Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  The princess as superhero is not irrelevant. Some scholars I spoke with say that given its post-9/11 timing, princess mania is a response to a newly dangerous world. “Historically, princess worship has emerged during periods of uncertainty and profound social change,” observes Miriam Forman-Brunell, a historian at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. Francis Hodgson Burnett’s original A Little Princess was published at a time of rapid urbanization, immigration, and poverty; Shirley Temple’s film version was a hit during the Great Depression. “The original folk tales themselves,” Forman-Brunell says, “spring from medieval and early-modern European culture that faced all kinds of economic and demographic and social upheaval—famine, war, disease, terror of wolves. Girls play savior during times of economic crisis and instability.” That’s a heavy burden for little shoulders. Perhaps that’s why the magic wand has become an essential part of the princess getup. In the original stories—even the Disney versions of them—it’s not the girl herself who’s magic; it’s the fairy godmother. Now, if Forman-Brunell is right, we adults have become the cursed creatures whom girls have the thaumaturgic power to transform.

  In the 1990s, third-wave feminists rebelled against their dour big sisters, “reclaiming” sexual objectification as a woman’s right—provided, of course, that it was on her own terms, that she was the one choosing to strip or wear a shirt that said porn star or make out with her best friend at a frat-house bash. They embraced words like “bitch” and “slut” as terms of affection and empowerment. That is, when used by the right people, with the right dash of playful irony. But how can you assure that? As Madonna gave way to Britney, whatever self-determination that message contained was watered down and commodified until all that was left was a gaggle of six-year-old girls in belly-baring T-shirts (which I’m guessing they don’t wear as a cultural critique). It is no wonder that parents, faced with thongs for eight-year-olds and Bratz dolls’ “passion for fashion,” fill their daughters’ closets with pink sateen; the innocence of the Princess feels like a reprieve.

  “But what does that mean?” asks Sharon Lamb, Mikel Brown’s co-author and a psychology professor at Saint Michael’s College. “There are other ways to express ‘innocence’—girls could play ladybug or caterpillar. What you’re really talking about is sexual purity. And there’s a trap at the end of that rainbow, because the natural progression from pale, innocent pink is not to other colors. It’s to hot, sexy pink—exactly the kind of sexualization parents are trying to avoid.”

  Lamb suggested that to see for myself how “Someday My Prince Will Come” morphs into “Oops! . . . I Did It Again,” I visit Club Libby Lu, the mall shop dedicated to the “Very Important Princess.”

  Walking into one of the newest links in the store’s chain, in Natick, Massachusetts, last summer, I had to tip my tiara to the founder, Mary Drolet: Libby Lu’s design was flawless. Unlike Disney, Drolet depended on focus groups to choose the logo (a crown-topped heart) and the colors (pink, pink, purple, and more pink). The displays were scaled to the size of a ten-year-old, though most of the shoppers I saw were several years younger than that. The decals on the walls and dressing rooms—i love your hair, hip chick, spoiled—were written in “girlfriend language.” The young sales clerks at this “special secret club for superfabulous girls” are called “club counselors” and come off like your coolest babysitter, the one who used to let you brush her hair. The malls themselves are chosen based on a company formula called the GPI, or “Girl Power Index,” which predicts potential sales revenues. Talk about newspeak: “Girl Power” has gone from a riot grrrl anthem to “I Am Woman, Watch Me Shop.”

  Inside, the store was divided into several glittery “shopping zones” called “experiences”: Libby’s Laboratory, now called Sparkle Spa, where girls concoct their own cosmetics and bath products; Libby’s Room; Ear Piercing; Pooch Parlor (where divas in training can pamper stuffed poodles, pugs, and Chihuahuas); and the Style Studio, offering “Libby Lu” makeover choices, including ‘Tween Idol, Rock Star, Pop Star, and, of course, Priceless Princess. Each look includes hairstyle, makeup, nail polish, and sparkly tattoos.

  As I browsed, I noticed a mother standing in the center of the store holding a price list for makeover birthday parties—$22.50 to $35 per child. Her name was Anne McAuliffe; her daughters—Stephanie, four, and seven-year-old twins Rory and Sarah—were dashing giddily up and down the aisles.

