the other pink mafia

The princess-industrial complex

Is there a way to help our daughters identify and embrace their gender without forcing them to take on society's prescribed gender roles, without having to equate their value with their looks and their sexuality? We can start by not showing them frogging princess movies, by closely monitoring all of their media consumption, and by constantly encouraging them to embrace not only gender neutral toys, colors, and activities, but to participate in traditionally masculine past times, playing with cars and trains, wearing blue, or, as my own mother did, using a .22 to pick off vermin trespassing in the vegetable patch (poor Peter Rabbit).  We need to do this while still celebrating their identity as girls, which is the tricky part, because without sugar, spice, pink tulle and strappy sparkle shoes what is that identity? Whatever she, my daughter or yours, wants it to be. Right now, for my 19 month old, that means literally cheering every time she points to her vagina. Considering what my vagina went through 19 months ago, what the organ is capable of, I think cheering is appropriate.

While I hope to empower my daughter as my mother empowered me, there is no way to shield her completely from the toad load of gender stereotyping out there. She will go to a slumber party, she will watch Sleeping Beauty, she will spend the subsequent vacation upstate wandering around the woods trying to sing to squirrels. She will internalize The Message that girls must conform to specific characteristics to be considered successful as women, ie feminine, sexy but also pure. These princesses glorify, in the most psychologically manipulative way so that little girls' imaginations latch onto them, a way of life, not just a way of being.  These movies promote the idea that the only way to be happy, let me say that again, the only way to be happy is to find love (aka a man). So a woman must have a man, not just to be complete as a woman, but to feel complete. Many of these girls, sitting quietly in darkened theaters thinking, someone has made a movie just for me and Now I Understand, are children of divorced parents. These girls may decided that married life is happier and easier than single life. This message will then be reenforced by every John Hughes movie they will ever see. "It will all make sense once you have love, it will all get easier once you have love." It is this mantra that can lead them down knotted sheets out their bedroom windows, into borrowed cars and to all night chapels that also sell glowsticks and malt liquor.

This is not new information. I have no illusions about that. I want to some day, when I let her watch media, show my daughter movies that feature smart, strong women achieving goals that have nothing to do with romantic love. Though it is okay if they sing to animals.

This is my kind of princess:

It was this book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, that got my tiara in a twist.