One of Cinderella’s many clever factoids is that the childhood phases we now take for granted-toddler, tween-were established by marketers rather than doctors or child specialists.
This isn’t exactly a revelation, but it feels nice to see it in print.Īccording to Orenstein, her daughter’s own princess fixation started when she was around 3 and faded out about a year later.
She concludes that a 21 st-century girl is supposed to be a high-stakes combo of high-achieving and pretty that’s arguably more unrealistic than anything foisted on her predecessors. Your average progressive parent probably already sensed the corrosive effect of sexualized dolls ( Bratz) and role models (Miley Cyrus), but Orenstein will validate their intuitions with her statistics. Orenstein cites a study showing that between 20, girls grew more concerned about their looks and weight, and displayed higher stress levels and rates of suicide and depression.
But if you’re in the target group, you’ll probably find that Orenstein is voicing more articulate, thoughtful, and better-researched versions of your own observations and concerns. Just as there’s no reason for a childless reader to pick up a book on potty training, there’s not much call for anyone other than a middle-class, left-leaning parent of a young girl to pick up Cinderella. Rather, the comfort of reading a book like this comes from recognition. Little of this will constitute news to Orenstein’s readers. Does this mean that all these marketers and producers are merely catering to biology? Orenstein decides to find out. The show’s producers explain that attempts at other girl Muppets flopped with their audience. Even Sesame Street seems to be playing to this trend: In the diverse pantheon of its current Muppet characters, the only two major female Muppets are Abby Cadabby (a pink fairy), and Zoe (a ballerina). Instead, Orenstein finds that during a drawing exercise at her daughter’s preschool, boys imagined themselves as everything from animals to insects, snack foods to superheroes, while girls were uniformly princesses, fairies, butterflies, or ballerinas. The exec suggests that Disney princess props allow girls to expand their imaginations. She interviews the Disney exec responsible for the birth of the Disney Princess concept that, 10 years later, has landed some permutation of Ariel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, or Belle in every American household containing a girl-child between the ages of 2 and 10. There’s real pleasure to be derived from reading Orenstein’s sane and reasoned dissection of this phenomenon.
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