Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  Perhaps by the time my daughter is of age, the ambivalence toward powerful women will have dissipated. Judging by the attitudes of today’s young adults, however, I’m not optimistic. According to a J. Walter Thompson survey of workplace issues published last month, while many men in their twenties show no preference, a full 40 percent would rather have a male than a female boss.

  The bumper sticker my daughter saw on Fourth Street struck me as “viraginous,” yet a virago can be defined either as a harpy or as a hero. I have a few years before I have to explain that to her. In the meantime, I did what any good mother would do when confronted with a thorny subject: I pointed to the bakery across the street and said: “Hey, look, honey! Want a cookie?”

  The Empowerment Mystique

  Since I wrote this piece, in September 2010, Sarah Palin has largely receded from public view: apparently, conservative male politicians no longer need her to camouflage their reactionary policies. The category of “femvertising,” however, has ballooned. Some spots rise to the level of innocuously political: the Always #LikeAGirl campaign, for instance, urged customers to join the “epic battle to keep girls’ confidence high during puberty and beyond.” Most, though, present female empowerment as completely unrelated to the struggle for political, economic, or social equality. Take the ad that Allergan, a pharmaceutical company, released in 2017 for International Women’s Day: a heart-swelling montage of inspirational photographs—portraits of Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks, Amelia Earhart—culminating in a call for “eyepowerment”: the feminist stand of using drops to combat chronic dry eye. Seriously: not a joke. Earlier in this collection, I quote Deborah Tolman, who says, “Looking good is not a feeling.” Neither, it turns out, is feminism.

  True confession: at age sixteen, I performed in a high-school production of the musical Free to Be . . . You and Me, dressed in Mork-from-Ork rainbow suspenders and matching toe socks. Our troupe defended William’s right to a doll and explained why mommies were people, too, at every elementary school in St. Louis Park, Minnesota; I can still recite “Don’t Dress Your Cat in an Apron.” So early last month, when I heard the familiar lilt of the New Seekers’ voices (“Come with me, take my hand, and we’ll liiiii-IIIIVE . . .”) emanating from the TV in my den, I dashed in, already singing along.

  What I saw was an irresistible set of triplets walking into a school wearing identical uniforms. Over the course of thirty seconds, the girls evolved—a powder-blue pencil holder, a yellow soccer ball, a pair of pink knockoff UGGs—as each asserted her individuality through brightly colored back-to-school gear from Target.

  I don’t think that was quite what Marlo Thomas had in mind.

  It would be easy to call the ad cynical, an attempt to channel a generation’s nostalgia for a time that irony forgot—and it may well be that. Yet other songs could have struck that particular chord. Free to Be was foremost about vanquishing gender stereotypes. By choosing girls to liberate from the tyranny of antimaterialism, Target implied that buying its wares was part of the victory. That’s part of a trend I’ve noticed across a whole range of sectors over the last several months, from big-box stores to high-end fashion to wireless-phone services to politics: all have discovered the sales potential in female pride.

  I am not talking about feminism per se so much as the suggestion, the feeling, of “empowerment”: an amorphous, untethered huzzah of “Go, Team Woman!” Take the Web site that Thierry Mugler, the couturier, started for Womanity, a perfume extolling “the invisible bond between women.” Awash with inspirational quotes (“adventure is worthwhile”), the site asked viewers the world over to join together by submitting what “womanity”—presumably derived from “humanity” rather than “inanity”—means to them.

  Then there was last month’s Verizon spot, titled “Prejudice,” in which a series of earnest everygirls addressed the camera: “Air has no prejudice. It does not carry the opinions of a man faster than those of a woman. . . . So it stands to reason my ideas will be powerful, if they are wise. . . . If my thoughts have flawless delivery”—that is, if her cell phone doesn’t punk out—“I can lead the army that will follow.”

  The girls are the quintessence of sincerity, and their expectation of a bright future can’t help but warm a viewer’s heart—especially if she is the parent of a daughter. In fact, watching the ad, I realized that daughters have supplanted sons as the repository of hope in tough economic times. To an extent, that has always been the case: Shirley Temple and Little Orphan Annie embodied optimism during the Great Depression. But this time, the symbolism is grounded less in sugar and spice than in cold, hard facts. It’s well established that three women now receive bachelor’s and master’s degrees for every two men, but in 2009, for the first time, they earned more doctorates, as well. Meanwhile, three-quarters of the jobs lost in the current recession were held by men (who were more likely to be in hard-hit industries like construction). Women have not only become (for the first time) the majority of the workforce, but they also hold the lioness’s share of managerial jobs and are the primary breadwinners in more than a quarter of dual-income families. According to a recent, ominously titled The Atlantic article, “The End of Men,” 75 percent of couples who used an experimental sex-selection technology before conception preferred to have girls.

  Women’s relatively rapid rise seems to have become unexpectedly entwined with patriotism—the music swelling under the Verizon spots is downright stately—proof of this country’s belief in fairness, equality, upward mobility. No wonder another Verizon ad, a freeway billboard I zoomed by, shows an African American woman, eyes gleaming, face tilted upward at the precise angle of Barack Obama’s on his ubiquitous campaign poster. We women, not just the air around us, are free.

