WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:19.560 I want to talk tonight a little bit about the work that I did in Cinderella Ate My Daughter 00:19.560 --> 00:22.880 and then some of the ways that we can push back and sort of just go through the ways 00:22.880 --> 00:28.960 that the culture of little girls, the media and marketing and consumer landscape that 00:28.960 --> 00:32.760 they inhabit has changed primarily in the last decade. 00:32.760 --> 00:38.600 So I've been writing about teenage girls for a long time and I started writing about little 00:38.600 --> 00:44.800 girls because I had a daughter, I became a mom. 00:44.800 --> 00:52.320 And I think for most of us with little girls, you know, the first time that you hold that 00:52.320 --> 00:57.880 little girl in your arms, you just think you want her to have, you know, all the potential, 00:57.880 --> 01:02.400 all the possibilities and you don't want there to be anything that she feels like she can't 01:02.400 --> 01:05.400 do because she's a girl and you don't want there to be anything that she feels like she 01:05.400 --> 01:07.920 has to do because she's a girl. 01:07.920 --> 01:12.920 And my husband and I were going along raising our daughter that way and then she went to 01:12.920 --> 01:13.920 preschool. 01:13.920 --> 01:17.400 Oh, how the mighty fall. 01:17.400 --> 01:21.480 And we were walking around town and I live in Berkeley so I was thinking like I can just 01:21.480 --> 01:26.920 imagine what's going on where women actually shave their legs. 01:26.920 --> 01:33.040 And we would go to the local grocery store and the guy behind the checkout counter would 01:33.040 --> 01:35.120 greet her and say, you know, hi princess. 01:35.120 --> 01:39.440 And then we'd go to the drug store and the nice lady behind the checkout counter would 01:39.440 --> 01:43.400 offer her a balloon and say, I know which color you want and give her a pink one without 01:43.400 --> 01:44.400 asking. 01:44.400 --> 01:49.680 And, you know, the tattooed and pierced waitress at the breakfast place owned by Green Day 01:49.680 --> 01:52.120 would give her her princess pancakes. 01:52.120 --> 01:56.500 And finally we went to the dentist, you know, those tricked out pediatric dentists that 01:56.500 --> 01:59.720 charge double because they have Pac-Man in the office. 01:59.720 --> 02:00.720 You do. 02:00.720 --> 02:07.400 And the dentist said to me, my daughter, excuse me, you want to get in my princess throne 02:07.400 --> 02:09.440 and I'll sparkle your teeth? 02:09.440 --> 02:13.480 And I just went, oh my gosh, do you have a princess drill too? 02:13.480 --> 02:19.320 I mean seriously, I remembered availing myself of my mom's cast off tiara now and again when 02:19.320 --> 02:20.320 I was a kid. 02:20.320 --> 02:23.280 You know, royal play is as old as King Arthur's court. 02:23.280 --> 02:32.040 But I didn't remember this idea that for three solid years of my life, 24-7, 365 days a year, 02:32.040 --> 02:36.440 I was not supposed to just like play princess in my room but actually be a princess out 02:36.440 --> 02:38.040 in the world. 02:38.040 --> 02:41.600 And I really didn't know if this was an issue or not. 02:41.600 --> 02:44.920 You know, I mean on one hand girls were doing really well. 02:44.920 --> 02:47.000 They were flooding the playing fields. 02:47.000 --> 02:50.180 They were going to college in greater number than boys. 02:50.180 --> 02:55.880 And yet the pressure to define themselves through appearance, to believe that how they 02:55.880 --> 03:01.960 looked, very narrowly defined, is who they are, had not abated one wit. 03:01.960 --> 03:06.640 And if anything, it had grown, that message had grown more intense and it was skewing 03:06.640 --> 03:12.920 younger so that when I kind of delved into the research, I looked at a study of 2,000 03:12.920 --> 03:15.240 elementary school aged kids. 03:15.240 --> 03:21.240 And it found that between 2000 and 2007, the percentage of elementary school aged girls 03:21.240 --> 03:29.720 who expressed intense concern about weight and appearance went up. 03:29.720 --> 03:34.240 And thinking about that and then thinking about sort of at the other end of the spectrum, 03:34.240 --> 03:40.160 I was looking at research on college aged women and I was looking at Princeton University. 03:40.160 --> 03:45.720 They had become alarmed because the percentage of young women in leadership positions, elected 03:45.720 --> 03:52.880 and appointed in volunteer leadership positions, had also dropped during the same period precipitously. 03:52.880 --> 03:57.000 And when they surveyed the young women about why they weren't willing to put themselves 03:57.000 --> 04:01.840 forward, they also got the response that the girls felt, the young women felt that they 04:01.840 --> 04:07.400 had to do everything, do everything well and look hot while doing it. 04:07.400 --> 04:13.000 So thinking about all of that, I began this journey through girl culture and it took me 04:13.000 --> 04:16.440 from Disneyland to American Girl Place. 04:16.440 --> 04:23.200 I went to a Toddlers and Tiaras beauty pageant, so you don't have to. 04:23.200 --> 04:29.380 I went to a Miley Cyrus concert, so you don't have to. 04:29.380 --> 04:34.240 And I delved into Twilight and I looked and I hung out on Facebook and all of it, I was 04:34.240 --> 04:39.720 looking at this continuum of what girls were seeing and hearing and playing with from toddler 04:39.720 --> 04:44.520 to tween and how that was affecting their sense of self, their development of their 04:44.520 --> 04:49.600 sexuality, their body image, their ideas about their future relationships and their sense 04:49.600 --> 04:52.480 of their academic and professional potential. 04:52.480 --> 04:57.440 And I started with the princesses with the question of whether the very thing that claimed 04:57.440 --> 05:02.380 to be protective of girls, to protect them against premature sexualization was actually 05:02.380 --> 05:03.520 priming them for it. 05:03.520 --> 05:06.840 I'm only going to give you one slide that has text and then read it because I know you 05:06.840 --> 05:09.720 can read and I hate when people do this, but this is important. 05:09.720 --> 05:15.000 So sexualization, because we bandy that term around a lot, it's when a girl learns that 05:15.000 --> 05:21.240 her value comes primarily from her appearance, especially looking hot, or any of these can 05:21.240 --> 05:23.660 be true or any combination of them can be true. 05:23.660 --> 05:29.280 She's held to a narrow standard equating physical attractiveness with being sexy, or she sexually 05:29.280 --> 05:35.320 objectifies herself or is objectified, she judges her body by how she thinks it looks 05:35.320 --> 05:40.680 to others rather than how it feels to her, or adult sexuality is inappropriately imposed 05:40.680 --> 05:41.680 on her. 05:41.680 --> 05:45.880 So let that marinate for a second because you're going to need to remember it and you 05:45.880 --> 05:48.300 will be quizzed. 05:48.300 --> 05:52.800 The American Psychological Association issued a report on the sexualization of girlhood 05:52.800 --> 05:59.960 that showed that as this has become so and as girls excessively focus on their appearance, 05:59.960 --> 06:05.760 especially a narrow defined ideal of appearance, they become at risk for the vulnerabilities 06:05.760 --> 06:07.400 that we worry about with girls. 06:07.400 --> 06:11.920 Obviously it's not A plus B equals C, but there's a vulnerability there for distorted 06:11.920 --> 06:19.080 body image, eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, poor sexual choices, all 06:19.080 --> 06:20.640 the things that we worry about. 06:20.640 --> 06:22.440 So keep that in mind. 06:22.440 --> 06:28.520 And now I'm going to go back to the princesses. 06:28.520 --> 06:32.440 So when my daughter came home and said that there were these Disney princesses, I didn't 06:32.440 --> 06:34.280 know what she was talking about. 06:34.280 --> 06:36.720 And it turned out that there was a reason for that. 06:36.720 --> 06:39.900 The Disney princesses did not exist until 2000. 06:39.900 --> 06:42.720 And I know you're all thinking, yeah, they did, but they didn't. 06:42.720 --> 06:43.960 There were those movies, right? 06:43.960 --> 06:47.080 There was Cinderella, Snow White, maybe if you're a little younger, there was Beauty 06:47.080 --> 06:49.240 and the Beast. 06:49.240 --> 06:53.920 And they would come out and they would be in theaters for maybe two weeks and they'd 06:53.920 --> 06:55.640 be available on VHS later on. 06:55.640 --> 06:58.960 And there would be a little bit of merchandise around that. 06:58.960 --> 07:01.840 But then what would happen is they would come out of the theaters and Disney would say they'd 07:01.840 --> 07:03.200 go back in the vault. 07:03.200 --> 07:05.840 That's what they talk, what their language is. 07:05.840 --> 07:11.120 And all the merchandise would disappear and you wouldn't see those characters again for 07:11.120 --> 07:15.140 seven years until a new generation of children came along. 