The Trouble with Peggy Orenstein's book Cinderella Ate My Daughter

I love this feminist author and journalist, and have taught her in class.  I still remember the complete, loaded silence that greeted Peggy Orenstein’s research in Flux that showed that every teenage girl interviewed in the article we’d just read had felt not sure about what gave her sexual pleasure, except for one, who had gotten a vibrator from her aunt.  Then Orenstein came out with Cinderella Ate My Daughter…  and I gobbled it up.  Most mothering books don’t have such an explicit feminist view or pedigree, and I was excited to see what Orenstein would do with the media’s effect on young girls.  Her book about her long journey to have a child, Waiting for Daisy, was one I cherished in my own journey and had been a New York Times bestseller.  I liked her.

The book generated lots of interest among the school moms and even in our lesbian moms group, and it took a while for it to become available from the library.  Peggy Orenstein talks about the recently increasing gender segregation of toys by color as a company-driven phenomenon, so that each family might have to buy two of each toy.  She talks about the enormity of the onslaught on our kids by sophisticated marketing strategies, and does a helpful and elucidating riff on Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus and other girls in the Disney factory, and their frequent and worrisome morphing from super good girl-role model to celebrity who uses sex in the most pedestrian and depressing of fashions, as dominant in her persona.  But solutions?  Analysis?—not so much. 

At the end of the book, after traveling through American Girl Dolls, the Disney girls, the Disney Princesses as marketing ploy, and many other good things she notices, her ultimate critique is next to nothing, namely:

"Daisy's mix-up gave me the opening I needed to talk with her ("with" being the operative word) about the way the film had presented girls and women, to solicit her own ideas about it.  That, in the end, is the best weapon we parents have, short of enrolling our daughters in one of those schools where kids knit all day (or moving to Sweden; marketing to children under twelve there is actually *illegal*--can you believe it?).  We have only so much control over the images and products to which they are exposed, and even that will diminish over time.  It is strategic then, --absolutely vital--to think through our own values and limits early, to consider what we approve or disapprove of and why.  I can't say what others' personal threshhold ought to be:  That depends on one's child, one's parenting style, one's judgment, one's own personal experience.  It would be disingenuous to claim that Disney Princess diapers or Ty Girlz or *Hannah Montana* or *Twilight* or the latest Shakira video or a Facebook account is inherently harmful.  Each is, however a moment in the round-the clock-all-pervasive media machine aimed at out daughter--and at us--from womb-to-tomb; one that, again and again, presents femininity as performance, sexuality as performance, identity as performance, and each of those traits as available for a price.  It tells girls that how you look is more important than how you feel...." (p. 182)

And that’s it.  That’s the height of a books’ worth of marshaling of the argument through facts and anecdotes. After this she winds down the book for a few pages and it’s over.  For my money, this is a cynical ploy on Orenstein’s part to be mainstream enough, to not be perceived as a screaming, overly political kind of feminist.  And it’s worked, this book too is a bestseller.  But American Girl Dolls, the Disney girls, the Disney Princesses as marketing ploy, and many other good things she notices, get diminished as she pulls her punches at the end here.

I was furious with her:  the main answer to being stuck in this culture is to talk to your daughter about what she sees?  After so much work?  Individualize the solution?  That’s not a legitimate answer.  An easy step she doesn’t even take is to say “write your congressperson or join a women’s/mom’s group in advocating for no advertising to kids under 12”.  She seems to take advertiser’s right to try to brainwash our kids as their Jefferson-given right to free speech.
 
And, speaking as a Waldorf parent, I like our school’s emphasis on knitting—and I presume there is a silent dig there at Waldorf’s attempts to have their schoolchildren be media-free. 

Dylan as I write is still experiencing the worst sleep anxiety of her life, because she and Rylie saw Disney’s Jungle Book.  At the time she said she was fine, the movie wasn’t scary, and for a few days afterwards she was fine.  But then —and she is six and a half not a toddler anymore—she became scared.  Every night it’s been the same thing:  I’m scared of that snake Mommy.  That snake can’t really do that can it Mommy?  That snake can’t come here can it Mommy?  I wish I’d never seen that video Mommy.  I can’t stop thinking about that snake.  Poor thing.  I saw half of it with them, even.  It’s known for its songs and as the last work that Disney worked on himself.  And I admit I didn’t really see the scary snake.  But seeing it through her eyes the movie is just a bunch of chances for Mowgli to get killed or hurt, and how he protects himself or is protected by two father figures. 

Peggy:  Seriously?  Writing your congressperson is too political for you? 

My answer:   Yes put out a law forbidding advertising to kids under 12.  In our family there is flexibility on media.  For example, we allow dvds every Sunday morning these days, so the moms can sleep in.  But  I see how each video becomes part of my kids' vocabulary.
 
More to say…

A "Do You Want a Dad" Conversation

I am almost asleep in our co-sleeping bed.  I am wishing I were asleep and pretty tired.  Susan is in the bathroom doing something useful.  I am lying in bed with my eyes closed.  And suddenly I hear, from D&R sitting close to me on the bed playing, they’ve been playing for a while:

“Do you wish we had a dad?”

