Here's why: The princess thing is a phase. A blip. At three, my daughter wore a crappy purple Barbie princess dress over everything she owned. She adored the DVD Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses, a hellhole of weird computer animation which made me want to gouge out my own eyeballs. Did I complain? No. It made my girl happy, as did my husband's willingness to pretend to be a prince asking her to dance at the royal ball. He would even tolerate her tiny rage when she felt he wasn't acting "princey" enough. We endured Disney Princesses on Ice--twice.
Our son spent two whole years wearing a Bob the Builder costume and hyperventilating over diggers and cranes. It never made us think he might grow up to be a construction worker, or a member of a Village People cover band, not that we'd mind if he did. So why get all freaked out just because Violet liked Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and wanted to dress up? It seemed like totally age-appropriate pretend play.
During this period, Peggy Orenstein wrote her anti-princess New York Times story, and later a book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter. She worried that all the princess mania would accelerate body-image issues for her daughter and other girls in her generation. While I am certainly sensitive to that, I really don't think putting on a sparkly dress and plastic crown in pre-school is the gateway drug to anorexia.
By age 5, Violet was done with princesses, which actually made me a little sad. "Princesses are for babies," she told me. She moved on to many other interests, no harm done.
As the mother of a 3-year-old girl, I think my issue with princesses is not the princess part, it's the huge Disney marketing machine behind it.
ReplyDeleteI'm just going with the flow of it... my girls also watch and do lots of other things... so right now it is princess cookers (aka chefs)...
ReplyDeleteI vaguely remember my own princess stage (actually, just being a princess wasn't enough-- one Halloween I insisted on being a "ballerina fairy princess" complete with wings, tutu and crown) and I don't think it did me any lasting harm. It's like reading preteen romance novels or shrieking at boy bands-- a developmental stage you grow out of soon enough, then look back on with embarrassment later.
ReplyDeletePeggy Orenstein's book is actually more nuanced than I expected. Like wellunderstood, she differentiates between the marketing juggernaut and the kid's own desires (and points out that she didn't want to shut down her own kid's taste -- if your kid's all this is beautiful I love this and you're all no it sucks, you're negating the kid's own experience and beliefs). she does talk about the RELENTLESSNESS of the princess message, and how toys are so rarely aimed at both genders now, and how little girls get just ONE message from their toys and costumes about how they're supposed to look and what they're supposed to value.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Marjorie, for actually reading the book and making a comment more informed than my post. And thanks everyone else for commenting too!
ReplyDeleteEvery once in a while, I still pretend I am Ariel.
ReplyDeleteYes, the aggressive marketing is so pervasive, and it's not so much that I fear the princess thing, it's just that I have no patience for it. My three year old son has already experienced the disappointment of not being invited to a birthday party because it was a girls-only princess party. In that instance I pin it on the b-day girl's parents, but I get very uneasy with the bitchy, clique-y, exclusionary subtext of princess culture.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, I don't want proscriptive play to foreclose my kids' natural tendencies to be little weirdos and nice people.
Hi RSB. Thanks for commenting. I never noticed anything bitchy or cliquey about Violet's pretend princess play, but I am sorry for your son that he didn't get to go to a party. There will be many other parties, so many, many birthday parties.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the aggressive marketing, I would say we avoided it by not allowing tv, but she found out about it some other way. It was so well-marketed that the message was received, perhaps subliminally.
What prompted me to write this item is just that there are so many things to worry about when you have a little one, I just think it' better to let this one go.
My daughter is seven and is already SO OVER the princess thing. I tended to not make a big deal about it because I remember when I was 5 and my dad was talking disparagingly about a Miss America pageant, and I told him "You'll be sorry when I win." Now, I am about as feminist as they come.
ReplyDeleteI have a much bigger problem with Bratz dolls - and other similar toys that seem to promote stupidity and bitchiness as a virtue - more than Princesses and Barbies.
Kilgore, I am so with you on the Bratz. Thanks for commenting!
ReplyDelete