07:15.140 --> 07:19.640 So what changed was that around about 2000, there was a guy who became the new head of 07:19.640 --> 07:24.500 consumer licensing and he went down to Phoenix, Arizona to familiarize himself with the brand. 07:24.500 --> 07:29.520 And he saw all these little girls coming to this ice show and they were dressed in princess 07:29.520 --> 07:33.640 outfits but they were not official Disney licensed products. 07:33.640 --> 07:36.880 They were making their own costumes. 07:36.880 --> 07:39.580 Huge profit potential lost. 07:39.580 --> 07:45.620 So he went back and for the first time in the history of Disney, he pulled these characters 07:45.620 --> 07:49.160 out of these different movies and grouped them together to market separately from a 07:49.160 --> 07:52.840 film's release and call them Disney princesses. 07:52.840 --> 07:57.160 Now this move was incredibly controversial within Disney and I'm going to tell you my 07:57.160 --> 08:00.920 very favorite piece of Disney trivia now. 08:00.920 --> 08:04.920 Roy Disney, who was Walt's nephew, was totally against this because he said, you know, if 08:04.920 --> 08:10.440 you put Cinderella and Snow White on the same t-shirt, it's like mixing mythologies and 08:10.440 --> 08:12.920 I don't know, the world implodes. 08:12.920 --> 08:16.940 I'm not really sure what they, what he thought would happen but can't do it. 08:16.940 --> 08:25.080 So to appease that faction, when you see multiple princesses on an item, you'll notice that 08:25.080 --> 08:30.180 they're all looking slightly different directions. 08:30.180 --> 08:35.760 And that's because they're not supposed to know the other ones are there. 08:35.760 --> 08:39.760 And now that you know that, it's going to drive you crazy every time you see it. 08:39.760 --> 08:40.760 Yeah. 08:40.760 --> 08:46.320 It also has this weird thing after like staring at this for several years now of isolating 08:46.320 --> 08:49.400 the princess, you know, I mean princesses don't have girlfriends, right? 08:49.400 --> 08:56.440 You know, God forbid, you know, Cinderella should give Sleeping Beauty a little support. 08:56.440 --> 08:59.560 So it does sort of also have this kind of subtle effect of communicating, you know, 08:59.560 --> 09:03.760 it's all about you and it's not about anybody else and it's not about any other girls. 09:03.760 --> 09:07.680 So you know, there is that aspect of it too, I think that's my take anyway. 09:07.680 --> 09:11.200 And so anyway, they put these out there, they put these characters out there and the first 09:11.200 --> 09:17.120 year they did a $300 million business, which you know, pretty good lunch money, right? 09:17.120 --> 09:21.460 Ten years later, it's a $4 billion a year business. 09:21.460 --> 09:28.320 There are 26,000 plus Disney princess products, which when you consider that they can't put 09:28.320 --> 09:36.680 them on cigarettes, liquor, cars or antidepressants, you know, it's hard to even think about 26,000 09:36.680 --> 09:40.240 products, which is why you start getting things like Disney princess grapes. 09:40.240 --> 09:43.280 Yes, those are grapes. 09:43.280 --> 09:47.800 And when, you know, as Disney goes, so goes childhood. 09:47.800 --> 09:51.820 They define childhood, especially when they're making $4 billion a year off of childhood. 09:51.820 --> 09:57.320 So that's why everything from the t-shirt vendor at Etsy to bookstores, this is, I don't 09:57.320 --> 10:01.960 know if you can see this, but now in bookstores, they have a princess section and a pretty 10:01.960 --> 10:03.760 pink and fancy section. 10:03.760 --> 10:07.920 Pink has become a, apparently a genre of book. 10:07.920 --> 10:12.760 To Dora the Explorer have all gone princess. 10:12.760 --> 10:15.400 I do really love this one. 10:15.400 --> 10:18.880 Says future princess underneath it says president. 10:18.880 --> 10:20.520 Princess is crossed out. 10:20.520 --> 10:25.360 But I also think that it sort of points out, you know, what the difference is in those 10:25.360 --> 10:27.680 two messages on that t-shirt. 10:27.680 --> 10:31.120 And I was thinking about this the other day, I got, this is a little far afield, but I 10:31.120 --> 10:37.720 got a piece of research that went across my desk was by an economist from MIT who had 10:37.720 --> 10:41.560 gone to 495 towns and villages in India. 10:41.560 --> 10:48.460 And she was looking at the differential between how the aspirations parents have for their 10:48.460 --> 10:51.160 sons and their daughters for education. 10:51.160 --> 10:58.640 And in most places she found that parents were 42% more likely to want their son or 10:58.640 --> 11:01.600 assume their son would graduate high school than their daughter. 11:01.600 --> 11:05.640 And with what we know about the importance of educating girls for alleviating poverty, 11:05.640 --> 11:07.160 that's concerning. 11:07.160 --> 11:12.720 The only place where that was not true was in West Bengal where for the last several 11:12.720 --> 11:21.160 decades they have reserved 30% of positions in local government for women. 11:21.160 --> 11:27.520 And only there were parents' aspirations for their kids' education equal between boys and 11:27.520 --> 11:28.520 girls. 11:28.520 --> 11:31.680 And, you know, although it's a little far afield, I also think it shows how important 11:31.680 --> 11:37.560 women's leadership is to little girls for their aspirations, something beyond princesses, 11:37.560 --> 11:41.680 because you know, if they can't see it, it's really hard for them to be it. 11:41.680 --> 11:49.440 So you can't look at girls' culture without talking about the color pink. 11:49.440 --> 11:52.720 And you know, I want to be clear here because pink is not intrinsic. 11:52.720 --> 11:53.760 Pink is just a color, right? 11:53.760 --> 11:56.300 It's nothing really intrinsically bad about pink. 11:56.300 --> 12:01.320 It's just that it's such a tiny slice of the rainbow, you know, and it just kind of goes 12:01.320 --> 12:02.960 on and on. 12:02.960 --> 12:10.800 And on one hand you could say that it celebrates girlhood, but on the other hand it fuses 12:10.800 --> 12:20.560 – it fuses girlhood with – a girl's identity to an obsession with appearance. 12:20.560 --> 12:26.280 And then it presents that not only as innocent, but as evidence of innocence. 12:26.280 --> 12:33.040 So you start having things like the Pretty Pretty Princess board game where – this 12:33.040 --> 12:36.920 is the Sleeping Beauty version – where you connect – you collect a ring, a bracelet, 12:36.920 --> 12:40.640 a necklace, and a crown to match your gown, and then you win the game and now you're 12:40.640 --> 12:43.560 ready to meet your prince. 12:43.560 --> 12:46.400 One of my favorites here is Princess with a Loving Heart makeup kit. 12:46.400 --> 12:49.000 What gives you your loving heart is your makeup. 12:49.000 --> 12:50.160 This is really my favorite. 12:50.160 --> 12:55.520 Yeah, Rapunzel, Escape from the Tower lip and nail set. 12:55.520 --> 12:57.200 Because that's what that character was about. 12:57.200 --> 13:00.960 And that's what you see is that as these products have proliferated, they become a 13:00.960 --> 13:09.000 lot less about maybe some of the better lessons from the movies, some of the more admirable 13:09.000 --> 13:10.600 character traits that some of the princes – you don't 13:10.600 --> 13:13.920 see Cinderella anymore in her rags. 13:13.920 --> 13:17.000 You just see it being about the bling. 13:17.000 --> 13:22.920 And it may seem like pink is naturally encoded in girls' DNA, like they go for it like heat-seeking 13:22.920 --> 13:23.920 missiles. 13:23.920 --> 13:25.720 But in fact, that's not true. 13:25.720 --> 13:29.280 And if you look back historically a little over a hundred years to the turn of the last 13:29.280 --> 13:36.360 century, you find that back then all small children and babies wore white as a practical 13:36.360 --> 13:41.080 matter because they didn't have Maytag and they had to boil clothes to get them clean. 13:41.080 --> 13:46.360 And when color first came into the nursery, pink was actually assigned to boys because 13:46.360 --> 13:50.000 it was seen as the pastel version of red. 13:50.000 --> 13:53.960 And red was associated with masculinity and the god of war and all of that. 13:53.960 --> 14:00.440 And blue was assigned to girls because it was associated with constancy and faithfulness 14:00.440 --> 14:02.440 and the Virgin Mary. 14:02.440 --> 14:08.760 And when and where that switched is not really clear, but as late as the 1930s, the New York 14:08.760 --> 14:13.520 City department store Lord & Taylor did a poll of its customer base, and 30 percent 14:13.520 --> 14:17.360 of them still said pink was for boys and blue was for girls. 14:17.360 --> 14:23.080 So I don't think anybody would get that wrong today. 14:23.080 --> 14:29.640 And even in old Walt Disney movies, pink was the color for boys and blue for girls. 