  “They’ve been begging to come to this store for three weeks,” McAuliffe said. “I’d never heard of it. So I said they could, but they’d have to spend their own money if they bought anything.” She looked around. “Some of this stuff is innocuous,” she observed, then leaned toward me, eyes wide and stage-whispered: “But . . . a lot of it is horrible. It makes them look like little prostitutes. It’s crazy. They’re babies!”

  As we debated the line between frivolous fun and JonBenét, McAuliffe’s daughter Rory came dashing up, pigtails haphazard, glasses askew. “They have the best pocketbooks here,” she said breathlessly, brandishing a clutch with the words girlie girl stamped on it. “Please, can I have one? It has sequins!”

  “You see that?” McAuliffe asked, gesturing at the bag. “What am I supposed to say?”

  On my way out of the mall, I popped into the tween mecca Hot Topic, where a display of Tinker Bell items caught my eye. Tinker Bell, whose image racks up an annual $400 million in retail sales with no particular effort on Disney’s part, is poised to wreak vengeance on the Princess line that once expelled her. Last winter, the first chapter book designed to introduce girls to Tink and her Pixie Hollow pals spent eighteen weeks on the New York Times children’s bestseller list. In a direct-to-DVD now in production, she will speak for the first time, voiced by the actress Brittany Murphy. Next year, Disney Fairies will be rolled out in earnest. Aimed at six- to nine-year-old girls, the line will catch them just as they outgrow the Princess. Their colors will be lavender, green, turquoise—anything but the Princess’s soon-to-be-babyish pink.

  To appeal to that older child, Disney executives said, the Fairies will have more “attitude” and “sass” than the Princesses. What, I wondered, did that entail? I’d seen some of the Tinker Bell merchandise that Disney sells at its theme parks: T-shirts reading spoiled to perfection, mood subject to change without notice, and tinker bell: prettier than a princess. At Hot Topic, that edge was even sharper: magnets, clocks, light-switch plates, and panties featured dark tink, described as “the bad-girl side of Miss Bell that Walt never saw.”

  Girl power, indeed.

  A few days later, I picked my daughter up from preschool. She came tearing over in a full-skirted frock with a gold bodice, a beaded crown perched sideways on her head. “Look, Mommy, I’m Ariel!” she crowed, referring to Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Then she stopped and furrowed her brow. “Mommy, do you like Ariel?”

  I considered her for a moment. Maybe the Princess is the first salvo in what will become a lifelong struggle over her body image, a Hundred Years’ War of dieting, plucking, painting, and perpetual dissatisfaction with the results. Or maybe it isn’t. I’ll never really know. In the end, it’s not the Princesses that really bother me anyway. They’re just a trigger for the bigger question of how, over the years, can I help my daughter with the contradictions she will inevitably face as a girl, the dissonance that is as endemic as ever to growing up female? Maybe the best I can hope for is that her generation will get a little further with the solutions than we did.

  For now, I kneeled down on the floor and gave my daughter a hug.

  She smiled happily. “But, Mommy?” she added. “When I grow up, I’m still going to be a fireman.”

  Playing at Sexy

  Cinderella Ate My Daughter explored the ways that even (or maybe especially) in our more “liberated” era, girls learn that how their bodies look to others is more important than how those bodies feel to themselves. It seemed both a natural and crucial next step to question the impact of such lessons on their int
imate relationships. That process—which I began in earnest with this piece, published in June 2010—would eventually lead me to write Girls & Sex.

  Last month, over the course of one workday, six friends sent me a link to the same video along with messages that said, “Have you seen this?” I had, but I clicked it each time anyway. I just couldn’t stop myself. The clip showed a troupe of eight- and nine-year-old Los Angeles girls in a national dance contest. Wearing outfits that would make a stripper blush, they pumped it and bumped it to the Beyoncé hit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” The girls were spectacular dancers, able to twirl on one foot while extending the other into a perfect standing split. But I doubt that two million people had tuned in simply to admire their arabesques. As with TV phenomena like Toddlers & Tiaras, the compulsion to watch was like the impulse to rubberneck at an accident, but in this case the scene was a twelve-car pileup of early sexualization.

