The Destructive Culture of Pretty Pink Princesses

A great interview with an author exploring the culture of children's toys and what's being marketed to our daughters. Excerpts:

"You know, girls are doing so well academically, they're doing so well in leadership, they're doing so well on the sports field. Maybe all this is no problem and it just means we're free to indulge this. Or, is it something else? Is it that somehow, simultaneous to those gains, the pressure on girls to define themselves by their looks, and define looks in a very narrow way as being sexy and hot, and that too has been ratcheted up, and lowered down so that it starts, you know, basically in the womb.

***

There's an anecdote I share in the book, also about my poor daughter, she ends up being focused on. But she was going on her scooter with another little girl when she was 5. And Daisy's helmet was black with flames shooting across it in green, yellow, orange and red, I think, and she has a regular silver razor scooter. And her friend had a pink Hello Kitty helmet and a pink scooter.

And her friend actually looked at it – I mean, I swear, these kids sometimes just hand me these things – but she looked at Daisy and said, 'How come your helmet's not pink? It's not a girl's helmet.'

And Daisy looked at it, and she kind of furrowed her brow for a second, kind of like, 'Oh, what, hmm,' then she said, 'Well, it's for boys or for girls.'

And the other girl kind of looked at it, and she said, 'Oh,' and they kept playing.

I thought, so look at that interaction, what went on? Did Daisy learn that maybe she should stick with the pink and not be questioned? Or did that other girl learn that maybe there's something out there, maybe the one measly pink Lego set in the store is not the only thing she could play with? You know, I don't know.

***

While girls may be physically developing at a younger age, psychological development hasn't changed. So girls are playing with toys or wearing clothes or watching videos or otherwise partaking of a culture that is too mature or sexual for them, and they're encouraged to sort of play-act at sexy. [Girls Entering Puberty at Younger Ages, Study]

If you take a look at any girl product line, you're going to start finding massive amounts of makeup, and you know, the sexy Halloween costumes and everything for 6-year-olds. So on one hand, it's dress-up, on the other hand, it's sexualizing in a way that really isn't necessary.

What really floored me, both as a girl-advocate and as a parent, was the way that prematurely sexualizing girls or play-acting at sexy for them from a young age disconnects them from healthy authentic sexual feeling. So that they learn that sexuality is something that you perform, instead of something that you feel.

And that can have implications as they get older in the culture, both because of that, and because that's increasingly what they're going to be presented with – the idea that their sexuality is something to perform for others. And so starting that at the age of 4, 5, or 6 is troubling for a whole set of reasons that I hadn't anticipated when I started this.

There was one researcher who works on girls' sexual desire issues and she told me that by the time the girls she talks to are teenagers, when she asks them how a sexual encounter – and by sexual encounter I don't mean necessarily intercourse, but anything you would define as a sexual encounter – how it felt, they respond by telling her how they think they looked."

More at link, really very interesting!


http://www.livescience.com/culture/pink-princess-toys-girls-peggy-orenstein-1101...