14:29.640 --> 14:33.960 So if you look at, this is Peter Pan. 14:33.960 --> 14:37.640 Wendy's wearing a blue dress and Michael has his pink PJ on. 14:37.640 --> 14:39.360 This is the Jolly Pink Giant. 14:39.360 --> 14:41.040 And this is Sleeping Beauty. 14:41.040 --> 14:43.480 Sleeping Beauty had a blue dress, now she has a pink one, but she used to have a blue 14:43.480 --> 14:47.200 dress and Prince Charming was dressed in pink. 14:47.200 --> 14:55.280 And for me, it really pointed out how much of what we think is natural with kids is naturalized 14:55.280 --> 14:59.960 and also how much marketing can define how we think about kids' development. 14:59.960 --> 15:08.120 So when I did a little more digging, I found out that toddler, the word toddler, I assumed 15:08.120 --> 15:11.200 like at least somebody with a PhD made that up. 15:11.200 --> 15:13.120 But in fact, it was a marketing gimmick. 15:13.120 --> 15:19.200 And it was developed because it was for boys, because it was thought that parents who thought 15:19.200 --> 15:23.160 that their child was going to be treated more like a little man would be looser with their 15:23.160 --> 15:24.160 purse strings. 15:24.160 --> 15:28.720 And this is how little boys dressed around 1900. 15:28.720 --> 15:31.920 And this is the 32nd President of the United States, Seattle. 15:31.920 --> 15:32.920 Who would that be? 15:32.920 --> 15:33.920 Anybody? 15:33.920 --> 15:34.920 Uh-oh. 15:34.920 --> 15:38.720 I like to throw that out. 15:38.720 --> 15:39.720 Franklin Roosevelt. 15:39.720 --> 15:40.720 That's Franklin Roosevelt. 15:40.720 --> 15:43.120 Isn't he the prettiest little girl you ever saw? 15:43.120 --> 15:47.460 Yeah, with his white dress and his patent leather Mary Janes. 15:47.460 --> 15:50.640 So that was why toddler came about. 15:50.640 --> 15:55.680 And it was only after it became Shopper's Parlance that it became a full developmental 15:55.680 --> 15:56.880 phase. 15:56.880 --> 16:04.600 And if that seems difficult to believe, think about the trajectory of the word tween. 16:04.600 --> 16:11.120 Tween was a marketing construct developed in the 80s, mostly applied to girls, and used 16:11.120 --> 16:12.120 for girls. 16:12.120 --> 16:16.680 I've seen it used for girls as young as seven when Bonnie Bell says they're old enough to 16:16.680 --> 16:20.840 be adept with a lip gloss wand, to girls as old as 14. 16:20.840 --> 16:24.960 And I would submit to you that that is an age range that does not and probably should 16:24.960 --> 16:27.780 not have a whole lot in common. 16:27.780 --> 16:35.120 And that's one of the main issues with tween, is that it erases the lines between little 16:35.120 --> 16:37.020 girl and big girl. 16:37.020 --> 16:42.660 And it creates this kind of mass of consumer little girls and removes that kind of protective 16:42.660 --> 16:47.160 layer that used to be between childhood and teenage. 16:47.160 --> 16:53.520 And yet, even as on one hand there's this erasure of difference, there's also this magnification 16:53.520 --> 16:54.520 in the other direction. 16:54.520 --> 17:02.120 So this sounds a little contradictory, but dividing people into smaller and smaller groups 17:02.120 --> 17:03.180 actually increases sales. 17:03.180 --> 17:08.000 So an executive at LeapFrog called this the pink factor to me. 17:08.000 --> 17:12.880 She said, you know, if you have a little boy first and then you have a little girl, you're 17:12.880 --> 17:16.880 so excited to have the little princess that you're going to buy everything all over again 17:16.880 --> 17:18.180 in pink. 17:18.180 --> 17:21.280 And conversely, if you have the little girl first and you buy everything in pink and then 17:21.280 --> 17:25.120 you have a little boy, oops, gotta buy it all over again in boy colors. 17:25.120 --> 17:28.000 But either way, you double your sales. 17:28.000 --> 17:35.200 And so we're seeing this unprecedented emphasis on gender differences at the youngest ages. 17:35.200 --> 17:39.600 So I went to the International Toy Fair in New York and I went into the Fisher Price 17:39.600 --> 17:44.100 Room and there were two rooms in there. 17:44.100 --> 17:45.360 One was for girls, one was for boys. 17:45.360 --> 17:53.160 The girls had a banner in pink that said, beautiful, colorful, pretty. 17:53.160 --> 17:57.200 Beautiful and pretty are synonyms. 17:57.200 --> 18:02.880 They could not think of three separate words for girls. 18:02.880 --> 18:06.600 Girls got energy, heroes, and power. 18:06.600 --> 18:11.440 So there was this magnification on the order of feeling, made me feel like I was on the 18:11.440 --> 18:14.320 set of Mad Men. 18:14.320 --> 18:18.160 And a magnifying and inventing of differences where they didn't exist. 18:18.160 --> 18:23.720 So do you guys remember that little toy phone, Fisher Price phone that you probably had when 18:23.720 --> 18:26.100 you were a kid with little eyes on it? 18:26.100 --> 18:30.320 Now they make a girls' version of that, a pink one. 18:30.320 --> 18:33.080 They make a pink Fisher Price bus now. 18:33.080 --> 18:36.680 Remember the popcorn popper? 18:36.680 --> 18:38.720 They make a pink one of those now. 18:38.720 --> 18:41.920 And here's the new Fisher Price Brilliant Basics Teethers. 18:41.920 --> 18:47.920 It's a little hard to tell, but the little glamour kit for your six-month-old has a purse, 18:47.920 --> 18:50.440 a diamond ring, and a charm bracelet. 18:50.440 --> 18:59.760 And the fun-to-fix kit for your boy has a hammer, a saw, and wrenches. 18:59.760 --> 19:01.600 So you might say, what's the big deal, right? 19:01.600 --> 19:04.080 Boys play with some toys, girls play with other toys. 19:04.080 --> 19:06.320 That's the way it goes. 19:06.320 --> 19:08.080 You know, yes and no. 19:08.080 --> 19:11.920 So I want to take a little moment here to discuss nature versus nurture, because I think 19:11.920 --> 19:14.960 we always have to talk about that with gender. 19:14.960 --> 19:19.240 And the first thing to understand is that little kids don't understand gender the way 19:19.240 --> 19:23.560 that we do. 19:23.560 --> 19:28.280 My favorite example of this is a story that is told by Sandra Bem, who's a psychologist 19:28.280 --> 19:32.200 at Cornell, about her son, who's probably 40 now and hates this story. 19:32.200 --> 19:37.760 But when he was in preschool, he went to preschool wearing his beloved berets to class. 19:37.760 --> 19:42.040 And he got there, and this other little boy was just mocking him, saying, you're a girl, 19:42.040 --> 19:43.040 you're a girl. 19:43.040 --> 19:44.040 And he said, no, I'm a boy. 19:44.040 --> 19:45.520 I'm on the radio, but I can say penis, can I? 19:45.520 --> 19:46.520 I can say penis. 19:46.520 --> 19:47.520 I just did. 19:47.520 --> 19:48.520 OK, so there you go. 19:48.520 --> 19:52.120 I'm a boy, I have a penis. 19:52.120 --> 19:54.600 And the other boy said, no, you're a girl, you're a girl, you're a girl. 19:54.600 --> 19:56.720 And he said, no, I'm a boy, I have a penis. 19:56.720 --> 20:01.040 And finally, this went on and on, and Jeremy got so disgusted that he dropped his pants. 20:01.040 --> 20:04.120 And he said, see, I'm a boy, I have a penis. 20:04.120 --> 20:10.600 And the other little boy, totally unimpressed, said, everybody has a penis. 20:10.600 --> 20:13.760 Only girls wear berets. 20:13.760 --> 20:17.040 Yeah. 20:17.040 --> 20:19.920 But you know, that's really how kids see it. 20:19.920 --> 20:22.960 They don't understand that, you know, for the great majority of us, that the sex we're 20:22.960 --> 20:25.680 born with is the one we're going to stay. 20:25.680 --> 20:29.920 And they think that if I left this room and I put on a suit and a tie and cut my hair 20:29.920 --> 20:32.080 short, I would turn into a man. 20:32.080 --> 20:35.880 That you can either, you can change sex as easily as changing your clothes, which is 20:35.880 --> 20:40.080 partly why three-year-old girls don't want to be, you can't suddenly stuff your three-year-old 20:40.080 --> 20:41.640 into pants. 20:41.640 --> 20:45.720 Why they want to have the long hair and stuff, because they are trying to cling to the idea 20:45.720 --> 20:52.440 that they're girls with whatever extreme representations their culture gives them. 20:52.440 --> 20:53.440 That's what kids think. 20:53.440 --> 20:57.240 If you thought that you could just like suddenly, inadvertently change sex or choose to be a 20:57.240 --> 20:59.920 mommy or daddy, it would make you a little nervous. 20:59.920 --> 21:03.880 So they tend to gravitate towards these extremes, which when we were little may have been like 21:03.880 --> 21:07.380 baby dolls and baby buggies and, you know, playing house. 21:07.380 --> 21:11.780 And now are princesses in spa makeovers for three-year-olds. 21:11.780 --> 21:17.640 So there's a way that the rigidity of little kids is natural. 21:17.640 --> 21:23.400 And there's a way that this developmental phase is natural and being exploited. 21:23.400 --> 21:25.480 But is real. 21:25.480 --> 21:32.680 However, early childhood is also the time when the brain is the most plastic. 