Cinderella ate my daughter

Parts of it, I loved very much. Much of it, I found very dated. How amazing! But the world of gender has changed a LOT since this book's release date (2011): namely, we've had the 2013 Supreme Court decision, #MeToo, the 2016 election, and an explosion of gender diversity on the cultural consciousness (and transphobia becoming a political platform :vomit:). So, I found a lot of this book to be - maybe outdated and rendered moot?

Anyway,

The things I liked

Preschool girls are definitely obsessed with princesses. The blooming of gender consciousness among the preschool set is really a sight to behold (and annoying to deal with). Boy, this tiny gender police. So the book was great in framing that: framing how, for example, kids as old as 6 don't understand that their sex is (barring medical intervention) unchanging. So they reckon, yeah, if you cut my hair short, maybe I will become a boy. And so on. I found this very adorable, enlightening, and compassion-giving: ooooh, so that's why you can't wear the baggy shorts. Okay, fine, whatever.

I also appreciated the author's awareness of her own hang-ups, and the (colorful!) interaction between second wave (mostly white lady) feminism - which sounds lovely, tbh, I wish I was wearing overalls in 1977, full of women's lib hope, fighting for equal pay and so on - and early 2000s reactionary feminism. DID U KNOW that the number of stay-at-home-moms increased in the 2000s? (DID U ALSO KNOW that “parenting” was not a word until the 1970s, and, indeed, women out of the workforce were previously called housewives or spinsters (aka, it was marital status - not kid status - that labeled you)). Anyway, I found Orenstein's ability to also recognize her own ridiculousness - NO TULLE SKIRTS FOR U! - relatable and, again, compassion-giving.

Did you know that “tween”, as a word, was invented by marketers? AND “toddler”?!!

Anyway, I appreciated how much Orenstein focused on marketing - THE EVILS OF MAD MEN - and how insidious capitalism is in defining our culture, our childhoods, etc. The brand recognition stuff was, ugh, revolting.

The things that made me go, “oh, jeez”

I didn't necessarily dislike anything in the book, but I did find it quaint. First of all, one of Orenstein's big focuses is the sexualization of girls - and the way (American! corporate!) culture inundates girls with an emphasis on appearance and performance, at the expense of their own internal selves. Fine, okay. Yes. Toddlers and Tiaras is an aberration, as are Bratz. I had literally just read a research report (argh, which I can't find right now - I think by Pew), something that had surveyed teens, about their hopes and fears. Their TOP worry was mental health (top worry for parents too). Their top pressure was academic. Sex and sexuality was way down the list - something that makes Jean Twenge, e.g., get worried (the kids!! always glued to their screens!). Girls are also, on average, outperforming boys academically - at all levels (see Richard Reeves's book). Sooo I just couldn't really take seriously Orenstein's concerns (which go on for quite a while) about the early 2000s Mad Men/Disney Princess marketing machine/Britney Spears/Hannah Montana breeding a generation of empty-headed bimbos.

Another quaintness that I feel is no longer helpful was Orenstein's hand-wringing over social media (which included... MySpace!!!). In this regard, I found Richard Culatta's book a lot more down to Earth, reasonable, and helpful. Orenstein was basically like “these crazy kids with their thefacebook.com”. I mean, she's right about social media being intricately linked with advertising, social performance, and social-performance-as-free-advertising, but Facebook is ded now. :p And TikTok is just so very different.

In essence, Orenstein has written a memoir about what it is like to be someone like me: a conscientious, modern woman trying to raise a girl to be anything she wants to be, and not just a girl, not that there's anything wrong with girliness (with that last part being basically all one phrase.)
It's hard and Orenstein nails her depiction of the double whammy: first they extensively market pink, princessy, unempowered women to our girls, and then society tells us we're not allowed to complain, because if we complain we're dissing feminity, disempowering our girls and being all-around anti-feminist.

Orenstein doesn't offer much in the way of solutions, but it's nice to know that there are others out there who want to raise our girls to be able to choose to be anything that they want to be, rather than “choosing” to be anything that society presents them with. And that even the best mom has girls who go through the princess stage, but that if you talk them through it, they come through the other side and realize that they don't need to sit on their duff waiting for a prince to save them and that there is more to the world than consumerism and aesthetics. Or at least Orenstein's daughter came out the other side – mine is still young enough that I cover her ears when people call her “princess.”

The other part that really spoke to me was the idea that she explores relating achievement to appearance – it has definitely been true for me that the more I have been academically and professionally successful, the more I am expected to perform a stereotypical female gender role. I had previously thought that was only anecdotally true for me, having transitioned from the world of computer science, where I could perform whatever gender I wanted, into the extremely gendered world of medicine. However, Orenstein presents it as a global phenomenon: “‘We can excel in school, play sports, go to college...get jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so forth. But in exchange, we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast size, clothing brands...“

Very interesting. This is one of the reasons I choose to not have children... a very scary portrait of the world kids evolve in surrounded by marketing strategies and cyber-bullying.

A lot of interesting thoughts about Disney, fairy tales, American Girl, etc. I enjoyed a lot of the book but wished it went into more depth in certain points (at least there's an extensive bibliography). The idea that when women were more restricted to the home allowed them to actually have more freedom (in terms of appearance mainly) was interesting. I would like an updated copy talking about Brave and Tangled since she briefly mentions they will be happening in the future at the end of the book. I think she was a bit dismissive of American Girl (though I am biased in that I love AG), focusing too much on its consumeristic aspects and not really dealing with how much of the change was due to Mattel taking over. That's a pretty minor quibble though. All in all an interesting book about things I do worry about if I ever have a daughter.

Everyone woman and mother of a daughter should read this book. It's a quick read (I started yesterday and am halfway through) but thought-provoking and even funny. Orenstein doesn't preach against the pinkification of American girls, but struggles to balance her ideals with the reality of mothering a toddler girl.