  Of course, there’s no actual substance beneath these spots. Nike’s 1995 “If You Let Me Play Sports” campaign featured girls in much the same way as Verizon’s “Prejudice.” But though designed to sell shoes, the Nike ad also presented a compelling case for girls’ athletics—and the company donates to programs that promote them. The Verizon ad, by contrast, is cause-related marketing without the cause. Merely buying its service is how you’re supposed to strike the blow against inequality. Meanwhile, though the explicit mission of the Free to Be Foundation is to end discrimination, Target was recently forced to apologize for donating $150,000 to an organization supporting the gubernatorial campaign of Tom Emmer, a Minnesota state representative who drafted an amendment to the state’s constitution to ban same-sex marriage. That move sparked a boycott (or perhaps I should say a personcott) among the very type of shoppers who were weaned on the song.

  Where advertising goes, politics follows. And no one has channeled the power of free-floating female pride better than Sarah Palin. Her “Mama Grizzlies” video—a rallying cry to conservative women—hijacked feminist iconography for the right as effectively as Dan Quayle snagged “family values” back in 1992. In Palin’s video, images unspool over music that is nearly indistinguishable from the score of the Verizon spot: women hugging, women marching, women applauding in front of a gigantic flag. There are “a lot of women coming together,” Palin observes in a voice-over.

  As with the commercial product pitches, simply acknowledging—celebrating—that we are female, alluding to the idea that we can make something happen, even though it’s never clear what that something is or whether it’s in our best interests, is presented as empowerment. Never mind that in addition to being virulently antichoice, Palin opposed legislation to end pay discrimination. But by the time the video was through, I have to admit, I was ready to rear up on my own hind legs and attack those rats in Washington who would dare to provide children with affordable health care.

  That’s the thing about rhetoric: it can be effective even when it is vacuous. Which is no doubt why I found myself cheerfully humming—“I see a land bright and clear, and the time’s coming near”—as my daughter and I browsed under the big red bull’s-eye for new notebooks and sharp colored pe
ncils. Despite knowing better, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that with the right school supplies, she could rule the world.

  The Fat Trap

  Raising a girl with a healthy body image is challenging for any mother, especially those of us who have struggled ourselves (and, really, who hasn’t?). Having a daughter has not necessarily improved my own relationship with body and beauty, but it’s certainly taught me to fake it better. This piece ran in April 2010.

  Food is never just food. Food is love. Food is solace. It is politics. It is religion. And if that’s not enough to heap on your dinner plate each night, food is also, especially for mothers, the instant-read measure of our parenting. We are not only what we eat, we are what we feed our children. So here in Berkeley—where a preoccupation with locally grown, organic, sustainable agriculture is presumed—the mom who strolls the farmers’ markets can feel superior to the one who buys pesticide-free produce trucked in from Mexico, who can, in turn, lord it over the one who stoops to conventionally grown carrots (though the folks who grow their own trump us all). Let it slip that you took the kids to McDonald’s, and watch how fast those playdates dry up.

  Doing right by our kids means doing right by their health—body and soul. Yet even as awareness about the family diet has spread across the country (especially among the middle class and the affluent), so, it seems, have youngsters’ waistlines. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a full third of America’s children are overweight, and 17 percent are clinically obese—a rate that has more than tripled since 1976. Those figures may be alarming, yet equally disturbing are the numbers of children, girls in particular, who risk their health in the other direction, in the vain pursuit of thinness. In a 2002 survey of 81,247 Minnesota high school students published in The Journal of Adolescent Health, more than half of the girls reported engaging in some form of disordered behavior while trying to lose weight: fasting, popping diet pills, smoking, vomiting, abusing laxatives, binge eating.

  Parents, then, are left in a quandary, worrying about both the perils of obesity and those of anorexia. How can you simultaneously encourage your daughter to watch her size and accept her body? My own initial impulse, when I found out I was pregnant with a girl, was to suggest that my husband take responsibility for feeding her. After all, he doesn’t see a few extra pounds as a character flaw. Nor does he serve up a heaping helping of internal conflict with every meal. It’s not that I’m extreme; it’s just that like most—heck, all—of the women I know, my relationship to food, to my weight, to my body is . . . complicated. I did not want to pass that pathology on to my daughter.

  At best, weight is delicate territory between mothers and their girls. Michelle Obama found that out firsthand when kicking off her campaign to eliminate childhood obesity. In an attempt to destigmatize the condition, especially for African Americans, she confessed that the family pediatrician warned her that “something was getting off-balance”; she needed to watch her daughters’ body-mass indices. So she cut back on portion sizes, switched to low-fat milk, left fruit out on the table, and banned weekday TV viewing.

  The news that the First Mom put her daughters on a “diet” set the blogosphere abuzz. She was accused, even by supporters, of subjecting her daughters’ bodies to public scrutiny, making their appearance fair game. Some grimly predicted that years of purging awaited the girls. The actual message Mrs. Obama was trying to get across—that minor changes can make a major difference in kids’ lives—was, at least temporarily, lost in the uproar.