21:32.680 --> 21:35.080 Door slam. 21:35.080 --> 21:36.360 And most open to change. 21:36.360 --> 21:41.040 And then kids are laying down tracks that will last the rest of their lives about gender, 21:41.040 --> 21:42.040 about everything. 21:42.040 --> 21:44.800 So every experience a little, you know, a child has, and the younger the child, the 21:44.800 --> 21:45.800 bigger the effect. 21:45.800 --> 21:50.400 The first time they speak, they learn to walk, they learn to talk, they laugh, they cry, 21:50.400 --> 21:52.280 they fall down, they run. 21:52.280 --> 21:56.440 Everything affects their brain on a neurological level, strengthening some neurons at the expense 21:56.440 --> 21:57.760 of others. 21:57.760 --> 22:04.600 So when children play in gendered worlds and are only exposed to the ways, styles, and 22:04.600 --> 22:09.120 experiences that are attributed to their sex, it has an impact on them. 22:09.120 --> 22:16.160 And when they're exposed to a broader range of styles and experiences, that has an impact 22:16.160 --> 22:17.300 too. 22:17.300 --> 22:23.120 So there was a study of more than 5,000 three-year-olds, and they found that among those three-year-olds, 22:23.120 --> 22:28.820 that the girls who had older brothers had better spatial skills than girls with older 22:28.820 --> 22:31.560 sisters or boys with older sisters. 22:31.560 --> 22:38.000 So there was a way that that exposure to whatever it is that older boys do changed the little 22:38.000 --> 22:44.800 girl's brains and made them more, strengthened their spatial skills. 22:44.800 --> 22:51.140 So rather than thinking about nature or nurture, the issue is actually how nurture becomes 22:51.140 --> 22:52.680 nature. 22:52.680 --> 22:57.480 How what we expose kids to becomes natural to them. 22:57.480 --> 23:02.480 And if we don't want those little inborn differences to become big gaps, and we want children to 23:02.480 --> 23:06.780 be able to realize the whole range of their potential, it's really important for them 23:06.780 --> 23:10.700 to experience the whole range of play styles. 23:10.700 --> 23:15.700 And there's also some indication that kids who experience cross-sex play, who have friends 23:15.700 --> 23:21.240 of the opposite sex when they're in preschool or kindergarten or early elementary grades, 23:21.240 --> 23:24.240 have better dating relationships when they are older. 23:24.240 --> 23:28.580 So it's really hard, though, to do that when there's this hyper-segmentation. 23:28.580 --> 23:32.120 So here's a box, a Lego box from the 1960s. 23:32.120 --> 23:35.960 It's yellow, there's two little girls and a little boy playing together. 23:35.960 --> 23:37.760 This is Lego Isles Today. 23:37.760 --> 23:40.780 It's very clear who's supposed to play with what. 23:40.780 --> 23:46.400 And it's just really hard when a girl is sitting in an all-pink room, reading Pinkalicious, 23:46.400 --> 23:50.640 in her pink princess dress, looking at her pink Magic 8 ball, to make those cross-sex 23:50.640 --> 23:52.960 friendships happen. 23:52.960 --> 23:54.520 And they do happen really easily. 23:54.520 --> 23:56.760 The upside is that it's easy. 23:56.760 --> 24:01.060 Kids will naturally choose to play in their own groups, but they often do play together. 24:01.060 --> 24:05.200 And when preschool teachers comment on it, they do it more. 24:05.200 --> 24:11.480 So these things that separate them unnaturally just drive them apart and make them other 24:11.480 --> 24:13.520 to one another. 24:13.520 --> 24:16.160 So back to the world of toys. 24:16.160 --> 24:20.400 As girls move from two to three to five, there's a shift that happens, and a new idea starts 24:20.400 --> 24:25.200 to be attached to that fusion of the inevitability of pink, pretty, and innocence, and that's 24:25.200 --> 24:26.840 shopping. 24:26.840 --> 24:30.840 And so this is a pizza placemat. 24:30.840 --> 24:34.800 This is all the same placemat that was sent to me by a reader in Philadelphia. 24:34.800 --> 24:36.560 And you'll see there's the pink rim around it. 24:36.560 --> 24:42.560 And the first picture, you can see that there's a purse and nail polish. 24:42.560 --> 24:44.960 It's all to be colored in your cell phone. 24:44.960 --> 24:53.240 There's the word search, where you're looking to find mall queen, born to shop, diva, party, 24:53.240 --> 24:54.720 shopper, sales. 24:54.720 --> 24:57.480 That's okay. 24:57.480 --> 25:03.000 And then down is the unscramble, where you can unscramble shoe and hat and sunglasses. 25:03.000 --> 25:08.520 And then there's the ever-popular help the high-heeled shoe find its shopping bag maze. 25:08.520 --> 25:09.760 I know, right? 25:09.760 --> 25:15.840 And I'd like to tell you that that was unusual, but not so much. 25:15.840 --> 25:19.000 The Hasbro has made pink versions of classic games. 25:19.000 --> 25:24.960 So all the things girls love is the tagline for the pink monopoly, where instead of houses, 25:24.960 --> 25:30.920 they have boutiques, and instead of hotels, they have malls. 25:30.920 --> 25:34.200 Those are Scrabble racks from Pink Scrabble. 25:34.200 --> 25:36.640 And guess what's a seven-letter word? 25:36.640 --> 25:37.640 F-A-S-H-I-O-N. 25:37.640 --> 25:42.960 Yahtzee, they've replaced the numbers on the dice with flip-flops, hearts, flowers, dresses, 25:42.960 --> 25:45.720 and cell phones. 25:45.720 --> 25:52.640 And we first came across this kind of shift in what happens post-Princess, when my daughter 25:52.640 --> 25:55.640 was given a make-your-own-messenger bag for his sixth birthday. 25:55.640 --> 25:59.840 And it had iron-on transfers, hearts, flowers, that kind of stuff. 25:59.840 --> 26:06.240 And then it had iron-on transfers that said, spoiled and brat. 26:06.240 --> 26:11.040 And to her credit, my daughter said, Mom, why do they want me to put spoiled on my purse? 26:11.040 --> 26:19.080 And I said, I don't know, honey, let's throw that out and get a cookie. 26:19.080 --> 26:20.920 But I thought a lot about it. 26:20.920 --> 26:26.520 And I came up with this idea of girls power, girls with a Z, because any time you see that 26:26.520 --> 26:30.200 Z, you got trouble. 26:30.200 --> 26:36.240 Whereas girl power, that we used to talk about in the 1990s, celebrated ability over body, 26:36.240 --> 26:44.320 the new girls power casts physical perfection as not only a source but the source of empowerment 26:44.320 --> 26:45.320 for girls. 26:45.320 --> 26:48.960 And it sells girls self-absorption as self-confidence. 26:48.960 --> 26:53.680 And the kind of whole Prince part drops out, and female independence, empowerment, and 26:53.680 --> 26:58.760 identity are expressed through materialism and narcissism and putting spoiled on your 26:58.760 --> 26:59.760 purse. 26:59.760 --> 27:05.640 So another way that I think about this is the Kardashianization of girlhood. 27:05.640 --> 27:10.840 And you start walking through Toys R Us, and the tone of the toys and the color of the 27:10.840 --> 27:12.920 pink begins to change. 27:12.920 --> 27:16.720 And it becomes a lot less Cinderella and a lot more Wicked Stepsister. 27:16.720 --> 27:18.200 So you start seeing the new dolls. 27:18.200 --> 27:21.160 Thai girls, remember those ones on the upper left. 27:21.160 --> 27:24.320 Keep those in your mind, because I'm going to talk about them again later. 27:24.320 --> 27:30.200 Bratz, Moxie Girls, Monster High, that's the new line of undead Sesame Street Walkers that 27:30.200 --> 27:35.840 Mattel has put out, most popular toy for Christmas last year. 27:35.840 --> 27:38.360 Sassy, which is sexy with training wheels. 27:38.360 --> 27:40.600 There's been the rise of spa birthday parties for little kids. 27:40.600 --> 27:45.560 So that's the Bippity Boppity Boutique in the upper left at Disney World, where you 27:45.560 --> 27:50.740 can pay $200 for your daughter to be made over as her favorite princess. 27:50.740 --> 27:54.080 Over right is Sweet and Sassy, a mall store, makeover store. 27:54.080 --> 27:55.520 Another one's called Raspberry Lips. 27:55.520 --> 27:57.320 And that little girl on the right, she's... 27:57.320 --> 27:59.540 I took that off of somebody's blog. 27:59.540 --> 28:00.540 She was on a Raspberry... 28:00.540 --> 28:01.800 I hope you're not here. 28:01.800 --> 28:05.320 I did it without permission. 28:05.320 --> 28:07.600 But she's been to a Raspberry Lips party. 28:07.600 --> 28:10.080 So you see sort of the girls' power thing. 28:10.080 --> 28:13.160 And this... 28:13.160 --> 28:16.880 Craft kits for girls have started to be about this too. 28:16.880 --> 28:22.520 So you have the make your own lip balm, make your own pedicure, nail art, flip flop. 28:22.520 --> 28:25.060 That's creativity for kids. 28:25.060 --> 28:30.780 Science kits for girls are Perfume Lab, Beauty Spa, Pampering Boutique, Bath Bomb. 28:30.780 --> 28:37.680 Just as a comparison, science kits for boys, physics and chemistry. 28:37.680 --> 28:39.280 Go figure, right? 28:39.280 --> 28:42.580 Perils of the Deep, Rocket, Slime. 