatever we are, we adults in 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 afters.
So with that, I'll stop and I'm happy to take questions.
Thank you all for coming.
I have a stepdaughter who's eight and who lives across the country from me and has a
wonderful mother and is wicked bright and gorgeous.
And I just don't know what to do sometimes because some of the things that I hear her
talk about, you know, about how she likes that she's skinny and other things just make
me super uncomfortable.
And I don't know how to address it without A, you know, getting into business that's
not mine because she's not my daughter.
And B, 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 an actual 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, you know, 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, not that you would use that language with an 11-year-old, but essentially,
right?
That it's not gonna work.
But just sort of trying to engage her in discussion without having a goal for what that discussion
ought to, 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
models some other things.
I would say that would be the best.
And then presumably, if you have a stepdaughter, you have a daughter's father in the house
with you.
And I just, you know, would wanna say a word that men's roles here, fathers, uncles, grandfathers,
you know, whoever the man in a girl's life is, 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 stronger body images,
you know, less distorted negative body image, and also that they're more likely to go into
non-traditional fields than other girls.
So a father's regard, positive regard in a girl's life can really be a wonderful thing.
And so I'm always really pleased when men come out to see me or listen to me or call
into the radio for that reason.