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.
 
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