28:42.580 --> 28:44.680 And then there's the pink poodles in the purse. 28:44.680 --> 28:46.520 It's endless pink poodles. 28:46.520 --> 28:49.640 They just go on the pink poodles in the purse. 28:49.640 --> 28:51.800 Pink poodles, pink poodles. 28:51.800 --> 28:54.360 You just notice it everywhere now, pink poodles in purses. 28:54.360 --> 28:56.120 Do you feel bombarded by those pink poodles? 28:56.120 --> 29:00.200 Because girls are, you know, they're really bombarded by this stuff. 29:00.200 --> 29:04.680 And you know, the thing about girls' power is that with disease, it's not collective 29:04.680 --> 29:10.000 change through community, through gathering with other girls, through leadership, through 29:10.000 --> 29:11.000 engagement. 29:11.000 --> 29:13.560 It's individual change through a makeover. 29:13.560 --> 29:19.320 And the ultimate achievement of girls' power is fame, which becomes kind of a value in 29:19.320 --> 29:22.120 its own right, independent of hard work and skill. 29:22.120 --> 29:27.320 You know, fame is for just being famous. 29:27.320 --> 29:30.760 Yeah. 29:30.760 --> 29:37.920 So, one of the terms marketers talk about when they talk about all this is K-G-O-Y, 29:37.920 --> 29:40.000 which is kids getting older, younger. 29:40.000 --> 29:45.040 And that's the idea that kids are more sophisticated at a younger age than they used to be, and 29:45.040 --> 29:48.760 so they want more sophisticated playthings in media. 29:48.760 --> 29:55.600 And it's an interesting concept because they're also saying adults are staying younger, older. 29:55.600 --> 30:01.520 So if kids are getting older, younger, and adults are staying younger, older, our kids 30:01.520 --> 30:05.080 are gonna be older than we are at some point. 30:05.080 --> 30:09.760 Or we're all gonna meet at forever 21, right? 30:09.760 --> 30:15.160 Which is not irrelevant because I think there is a piece of this that is about how we adult 30:15.160 --> 30:20.160 women talk about and view our own bodies and beauty, and how we talk about it in front 30:20.160 --> 30:24.240 of our girls, and how we deal with our own issues around these. 30:24.240 --> 30:25.240 And it's complicated. 30:25.240 --> 30:26.440 I mean, I'm very clear in the book. 30:26.440 --> 30:27.440 I am contradictory. 30:27.440 --> 30:29.200 I am hypocritical as a mother. 30:29.200 --> 30:36.560 I go against my own beliefs sometimes because, you know, that's part of navigating this world. 30:36.560 --> 30:41.520 So I'm very much in the soup with, you know, with all of you and with everybody that I 30:41.520 --> 30:42.520 talk to. 30:42.520 --> 30:47.020 But anyway, so part of KGOY is age compression. 30:47.020 --> 30:50.840 And that's the idea that products are pitched to older kids, and then younger kids wanting 30:50.840 --> 30:53.600 to be cool, like their older brothers and sisters reach up and grab them, and then the 30:53.600 --> 30:55.980 older kids immediately don't want them anymore. 30:55.980 --> 30:57.560 So Barbie is a really good example. 30:57.560 --> 31:02.040 When Barbie first came out, she was pitched to 10 to 12-year-old girls. 31:02.040 --> 31:06.640 And now, if you're still playing with Barbie when you're six, kind of a baby. 31:06.640 --> 31:16.260 So for girls, that age compression, that attempt to be cool, increasingly means looking hot. 31:16.260 --> 31:21.720 So that explains the growth market that we've seen in cosmetics for 8- to 12-year-old girls. 31:21.720 --> 31:26.160 Market research, independent market research, showed recently that close to half of 6- to 31:26.160 --> 31:30.000 9-year-old girls say they regularly use lipstick or lip gloss. 31:30.000 --> 31:34.600 And the percentage of 8- to 12-year-olds who regularly use mascara or eyeliner doubled 31:34.600 --> 31:37.280 between 2008 and 2010. 31:37.280 --> 31:42.240 The biggest cosmetics growth market right now, and really the only one, is 8- to 12-year-old 31:42.240 --> 31:43.240 girls. 31:43.240 --> 31:49.840 So Walmart just came out with, I swear to God, an anti-aging line last year for 8-year-olds. 31:49.840 --> 31:54.720 And it's not like makeup that you play with to try to look like mommy and then wash. 31:54.720 --> 31:58.640 It's like, I missed my bus to third grade because I was putting on concealer kind of 31:58.640 --> 31:59.640 thing. 31:59.640 --> 32:03.760 And then there's Nair Pretty, which is fruit-flavored hair removal for your unwanted hair when you're 32:03.760 --> 32:06.280 nine. 32:06.280 --> 32:13.000 And remember that premature sexualization and early focus on appearance puts girls at 32:13.000 --> 32:14.000 risk. 32:14.000 --> 32:18.040 I think I put that, yeah, I did, so that you could look at that slide again while I'm talking. 32:18.040 --> 32:21.120 And it also takes tremendous mental resources. 32:21.120 --> 32:27.080 So there's just a couple studies that I like to throw out to just kind of illustrate this 32:27.080 --> 32:28.080 point. 32:28.080 --> 32:35.080 One group was at Stanford, and they took two groups of young women in advanced calculus, 32:35.080 --> 32:36.080 so girls who were good at math. 32:36.080 --> 32:40.680 And they showed them each group four 30-second ads. 32:40.680 --> 32:44.640 The first group saw just kind of generic, neutrally ads, and the second group saw two 32:44.640 --> 32:51.280 ads that were neutral and two ads that were more, were either stereotypically or overtly 32:51.280 --> 32:55.160 sexist in their depiction of women. 32:55.160 --> 33:01.280 And afterwards they gave them a survey gauging their interest in STEM careers, science, technology, 33:01.280 --> 33:02.520 engineering, math. 33:02.520 --> 33:08.520 And the young women who had seen the sexist ads reported a lower interest in pursuing 33:08.520 --> 33:10.040 those careers. 33:10.040 --> 33:13.400 After just seeing two ads, and it seemed like I read that and I thought, really? 33:13.400 --> 33:14.720 Could that be? 33:14.720 --> 33:19.400 But there's this idea of stereotype vulnerability, that when the stereotype of your group is 33:19.400 --> 33:21.640 presented to you, you conform to it. 33:21.640 --> 33:27.720 So if I told you that girls don't do very well on this math test, you would not do as 33:27.720 --> 33:31.360 well on that math test as you would if I told you that girls do well on this math test. 33:31.360 --> 33:36.720 So another study that showed this was, I actually really like this one even better. 33:36.720 --> 33:41.480 They took four groups, two men and two women, college age, and put them in dressing rooms. 33:41.480 --> 33:45.680 And they had half the men and half the women try on a sweater, and half the men and half 33:45.680 --> 33:47.920 the women try on a bathing suit. 33:47.920 --> 33:49.200 And then they gave them a math test. 33:49.200 --> 33:53.400 I don't know who funds this stuff, but there you go. 33:53.400 --> 34:00.640 And the young women who were wearing the bathing suit, their scores were lower compared to 34:00.640 --> 34:02.380 all the other groups. 34:02.380 --> 34:05.680 And there was no such difference with, no difference in the scores with the men between 34:05.680 --> 34:07.600 the sweaters and the bathing suits. 34:07.600 --> 34:10.600 So maybe they were cold, I don't know. 34:10.600 --> 34:16.960 But I tend to think that there's something for young women that happens when their mental 34:16.960 --> 34:22.920 resources or their attention becomes focused on their appearance and on the vulnerabilities 34:22.920 --> 34:26.760 of their appearance that can directly affect their performance. 34:26.760 --> 34:31.800 So when we talk about what girls are playing with, what they're watching, what they're 34:31.800 --> 34:36.360 absorbing, it does become really relevant. 34:36.360 --> 34:42.200 And girls are focusing on an ideal body image at a younger and younger age. 34:42.200 --> 34:47.440 So I don't know if you guys remember, do you remember Strawberry Shortcake, that doll from 34:47.440 --> 34:48.440 the 80s? 34:48.440 --> 34:51.000 So she got a remake. 34:51.000 --> 34:53.500 This is the new Strawberry Shortcake. 34:53.500 --> 34:58.000 This is the new Rainbow Brite. 34:58.000 --> 35:00.800 Holly Hobby. 35:00.800 --> 35:08.080 Trolls with a Z. Care Bears. 35:08.080 --> 35:11.240 Bears went on a diet. 35:11.240 --> 35:13.000 Night Little Pony. 35:13.000 --> 35:19.160 Lego 1982, Lego Friends today. 35:19.160 --> 35:20.640 And Dora. 35:20.640 --> 35:28.560 So I know Dora, this new Dora is for tweens, which Nickelodeon described to me as five 35:28.560 --> 35:32.960 to eight year olds. 35:32.960 --> 35:37.920 But we know with age compression, which we just talked about, that old Dora is probably 35:37.920 --> 35:41.200 going to be given the boot along with boots. 35:41.200 --> 35:42.200 Pretty soon. 35:42.200 --> 35:48.520 And, you know, so this new Dora, it's not that she's sexy, but she's pretty and she's 35:48.520 --> 35:51.720 skinny, and that's part of the package. 