“I don’t know do you wish we had a dad?”

Dylan:  “Yah…no…”  A pause.  “Dads tell jokes.”  A little wistfully, like that part would be fun, but also like that is the main dad role as far as they’ve discovered that is different from what they already have.  I am deeply amused, feel unfunny for a while there. 

Then our usual day starts.

On Schnozz-Kissing and Girls with Short Hair

We are getting out of the car I after picked up Dylan and Rylie at school.  Dylan is telling a story.  She said she invented schnozz kissing.  Schnozz kissing is when a boy takes his schnozz and touches a girl’s face with it.  “That’s a schnozz kiss, and I invented it Mommy,”  she says. 

Oh, I say, great.  Then as I close the car door and we head for the stairs I say oh so casually, and what about two girls, can they schnozz-kiss too? 

And she says, “Yes but one of them has to have short hair.”  Which is as close to talking about butch/femme (or Susan’s short hair versus my long hair) as we’re ever likely to come for a good long while. 

Ry's Class on Gay Moms

I was in Rylie’s classroom, visiting, because I had been taking photos for Dylan’s class photobook, and felt obliged to spend some time with Rylie as well.  Two things happened that I wanted to mention:

First, everything is so peaceful in the room, Miss Cathy, sitting in the rocking chair, focused on the kids, some kids in a “house” right in front of her made of playstands, some kids fingerknitting, some kids playing on the margins, Miss Cathy clearly at the center, holding everything.  Rylie is so happy to see me we are playing, she and Jack and Sayeeda are showing off their fingerknitting to me, Akmal too, Ry gives me two to put on my wrists right then.  Then Jack says, happily, “Rylie, come on, I’ll race you in fingerknitting!”   Even though Ry says no, my pleasure in the moment is not less:  racing in fingerknitting???!!!

Second, I am sitting next to Rylie, my back to the half of the class at the other table, at snack.  There is an argument going on behind me and I don’t catch it all, but I catch someone (a boy’s voice) saying “Yes two girls can too marry… Rylie’s moms are married.”  And then a jumble and then another boy says, in our general direction, “ My two uncles are married.”  Or something which implies a gay male partnership.  I let it slide, I get to let it slide.  Our presence here, my presence here, Ry’s presence here, is enough to change the dynamics.

Nightmare

So we saw Lisa Meeks, the lesbian and pro-lesbian lawyer, last Monday morning at 9:30 after Susan dropped the kids at school.  It felt normal and like about time.  I had forced us to do it because of two things:  First, last August when Dylan had sprung open her chin on Amanda and Jenn’s pool, the people at Children’s were so kind but immediately it was all about who was the “mom,” who was the guardian, and we were terrified.  Even though we were both there and it would be all right.  We were terrified.  We must have signed “responsibility’ signatures about six times over the course of the visit.  It was the biggest WHAT IF ever, what if I hadn’t been there, what if next time it was Rylie and Susan couldn’t be there.  We sort of had powers of attorney, but didn’t carry them…. It turned out on looking we never did one for Rylie at all.

In any case.  The one that put me over the edge was Karen, at Waldorf, asking for “proof” that Rylie lived in the house with me (who could show proof of residency) or Susan (who couldn’t at first because all the utilities were in my name).  This was in order to get the EdChoice scholarship from the state that makes it possible for our kids to go to Waldorf.   If Ry lived in the house then why was Susan listed as her Mom.  Etc etc.  All to say, we found the mortgage statement that Susan is on, and that was good enough.  Karen said it wasn’t prejudice there were so many people trying to game the system that they just had to follow their rules.  Karen didn’t know that second female parents couldn’t adopt in Ohio.  Didn’t know.  I walked out trying to contain my sudden fury and fear.

So we saw Lisa Meeks on Monday.  And at first it seemed so normal and then after about five minutes I got so choked up that I was close to tears the whole rest of the hour and 15 min we were there.  So fearful, so angry that some rules challenged our family and someone felt the right to.  So frustrating.  And that was before the very last thing, I showed her the contract Susan had signed as egg donor with the infertility clinic, and she ended up saying that according to Ohio law, if there’s a known egg donor then the child rightfully belongs to that parent, so that Dylan is Susan’s and not mine, despite my name on the birth certificate and my having given birth to her.  Lisa went so far as to say, “Some judges might decide to go back and change that birth certificate.”  I was beyond shell-shocked.

So last night I dreamed that my ex and I had broken up, and that I had to share the kids with her, fifty-fifty.  And something about it seemed fair, but something else about it seemed so unfair.  I’ve blocked a lot of the dream already, but on waking I thought it was about the Lisa Meeks thing, and having no rights to my own children and being so scared and angry about that.  I think the feeling, the screaming feeling in the dream, was about loss of the kids, and how awful that felt.  Nightmare.

Rainbow Families CampOut May 2011

All of us!