Archive for January 8th, 2012|Daily archive page
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
author: Peggy Orenstein
name: Paul
average rating: 3.61
book published: 2011
rating: 3
read at: 2012/01/08
date added: 2012/01/08
shelves: non-fiction, sociology
review:
As the father of a two year-old daughter, I’ve seen first hand the dramatic leap into pretty/pink/poofy/princess gear and garb that seems to happen far faster and far more completely than I ever would have considered. My daughter is a girly-girl, enchanted by hairdos and pretty nail polish and singing princesses. I knew a lot of this was uncomfortable to me from her earliest months, but I admit that there are certain battles that, in the individual moments, don’t feel like they’re worth having. If I take her to the dollar section at a bog box store and tell her to pick out something (within reason) and she selects a Hello Kitty notebook over a fairly neutral one with a giraffe or a red-and-orange striped pattern, well, I told her to pick didn’t I?
But these concerns that lurk in the back of my mind, primarily focused on the self-centeredness of princess as a concept, the fixation on external appearance, the raw entitlement inherent in royalty fantasy and the materialistic reverse sublimation when the term is adopted by older children or (sigh) adults. So I was enthusiastic to read Peggy Orenstein‘s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, hoping it would clarify some of these nebulous concerns and provide some reasonable insight on how to combat it.
On the bright side, Orenstein does a good job of describing the problem, critically outlining the progression of the culture and providing a reasonable view of the potential dangers. The topics here are kind of all over the map because the subject matter here spans everything from Disney Princess marketing to Toddlers and Tiaras pageants to toy line gender division to social media and the Internet’s impact on teenage and pre-teenage girls’ sense of identity and sexuality. Distressingly, despite the book being well-researched, it became pretty clear to me early on that 192 wide-margined pages was not going to be sufficient to cover the topic(s) in reasonable detail.
And this where Cinderella Ate My Daughter kind of disappointed me, because it feels very rushed. Rather than focus on these topics and dive into scholarly research to a deep degree, or even heavy investigative journalism, the whole thing smacks of time-sensitive, here-and-now snapshot reporting which is interesting—don’t make any mistakes, I ripped through this book—but I was never able to shake the feeling that I was reading an extended blog post or Salon.com article. The self-inserted, personal account tone added to this, as did the multitude of timely pop culture references, everything from Hannah Montana to Twilight to Monster High dolls, it anchors this book in the present tense and, as a sad side effect, makes it also feel disposable. Even, to an extent, behind the times as the final chapter discusses the Disney movie Tangled in the future tense when I read the book less than a year after publication and my daughter has devoured the movie approximately ten thousand times already on DVD.
I suppose the subtitle of the book, “Dispatches From The Front Lines Of The New Girlie-Girl Culture” should have tipped me off that this wasn’t supposed to be a long-view kind of volume, but I still hoped that even without the step back approach it would contain some practical advice for how to deal with this deluge of pink and princessy. Toward the end, Orenstein does offer some vague and mostly common-sensical advice. Perhaps the best thing the book contains is a reference to a different book, Packaging Girlhood, which she says offers some sample conversation guides to help deal with media literacy and suggestive content. I’ll put that one on my to-read list. Unfortunately, Cinderella Ate My Daughter doesn’t quite get the scholarship level right and doesn’t even offer anything directly useful, either, making it an interesting and thought-provoking—if ultimately frustrating—read.