35:51.720 --> 35:55.240 And it's telling little girls that they better get with that program at a very young age. 35:55.240 --> 35:59.980 And they are, because they're already rejecting things that don't fit that image. 35:59.980 --> 36:05.840 When I talked to toy manufacturers about why they had done this to these toys, they said 36:05.840 --> 36:10.800 that little girls won't play with the little chubby childlike looking toys. 36:10.800 --> 36:13.480 They want pretty skinny dolls. 36:13.480 --> 36:18.840 So they are realizing at a very, very young age now that that is the way to go. 36:18.840 --> 36:26.960 So we've talked a little bit about cognitive issues, about nature versus nurture, about 36:26.960 --> 36:27.960 body image. 36:27.960 --> 36:33.280 I want to talk a little bit about the impact of sexualization on girls' sexual health. 36:33.280 --> 36:37.420 Because when girls are encouraged to play sassy, when they're encouraged to play sexy 36:37.420 --> 36:41.880 too soon, even if they don't understand what they're doing, and maybe especially if they 36:41.880 --> 36:46.180 don't understand what they're doing, it undermines their sexual development. 36:46.180 --> 36:51.480 And it can be, because they aren't old enough to understand, to connect that performance 36:51.480 --> 36:55.920 with any kind of authentic erotic feeling, the risk becomes that that disconnect becomes 36:55.920 --> 36:57.920 permanent. 36:57.920 --> 37:04.840 And that girls continue to see sexuality as something that they perform rather than feel, 37:04.840 --> 37:09.280 and eventually make choices that are against their own self-interest. 37:09.280 --> 37:13.240 And I think it's really important for us as adults not only to protect the littlest girls 37:13.240 --> 37:19.300 from that, but also to help older girls by helping them distinguish and disentangle the 37:19.300 --> 37:23.560 ideas of sexualization from sexuality. 37:23.560 --> 37:27.240 And this is how you can help to not feel like a prude, which I know a lot of people think. 37:27.240 --> 37:29.520 I just don't know how to talk about this. 37:29.520 --> 37:34.560 But sexualization is something that's externally foisted on girls, and sexuality is something 37:34.560 --> 37:36.880 that's developed from within. 37:36.880 --> 37:42.680 And the way that I think about it is the kind of Rorschach I use is the difference between 37:42.680 --> 37:48.440 learning that you are supposed to be desirable, and that your focus should be on being desirable, 37:48.440 --> 37:53.280 versus learning to understand and connect to your own desire. 37:53.280 --> 37:58.280 And I think that that bait and switch is really nowhere more evident than in what Disney wants 37:58.280 --> 38:02.520 girls to go to after the animated princesses, which is the flesh and blood princesses, like 38:02.520 --> 38:06.720 Miley Cyrus being the most famous, but not the only example. 38:06.720 --> 38:10.680 And initially, these girls, it's the same cycle every time. 38:10.680 --> 38:12.200 They're marketed as wholesome, right? 38:12.200 --> 38:15.160 And they wear those true love weights rings that promise that they're going to be a virgin 38:15.160 --> 38:17.400 till they get married. 38:17.400 --> 38:23.720 And Miley, when she was 14, right before she was 15, she was on Oprah, and she said, I 38:23.720 --> 38:25.760 look way young, and I want to stay that way. 38:25.760 --> 38:29.760 And I try to choose clothes that moms will approve of and girls will love. 38:29.760 --> 38:35.120 And three months later, do you remember that Vanity Fair shoot that raised that? 38:35.120 --> 38:40.400 This was an image of her in Vanity Fair, the one on the left, where she looks kind of like 38:40.400 --> 38:43.120 she just got out of bed with a lover. 38:43.120 --> 38:45.240 That was the thing that made parents mad. 38:45.240 --> 38:48.680 I think the other image is way creepier. 38:48.680 --> 38:50.480 That's her dad. 38:50.480 --> 38:51.480 That's really weird. 38:51.480 --> 38:54.760 But anyway, that was Miley at 15. 38:54.760 --> 38:56.880 This is Miley at 17. 38:56.880 --> 38:58.760 This is Miley at 18. 38:58.760 --> 39:02.800 And again, the issue is not sexuality, right? 39:02.800 --> 39:04.240 Sex is okay. 39:04.240 --> 39:08.440 It's that Disney made Miley's virginity into a marketing gimmick. 39:08.440 --> 39:13.960 And so inevitably, what came after became a marketing gimmick as well. 39:13.960 --> 39:19.520 And that virgin-whore transformation that those girls go through over and over and over 39:19.520 --> 39:27.320 again when they make this big statement teaches girls over and over and over again that self-objectification 39:27.320 --> 39:30.960 is a feminine rite of passage. 39:30.960 --> 39:34.900 So you take that 13-year-old girl who has been marinating in the Princess Industrial 39:34.900 --> 39:44.160 Complex since she was a toddler, and you set her loose on Facebook with her 622 BFFs. 39:44.160 --> 39:48.760 And suddenly she becomes her own mini Miley, complete with the adoring fan base that she 39:48.760 --> 39:49.760 has to maintain. 39:49.760 --> 39:55.040 And there's this research from the Children's Digital Media Center at UCLA, which has found 39:55.040 --> 40:00.600 that college students are beginning to talk about identity, about the self, as something 40:00.600 --> 40:07.040 not cultivated from within, but something that you developed as kind of a brand that 40:07.040 --> 40:13.840 your marketing and your friends become the equivalent of fans or consumers or now on 40:13.840 --> 40:16.000 Facebook it's subscribers. 40:16.000 --> 40:20.240 And in building that brand, they found that girls are rewarded with the most positive 40:20.240 --> 40:28.000 feedback when they pose pictures that are provocative, but not too provocative. 40:28.000 --> 40:32.760 So just like the stars, just like Miley and all those girls, girls become engaged in this 40:32.760 --> 40:36.680 super public negotiation that used to be, you know, maybe it's perennial, but didn't 40:36.680 --> 40:46.880 used to be so out there and voted on so clearly between being sexy but not slutty. 40:46.880 --> 40:52.680 And I think that that gives a lie to any idea that the pervasive sexualization of girls 40:52.680 --> 40:57.400 in any way empowers them or gives them more control over their sexuality. 40:57.400 --> 41:01.780 And you could even argue that it gives them less because now, you know, their photographs 41:01.780 --> 41:04.900 and such can spread further faster. 41:04.900 --> 41:11.520 And speaking of that spreading, in 2009 I read a poll by AP that said 22% of teenage 41:11.520 --> 41:16.760 girls had center-posted nude or semi-nude photos of themselves online or texted. 41:16.760 --> 41:20.160 And my initial response to that was, come on, really? 41:20.160 --> 41:22.560 That just sounded like a sex panic to me. 41:22.560 --> 41:26.040 And then just a couple days after that, one of my dear friends called me up who was a 41:26.040 --> 41:31.520 ninth grade boy, and she was looking at his computer, you know, snooping around, and she 41:31.520 --> 41:37.520 found a picture on there of a classmate of his that he didn't even know very well, a 41:37.520 --> 41:39.960 girl, naked from the waist up. 41:39.960 --> 41:45.800 And she called me up to say, look, I'm trying to teach my boy to respect women. 41:45.800 --> 41:48.400 I'm trying to teach him that girls are not playthings. 41:48.400 --> 41:52.320 How am I supposed to do that when some girl's sending him a nudie shot? 41:52.320 --> 41:55.280 And I really wrestled with it because I really, you know, I tried to be sort of open-minded 41:55.280 --> 41:59.880 and I thought, like, is there some way this could be spun as positive? 41:59.880 --> 42:04.880 Seriously, like, you know, maybe she's feeling comfortable in her body. 42:04.880 --> 42:08.360 Maybe she's, you know, we have a double standard and she's transcending that. 42:08.360 --> 42:09.360 You know, I'm not really sure. 42:09.360 --> 42:12.160 But, you know, it just didn't really sit because it's like, well, what's she getting out of 42:12.160 --> 42:13.880 this exactly? 42:13.880 --> 42:19.040 And so I called Deb Tolman, who is at Hunter College in New York and is sort of the guru 42:19.040 --> 42:20.520 of female girls' desire. 42:20.520 --> 42:22.400 She does work on female desire. 42:22.400 --> 42:29.520 And she said that what they've been seeing is that increasingly sexual agency, the idea 42:29.520 --> 42:35.800 that you have entitlement to express sexuality, to be sexual, you know, to have an erotic 42:35.800 --> 42:40.760 life, that that in itself has become the latest performance for teenage girls. 42:40.760 --> 42:46.200 So it becomes something that they have to do or prove rather than authentically feel. 42:46.200 --> 42:51.000 And that makes it really tricky to talk to girls about sexuality and about their desire 42:51.000 --> 42:52.480 and about something authentic. 42:52.480 --> 42:56.240 And she said that what she was finding was as she was interviewing teenage girls and 42:56.240 --> 43:07.860 asking them to describe how an experience of sexual arousal felt to them, they would 43:07.860 --> 43:11.160 increasingly respond by how they felt they looked. 