  The girls’ routine was debated on CNN, Good Morning America, and the Huffington Post. For about forty-eight hours it blazed across blogs and filled up inboxes. And then, faster than you can say JonBenét Ramsey, it was gone. Outraged mommy bloggers calmed down. News outlets turned back to the BP oil spill and the Pennsylvania newlyweds who were born on the same day in the same hospital.

  Moral panics about pornified girls bubble up regularly these days: Should the self-proclaimed role model Miley Cyrus have stripped for Vanity Fair (or given a lap dance to a forty-four-year-old film producer, or pole danced on an ice-cream cart at the Teen Choice Awards)? Is the neckline too low on the new Barbie Basics Model 10 doll—nicknamed, seemingly redundantly, “Busty Barbie”? The next freak-out, mark my words, will explode this summer when Mattel rolls out its Monster High franchise—dolls, apparel, interactive Web site, Halloween costumes, Webisodes, and, eventually, television shows and a movie—which will be the biggest product introduction in the company’s history, and its first original line since Hot Wheels in 1968 (back when “hot” had a different connotation, at least to children). Monster High’s racy student body is made up of the children of “legendary monsters,” including Clawdeen, a fifteen-year-old werewolf who resembles an undead streetwalker, only less demure. But no worries, parents, Clawdeen is not without her wholesome side: although she is a “fierce fashionista” who is “gorgeous” and “intimidating” and hates gym “because they won’t let me participate in my platform heels,” her Web bio assures us that she is “absolutely loyal to my friends.” Well, that’s a relief.

  I might give the phenomenon a pass if it turned out that once they were older, little girls who playacted at sexy were more comfortable in their skins or more confident in their sexual relationships, if they asked more of their partners or enjoyed greater pleasure. But evidence is to the contrary. In his book The Triple Bind: Saving Our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures and Conflicting Expectations, Stephen Hinshaw, professor in the psychology department at the University of California at Berkeley, explains that sexualizing little girls—whether through images, music, or play—actually undermines healthy sexuality rather than promoting it. Those bootylicious grade-schoolers in the dance troupe presumably don’t understand the meaning of their motions (and thank goodness for it), but precisely because of that, they don’t connect—and may never learn to connect—sexy attitudes to erotic feelings.

  That ongoing confusion between desirability and desire may help explain another trend giving parents agita: the number of teenage girls—22 percent, according to a 2008 survey by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy—who have electronically sent or posted nude or seminude photos of themselves. I have to admit that part of me is impressed by their bravado. Maybe, rather than cause for alarm, this was a sign of progress—indication that girls were taking charge of their sexuality, transcending the double standard. Yet you have to wonder: Does flaunting it mean they’re feeling it?

  I find myself improbably nostalgic for the late 1970s, when I came of age. In many ways, girls were less free then than they are today: fewer of us competed on the sports field, raised our hands during math class, or graduated from college. No one spoke the word “vagina,” whether in a monologue or not. And there was that Farrah flip to contend with. Yet in that oh-so-brief window between the advent of the Pill and the fear of AIDS, when abortion was both legal and accessible to teenagers, there was—at least for some of us—a kind of Our Bodies, Ourselves optimism about sex. Young women felt an imperative, a political duty, to understand their desire and responses, to explore their own pleasure, to recognize sexuality as something rising from within. And young men—at least some of them—seemed eager to take the journey with us, to rewrite the rules of masculinity so they would prize mutuality over conquest.

  That notion now seems as quaint as a one-piece swimsuit on a five-year-old. Sexual entitlement, according to Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and author of Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk about Sexuality, has instead become the latest performance, something girls act out rather than experience. “By the time they are teenagers,” she said, “the girls I talk to respond to questions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or desire—by talking about how their bodies look. They will say something like, ‘I felt like I looked good.’ Looking good is not a feeling.”

  Tell that to the zombies at Monster High. Or the girls thrusting their hips at warp speed to Beyoncé (who, incidentally, wears a leotard in her video). Better yet, tell it to your daughter: she is going to need to hear it.