  The president also has overshared about his children’s weights, saying in a 2008 interview, “A couple of years ago—you’d never know it by looking at her now—Malia was getting a little chubby.” He, too, was criticized, though less harshly, maybe because while fathers’ comments sting, nothing cuts deeper than a mother’s appraising gaze. Daughters understand that early: according to a study of preschool girls published in the journal Pediatrics in 2001, those whose mothers expressed “higher concern” over their daughters’ weights not only reported more negative body images than their peers but also perceived themselves as less smart and less physically capable (paternal “concern” was associated only with the latter). The effect was independent of the child’s actual size.

  A 2003 analysis of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, meanwhile, showed that mothers were three times as likely to notice excess weight in daughters than in sons, even though the boys were more likely to be large. That gave me pause. It is so easy for the concern with “health,” however legitimate, to justify a focus on girls’ appearances. For organic-eating, right-living parents whose girls are merely on the fleshy side of average, “health” may also mask a discomfort with how a less-than-perfect daughter reflects on them. “‘Good’ parents today are expected to have normal-weight kids,” says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of the book The Body Project and a professor of history and human development at Cornell University. “Having a fat girl is a failure.”

  By the time my own daughter was born, I realized that avoiding conversations about food, health, and body image would be impossible: what I didn’t say would speak as loudly as anything I did. So rather than opt out, I decided to actively model something different, something saner. I’ve tried to forget all I once knew about calories, carbs, fat, and protein; I haven’t stepped on a scale in seven years. At dinner I pointedly enjoy what I eat, whether it’s steamed broccoli or pecan pie. I don’t fetishize food or indulge in foodieism. I exercise because it feels good, and I never, ever talk about weight. Honestly? It feels entirely unnatural, this studied unconcern, and it forces me to be more vigilant than ever about what goes in and what comes out of my mouth. Maybe my daughter senses that, but this conscious antidiet is the best I can do.

  Still, my daughter lives in the world. She watches Disney movies. She plays with Barbies. So although I was saddened, I was hardly surprised one day when, at six years old, she looked at me, frowned, and said, “Mama, don’t get f-a-t, okay?”

  At least, I thought, she didn’t hear it from me.

  The Battle over Dress Codes

  Parents of teenagers invariably ask me, “What do we do about what girls wear?” Girls ask me, “What do we do about slut-shaming dress codes?” This piece, published in June 2014, offers no easy answers, but the cross-generational advocacy group Spark Movement suggests the following: Students should have input into forming dress codes; each rule should have a clear explanation; those rules should be the same along gender lines (and evenly enforced within and between them); punishment should not involve humiliation or pulling students out of class; and, most of all, “it’s a distraction to boys” is never, ever a viable justification.

  In the Bay Area, the last week of school is a time to dig out cozy jackets and socks, but this year our natural air-conditioning (that’s “fog” to you) failed, giving us a few sweltering June days.

  On one, my daughter, who is in the final throes of fifth grade, came skipping out of class, her gangly legs poking out of her favorite denim short-shorts. “She won’t be able to wear those next year,” another mom commented. “They won’t pass the dress code.” A dress code? In Berkeley? Next they’ll be endorsing Darwinism in Kansas.

  It turns out that modern middle school parents from San Francisco to New York have been forced to break out the ruler. Are those inseams too short? How wide are those tank top shoulders? In March, middle schoolers in Evanston, Illinois, picketed a policy against leggings. In May, students at a Utah high school opened their yearbooks to discover digitally raised necklines and sleeves added to female classmates’ shirts.

  Girls, particularly those with ample hips or breasts, are almost exclusively singled out, typically told their outfits will “distract boys.” As if young men cannot control themselves in the presence of a spaghetti strap.

  The last time classroom attire was this contentious was the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the most high-profile cases centered on boys. According to Jo Paole
tti, author of the forthcoming book Sex and Unisex: Fashion, Feminism and the Sexual Revolution, young men with long hair were sometimes attacked by their peers. In an all-too-familiar scenario, it was the victims who were blamed for such assaults, accused of provoking classmates with their “distracting” appearance. While girls who violated dress codes were sent home to change, boys were suspended or expelled. Their parents also disproportionately lawyered up: by 1974, there were one hundred fifty court cases involving young men’s hairdos.

  Boys run afoul of dress codes when they flout authority: “hippies” defying the establishment, “thugs” in saggy pants. For girls, the issue is seductiveness, and that, too, has become politicized, exposing a new generation gap.

  Today’s canny girls, emboldened by #YesAllWomen Twitter culture, scold their elders, “Don’t tell us what to wear; teach the boys not to stare.” They are correct: Addressing leering or harassment will challenge young men’s assumptions. Imposing purdah on middle school girls does the opposite.

  Even so, while women are not responsible for male misbehavior, and while no amount of dress (or undress) will avert catcalls, cultural change can be glacial, and I have a child trying to wend her way safely through our city streets right now. I don’t want her to feel shame in her soon-to-be-emerging woman’s body, but I also don’t want her to be a target. Has maternal concern made me prudent or simply a prude?