43:11.160 --> 43:15.720 And she had to tell them that looking good was not a feeling, which I think should be 43:15.720 --> 43:18.240 a t-shirt. 43:18.240 --> 43:21.880 But I think that there's an arc there that is worth considering and worth thinking about. 43:21.880 --> 43:24.520 And I'm like looking out at you guys, and even though it's kind of bright and I can't 43:24.520 --> 43:26.960 see you, I'm still seeing that you're all looking like so bummed. 43:26.960 --> 43:33.400 You're all like sitting there going, oh, god, this is so sad. 43:33.400 --> 43:39.160 So I just want to say that I say all this because I really believe that understanding 43:39.160 --> 43:42.600 and awareness are the first step to change. 43:42.600 --> 43:45.480 Understanding the culture that girls are in, helping your daughter understand it as she 43:45.480 --> 43:48.400 grows, demanding change. 43:48.400 --> 43:53.560 And we adults in girls' lives, whether you're parents or grandparents or aunties or uncles 43:53.560 --> 43:58.480 or teachers or advocates, we have so much more power than we know. 43:58.480 --> 44:07.200 And I was thinking about that a lot last week, or maybe two weeks ago now, when the Susan 44:07.200 --> 44:11.120 G. Komen Foundation pulled its funding from Planned Parenthood and then was forced to 44:11.120 --> 44:13.160 reinstate it. 44:13.160 --> 44:20.400 Because collectively, with one voice, women and men put down, they just went, no, you 44:20.400 --> 44:22.080 don't. 44:22.080 --> 44:27.240 And took this huge, basically, corporation and didn't let them do something. 44:27.240 --> 44:30.080 And it was a tremendously powerful moment. 44:30.080 --> 44:33.900 And I think that we can really learn from that with the LEGO Girls, which recently came 44:33.900 --> 44:36.280 out that I showed you a couple slides of. 44:36.280 --> 44:42.960 The girls can build beauty parlors or cafes and more. 44:42.960 --> 44:50.560 And 52,000 people signed a petition on change.org saying, you know, we want girls to play with 44:50.560 --> 44:53.040 LEGO, not like this. 44:53.040 --> 44:58.320 And LEGO has now called for a meeting with the heads of a number of girls' advocacy 44:58.320 --> 45:07.000 organizations to discuss how they can reshape this to make it something that is more amenable 45:07.000 --> 45:11.360 to parents and to girls and less insulting and meets better criteria. 45:11.360 --> 45:16.800 So there was this way that the parental pushback, particularly in the consumer culture, makes 45:16.800 --> 45:17.800 a big difference. 45:17.800 --> 45:23.760 And I think about it a lot, because I'm from Berkeley, as being like the food movement. 45:23.760 --> 45:28.480 And how, you know, if I stood up here 10 or 15 years ago and talked to you guys about 45:28.480 --> 45:33.560 trans fat and free range chicken, you would have thought I was a crazy person. 45:33.560 --> 45:39.360 And now, I hope you don't, now because of, you know, really a couple of books, because 45:39.360 --> 45:44.320 of Omnivore's Dilemma and Fast Food Nation that sparked this national conversation, not 45:44.320 --> 45:50.560 everywhere, not everybody for sure, but a lot of places, a lot of people, a lot of communities 45:50.560 --> 45:58.320 have changed or are making change to make the way we eat more wholesome, more sustainable, 45:58.320 --> 46:01.200 you know, more environmentally sound and healthier for us. 46:01.200 --> 46:05.120 And the way that we talk, the language we use when we talk about food is the same language 46:05.120 --> 46:08.120 we use when we talk about media and culture. 46:08.120 --> 46:10.200 You know, our kids consume the junk. 46:10.200 --> 46:11.960 It's unhealthy for them. 46:11.960 --> 46:14.640 And I think that there's a reason that that language is the same. 46:14.640 --> 46:19.000 And you know, if we could get McDonald's to put healthier items on its menu, we can change 46:19.000 --> 46:21.800 Mattel, you know, for goodness sakes. 46:21.800 --> 46:25.800 So on a collective level, I see change and I see possibility. 46:25.800 --> 46:32.240 And on an individual level, you know, no is a good word when kids are little, and it does 46:32.240 --> 46:34.960 work. 46:34.960 --> 46:37.040 It's also not enough. 46:37.040 --> 46:39.920 And I learned that the hard way, remember a long time ago, I told you to remember those 46:39.920 --> 46:44.920 Thai girls dolls, they look like brat's dolls, but plush. 46:44.920 --> 46:48.840 My daughter and I were walking in the Los Angeles airport when she was four and they 46:48.840 --> 46:52.960 had a rack of those in the airport and she just was like, I don't know, it was like an 46:52.960 --> 46:57.280 emitted gamma rays and she was like, mommy, can I have one of those? 46:57.280 --> 47:00.640 And something in me snapped. 47:00.640 --> 47:08.160 And I just I was like, no, no, you cannot ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have one of those. 47:08.160 --> 47:10.160 And she was like, mommy, why? 47:10.160 --> 47:11.160 They're inappropriate. 47:11.160 --> 47:13.000 And she's like, why are they inappropriate? 47:13.000 --> 47:16.960 And I just thought, I don't even want to explain why they're inappropriate. 47:16.960 --> 47:21.040 I am so darn sick of the teachable moment. 47:21.040 --> 47:23.280 You know? 47:23.280 --> 47:25.080 So sick of it. 47:25.080 --> 47:29.320 And I thought, they have me over a barrel because you are never going to be able to 47:29.320 --> 47:35.120 convince your daughter that she has broader choices when you're always saying no. 47:35.120 --> 47:43.480 And so I came to the conclusion that the way to go is to limit, but not censor, but also 47:43.480 --> 47:49.880 really focus on expanding, expanding girls' ideas of what, and boys too, of what it means 47:49.880 --> 47:52.280 to be female and feminine. 47:52.280 --> 47:56.680 And so I actually, on my website, which is peggieornstein.com or cinderellaatemydaughter.com, 47:56.680 --> 48:01.880 I've been developing a resources list, which you're welcome to look at and also add to 48:01.880 --> 48:07.000 it by emailing me, of playthings and books and movies and all kinds of things that offer 48:07.000 --> 48:09.280 not just the neutral stuff. 48:09.280 --> 48:12.480 And I think we tend to think either neutral or we think binary. 48:12.480 --> 48:16.840 Either my daughter's wearing a princess dress or she's sleeping with a football. 48:16.840 --> 48:21.440 But I think there's a third way, and that's about creating an idea of the feminine that 48:21.440 --> 48:24.680 is positive and strong and internally based. 48:24.680 --> 48:29.800 And as an example of that, again, when my daughter was little, we started reading child-friendly 48:29.800 --> 48:31.460 versions of Greek myths. 48:31.460 --> 48:37.980 So not the ones where Hercules is killing all his kids, but other ones. 48:37.980 --> 48:42.640 And she went trick or treating that you're dressed as Athena, goddess of war and wisdom. 48:42.640 --> 48:46.480 So she's still got to wear the cool dress thing, and she's still got to wear the neat 48:46.480 --> 48:49.340 thing on her head, the little silver, crowny thing. 48:49.340 --> 48:55.240 But it was a totally different archetype, a totally different image of what it meant 48:55.240 --> 48:58.180 to be feminine than Disney's Cinderella. 48:58.180 --> 48:59.540 It was internally based. 48:59.540 --> 49:00.540 It was powerful. 49:00.540 --> 49:03.360 It was from the inside out rather than the outside in. 49:03.360 --> 49:07.760 And it allowed her to celebrate herself as a girl and feel that feeling of I'm a girl, 49:07.760 --> 49:12.200 I'm a girl, but in a way that I could totally embrace and say yes to. 49:12.200 --> 49:15.680 So I think we have to do that kind of creative thinking. 49:15.680 --> 49:19.000 Also as girls get older, giving power back to them is really great. 49:19.000 --> 49:23.320 Getting them involved in their own media literacy and talking back and getting them control 49:23.320 --> 49:24.320 over production. 49:24.320 --> 49:26.420 Oh, there's the happy girls. 49:26.420 --> 49:27.680 This is what we want. 49:27.680 --> 49:32.300 So Girls Inc. and Girl Scouts both have great programs this way. 49:32.300 --> 49:36.240 Girls Leadership Institute, for those of you who are writing this down, I just wanted to 49:36.240 --> 49:38.200 put this up there. 49:38.200 --> 49:41.640 Girlsleadershipinstitute.org is a great source. 49:41.640 --> 49:49.760 Aboutface.org has ideas of things that you can do with girls, as does Spark Summit. 49:49.760 --> 49:53.800 They have things you can download, activities and things that you can download. 49:53.800 --> 49:55.600 Hardy Girls Healthy Women. 49:55.600 --> 49:59.160 So this is powered by Girl, which is part of Hardy Girls Healthy Women. 49:59.160 --> 50:04.160 And what they do is they have the girls take existing ads and talk back to them. 50:04.160 --> 50:09.840 So the one on the right is an ad for diesel jeans and it says, in third grade, I learned 50:09.840 --> 50:12.480 the appropriate way to act in a museum. 