  The Hillary Lesson

  Oh how I wish that ten years after May 2008, when this piece was published, I could write that Hillary had triumphed, that sexism and ageism were vanquished in politics. Because if I worried about what our daughters might have learned from the race for president back then . . .

  Berkeley’s Fourth Street is my town’s version of a strip mall: there is little you might need there, but much to want: handcrafted Japanese paper; diaphanous Stevie Nicks–inspired frocks; wooden toys imported from Europe. One recent morning, as my four-year-old daughter and I strolled to our favorite diner, she pointed to a bumper sticker plastered on a mailbox. A yellow, viraginous caricature of Hillary Clinton leered out from a black background. Big block letters proclaimed, the wicked witch of the east is alive and living in new york.

  “Look, Mama,” she said. “That’s Hillary. What does it say?”

  Let me state right off that I don’t consider Senator Clinton a victim. Her arm is so limber from the mud she has lobbed during her political career that now that the whole president thing is doubtful, she may have a future as the first woman to pitch for the Yankees. So it is not the attacks themselves that give me pause, but the form they consistently have taken, the default position of incessant, even gleeful (and, I admit it, sometimes clever) misogyny. Staring down the sight line of my daughter’s index finger, I wondered what to tell her—not only at this moment, but in years to come—about Hillary and about herself. Will the senator be my example of how far we’ve come as women or how far we have to go? Is she proof to my daughter that “you can do anything” or of the hell that will rain down on you if you try? Voting against Clinton does not make a person sexist—there are other reasons to reject her. But contemplating the life’s a bitch, don’t vote for one T-shirts, the stainless-steel-thighed Hillary nutcrackers, the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction, I struggle over how, when—even whether—to talk to girls truthfully about women and power.

  I beamed when my daughter announced her first career choice, firefighter, ridiculously proud (given she was barely two) that she felt no barriers to what was historically a male-only job. Nor did I indicate at the time that there would be any for her. Of course, I didn’t really expect her to pursue that dream (she has already moved on to scuba diver) but the truth is, if she did she might face a life of isolation and hostility, much like Rebecca Farris, who, in 2006, after her promotion to engine driver in a firehouse in Austin, Texas, cam
e to work to find her locker smeared with human excrement. At least no one suggested she iron her stationmates’ shirts.

  In the white-collar realm, I suppose I should celebrate the announcement last month of the first woman named chief executive of a top U.S. accounting firm, but maybe I’m just a glass-half-empty kind of gal: I mean, the first? In 2008? Are they kidding? Meanwhile, now that Meg Whitman has stepped down as CEO of eBay, there are a measly twelve women who lead Fortune 500 companies; their percentage of female corporate officers has also dropped over the last three years. And while women make up 48 percent of new lawyers (and have hovered in that range for around a decade), the percentage of women who are law partners at major firms remains stuck at a pitiful eighteen.

  Right now, my daughter doesn’t know about the obstacles she may face someday, and I’m not sure of the wisdom of girding her in advance. Even the supposedly “girl positive” picture books, designed to address this very issue, pose a dilemma. Take Elenita, a magical-realist tale, given to my daughter by a family friend, about a girl who wants to be a glassblower. Her father says she can’t do it: she’s too little, and besides, the trade is forbidden to women. The lesson, naturally, is that with a little ingenuity girls can be glassblowers or stevedores or [fill in the blank]. Nice. Still, I found myself hesitating over the “girls can’t” section. My daughter has never heard that “girls can’t be” or “girls can’t do.” Why should I plant the idea in her head only to knock it down?

  The same quandary crops up with older girls. They are sports stars, yearbook editors, valedictorians. We have assured them the world is theirs, and they have no reason to disbelieve us. Like Clinton, our daughters are no victims. And yet, all is not quite well. Not when achieving CEO, MD, or PhD status can still come appended with a second alphabet of b- and c-words. Not when a woman who runs for office is accused of harboring a “testicle lockbox.” Clinton, whatever else she may be, has become a reflection, a freeze frame of the complications and contradictions of female success. Her bid for the White House has embodied both the possibilities we never imagined for our daughters—shattering not just the glass ceiling but the glass stratosphere—and the vitriol that attaining them can provoke. Both are real; so Godspeed, girls.