50:12.480 --> 50:15.560 It didn't look like this. 50:15.560 --> 50:22.020 And on the left, the purse ad, she's saying, she's thinking, can't blink, don't breathe, 50:22.020 --> 50:25.720 and I'm cold, so firing my agent. 50:25.720 --> 50:29.360 And so there's this kind of funny way that girls can engage and interact and talk back 50:29.360 --> 50:32.880 and you can actually go on their website and they have ads up there that you can do that 50:32.880 --> 50:37.960 to and your daughter can do that to, which is a great way to, I think, it can be transformative 50:37.960 --> 50:42.560 to get control over the culture for girls and it can really help them turn from princess 50:42.560 --> 50:45.320 to heroine. 50:45.320 --> 50:50.280 And I think our task as parents, Diane Levin talks, who wrote So Sexy So Soon, talks about 50:50.280 --> 50:53.000 these two boxes that kids carry around in their head. 50:53.000 --> 50:57.000 And one is the box that has all the popular culture stuff and all the values there. 50:57.000 --> 51:01.040 And the other is the box of stuff that we want for them, to fulfill their potential, 51:01.040 --> 51:06.520 to be competent, to be kind, to be compassionate, all the values that we have. 51:06.520 --> 51:09.820 And the culture box is too big right now. 51:09.820 --> 51:14.720 And so the task is to kind of make it smaller, to limit it as long as you can, but also to 51:14.720 --> 51:20.800 create bridges between the boxes so that you're helping children have vocabulary and a critical 51:20.800 --> 51:27.000 eye when they look at these things so that they can, that we're in it with them as allies, 51:27.000 --> 51:32.320 not as adversaries, and they are able to decode them for themselves. 51:32.320 --> 51:38.400 And I just want to end by, I love the fairy tales. 51:38.400 --> 51:40.040 I want to talk about the fairy tales for a second. 51:40.040 --> 51:41.760 And I particularly love Cinderella. 51:41.760 --> 51:46.400 Cinderella, the oldest Cinderella is from 850 AD. 51:46.400 --> 51:47.840 It's called Yeshen. 51:47.840 --> 51:49.240 She's Chinese. 51:49.240 --> 51:54.560 And there are, oh gosh, over 700 Cinderella stories. 51:54.560 --> 51:56.080 It crosses all cultures. 51:56.080 --> 51:58.240 It's like a universal story. 51:58.240 --> 52:04.200 And something that common, I feel like it has to have something worthy in it, right? 52:04.200 --> 52:07.040 And one of my favorite ones is the Grimm Cinderella. 52:07.040 --> 52:09.040 It's actually called Ashen Putru. 52:09.040 --> 52:13.920 But I'm going to call it Cinderella because my throat's starting to hurt. 52:13.920 --> 52:17.280 So in that Cinderella, okay, it's incredibly bloody. 52:17.280 --> 52:19.360 I don't know if any of you have read it. 52:19.360 --> 52:20.360 Incredibly bloody. 52:20.360 --> 52:25.360 The stepsisters, one cuts off her heel to get into the shoe, and neither cuts off her 52:25.360 --> 52:27.960 toe, and blood is spurting and flying. 52:27.960 --> 52:33.560 And then Cinderella seems to be nicely asking them to be her bridesmaids when she finally 52:33.560 --> 52:34.560 is going to marry the prince. 52:34.560 --> 52:38.080 And they walk in on either side of her, and Cinderella has these doves perched on her 52:38.080 --> 52:42.240 shoulders that peck out the stepsisters' eyes. 52:42.240 --> 52:45.360 Like imagine the wedding photos, you know? 52:45.360 --> 52:47.200 So it's really gross and gory. 52:47.200 --> 52:51.280 But it has this great, you know, you read these things differently at different times 52:51.280 --> 52:54.040 of your life, which I think is really the beauty of them. 52:54.040 --> 52:57.760 And so when I read Cinderella now, this is what I see. 52:57.760 --> 53:02.880 Cinderella's a story about this father goes on a business trip, and he asks his daughters 53:02.880 --> 53:05.280 what they want him to bring back. 53:05.280 --> 53:14.400 And the Wicked Stepsisters, Kim and Chloe, they ask for bling. 53:14.400 --> 53:21.820 And Cinderella asks him to bring back a branch that brushes his face, a twig. 53:21.820 --> 53:28.400 So he brings her a hazel branch, and she plants it in her dead mother's grave. 53:28.400 --> 53:30.920 And she waters it with her tears. 53:30.920 --> 53:33.460 And this tree grows from that. 53:33.460 --> 53:38.360 And there's no fairy godmother, there's no pumpkin, she walks to the ball, there's three 53:38.360 --> 53:40.800 balls, she walks to them on her own, gets home on her own. 53:40.800 --> 53:46.320 But it's the tree that provides the wherewithal for her to go to the ball. 53:46.320 --> 53:53.600 And there's this way that this story is about a mother's love transcending death to help 53:53.600 --> 53:57.960 guide her daughter from girlhood to womanhood. 53:57.960 --> 54:03.760 And when I read the story that way, I think we've got to bring back the tree, right? 54:03.760 --> 54:09.480 I mean, we, whether we're women or men, whatever we are, we adults in girls' lives, need to 54:09.480 --> 54:15.240 be those deep roots and those sheltering branches that help them navigate through the thicket 54:15.240 --> 54:19.280 of what this culture tells them it means to be female. 54:19.280 --> 54:24.200 Not lock them in a tower like the other fairy tale, but help them have the tools to get 54:24.200 --> 54:31.600 through so that they can find the real and their true happily ever afters. 54:31.600 --> 54:33.880 So with that, I'll stop and I'm happy to take questions. 54:33.880 --> 54:40.880 Thank you all for coming. 54:40.880 --> 54:44.160 I have a stepdaughter who's eight and who lives across the country from me and has a 54:44.160 --> 54:49.200 wonderful mother and is wicked bright and gorgeous. 54:49.200 --> 54:54.000 And I just don't know what to do sometimes because some of the things that I hear her 54:54.000 --> 54:59.600 talk about, about how she likes that she's skinny and other things just make me super 54:59.600 --> 55:00.700 uncomfortable. 55:00.700 --> 55:06.200 And I don't know how to address it without A, getting into business that's not mine 55:06.200 --> 55:08.840 because she's not my daughter. 55:08.840 --> 55:14.000 And B, without doing that thing where she's at the age where if you start pushing for 55:14.000 --> 55:18.000 something, she's going to run the opposite way. 55:18.000 --> 55:25.920 So I just was looking for some guidance on how to be positive without being there in 55:25.920 --> 55:29.600 person and without being an actual parent. 55:29.600 --> 55:30.600 Right. 55:30.600 --> 55:36.480 Well, I think there's a couple of things. 55:36.480 --> 55:41.760 One is giving her positive feedback for things that you think are great about her, that are 55:41.760 --> 55:42.760 not about her looks. 55:42.760 --> 55:50.360 Giving her positive feedback for her art or her sports or her whatever it is that she 55:50.360 --> 55:54.760 does that are about her as a person. 55:54.760 --> 55:57.080 And asking her questions. 55:57.080 --> 56:00.960 I think it's fair to engage a kid by asking open-ended questions. 56:00.960 --> 56:03.920 It's the best way to engage them on these things because if you start lecturing them 56:03.920 --> 56:08.320 and saying, this is what I think and this is bad and this is false empowerment, I mean 56:08.320 --> 56:12.320 not that you would use that language with an 11-year-old, but essentially, right? 56:12.320 --> 56:15.080 That it's not going to work. 56:15.080 --> 56:20.040 But just sort of trying to engage her in discussion without having a goal for what that discussion 56:20.040 --> 56:25.960 ought to come out is your best bet in that position. 56:25.960 --> 56:32.040 And then having stuff when she's at your house that you do together that is model some other 56:32.040 --> 56:33.040 things. 56:33.040 --> 56:34.520 I would say that would be the best. 56:34.520 --> 56:39.720 And then presumably if you have a stepdaughter, you have a daughter's father in the house 56:39.720 --> 56:41.080 with you. 56:41.080 --> 56:46.440 And I just would want to say a word that men's roles here, fathers, uncles, grandfathers, 56:46.440 --> 56:51.960 whoever the man in a girl's life is, are tremendously important in how a girl grows up and how she 56:51.960 --> 56:57.320 sees herself, both in terms of how that man talks to the girl's mother. 56:57.320 --> 57:04.200 And also there's a lot of research that girls who have support from, emotional support from 57:04.200 --> 57:12.520 their fathers, not about being pretty, but about who you are, have stronger body images, 57:12.520 --> 57:17.520 less distorted negative body image, and also that they're more likely to go into non-traditional 57:17.520 --> 57:19.080 fields than other girls. 57:19.080 --> 57:28.720 So a father's regard, positive regard in a girl's life can really be a wonderful thing. 57:28.720 --> 57:32.320 And so I'm always really pleased when men come out to see me or listen to me or call 57:32.320 --> 57:53.320 into the radio for that reason.