Cinderella Ate My Daughter (15 page)

Like Holly—like all of the women I know—I want to raise a girl who has a reasonable perspective on her body regardless of her shape, who does not plunge into a shame spiral whenever she looks at herself sideways in a mirror. Someone, in other words, who is not like me. My high school memories include hiding laxatives in my school locker, breaking sticks of sugar-free gum in half and calling that lunch. The hopeless feeling that accompanied my self-imposed starvation remains more vivid to me than anything else from that time. Although my body and I have reached if not peace, at least a state of détente, “fat” remains how I experience anger, dissatisfaction, disappointment. I feel “fat” if I can’t master a task at work. I feel “fat” if I can’t please those I love. “Fat” is how I blame myself for my failures. “Fat” is how I express my anxieties. A psychologist once told me, “Fat is not a feeling.” If only it were that simple. As for so many women, the pathology of self-loathing is permanently ingrained in me. I can give in to it, I can modify it, I can react against it with practiced self-acceptance, but I cannot eradicate it. It frustrates me to consider what else I might have done with the years of mental energy I have wasted on this single, senseless issue.

Given all of that, I wonder how I could expect—or even
hope
—to raise a daughter who is both less invested in and more confident about her appearance than I was, even if it is slightly (or wildly) imperfect, as, of course, it will be. Certainly, I do my best, and I follow all the expert advice I have mentioned above, but I don’t have an intuitive—a gut, if you will—feeling for whether or not I am on the right track. Not the way I do with ensuring that she is well mannered or values kindness, creativity, intellect. I am hardly the only mother who wrestles with this: I recalled the conversation I’d had about the Disney Princesses with the mothers of Daisy’s preschool classmates. One of them felt the answer was to shower her daughter with compliments about her looks as a kind of inoculation: she wanted to impress upon her girl that, regardless of what anyone might say, she was beautiful. Besides, the woman said, if you
never
tell your daughter she is pretty, rather than realizing that appearance is unimportant, she may suspect you think she’s ugly. Maybe. Yet
over
-emphasizing a girl’s looks is clearly hazardous—and that overemphasis is pervasive. How to find the sweet spot?

I took the quandary to Catherine Steiner-Adair, the director of eating disorders education and prevention at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center at McLean Hospital in Massachusetts. “Well,” she said, when I called her, “ ‘You’re beautiful’ is not something you want to say over and over to your daughter, because it’s not something that you want her to think is so important.

“That said,” she continued, “there are times when it
is
important to say it: when she’s messy or sweaty, when she’s
not
dressed up, so that she gets a sense that there is something naturally beautiful about her as a person. And it’s also important to connect beauty and love. To say, ‘I love you so much. Everything about you is beautiful to me—
you
are beautiful to me.’ That way you’re not just objectifying her body.”

I appreciated that advice, the way it redefined beauty as something that was both internal and eternal. I passed it along to Holly, who was somewhat less impressed. “I actually think it’s fine to reserve ‘beautiful’ for when she’s dressed up or has a new haircut or has done something special,” she said. “What’s important to me in a day-to-day way is to unhook looks from size, not to link the two for her—or, because of her, for me.” Take the challenge of buying Ava’s clothes—nix on jeans or those cute little Boden dresses—which will only intensify as she gets older and more aware of Abercrombie and Hot Topic. “Pretty to me is not the point,” Holly said. “I think Ava is pretty. I think she’s lovely. And I hope she’ll think so, too. But she’s always going to be a big girl—unless she starts dieting in an unhealthy way.”

I ached for Holly and her daughter, for the complicated position they were in. Yet I realized that along with that concern and love I did feel a certain… relief. Because, as Holly said, my own daughter
is
thin. True, she may still someday struggle, but I don’t have to worry that she will be teased about her size on the first day of summer camp. I wish appearance did not matter so much, that it did not confer so much power. But given that it does, I find that I am grateful for hers. Does that make me a hypocrite?

Women. Beauty. Power. Body. The ideas and images remain so muddled, so contradictory; how to disentangle them for our girls? By the end of kindergarten, Daisy had, blessedly, exited the Disney Princess phase. “The princesses are just, like”—she struck a “lovely Carol Merrill” pose and simpered—“ ‘I’m so pretty, Handsome Prince, won’t you rescue me?’ ” Later she added, “All Sleeping Beauty ever does is sleep.”

I admit to feeling a smidge of guilt (along with pride) at that pronouncement, because it was a reasonable approximation of what I had been drilling into her head for three years—but then again, if Disney could try to brainwash my child, I suppose I could, too. At any rate, I waited anxiously for what might come next: would I be moaning over
Monster High
? Were we bound for Tinker Bell’s Pixie Hollow, a realm of moralistic nice girl/mean girl dynamics? Would I have to decide whether to empty my wallet for that full-on American Girl rig (I had been sorely tempted by a newly introduced historical doll, a Russian-Jewish girl from the early twentieth century, whose accessories included a $68 “Sabbath set”)? Instead, she surprised me: for her sixth birthday, she asked for a Wonder Woman costume.

Finally, a stage I could get with! I was even willing to up the ante: why stop at Wonder Woman? I trolled eBay for action figures of Hawkgirl and Big Barda (a superheroine from the 1970s who defends her milquetoast husband). I scored a PVC-free Supergirl lunch box. I searched YouTube for snippets of the short-lived animated
Spider-Woman
TV series from 1980. Yes, it gave me pause that the lunch box was pink, that, given her druthers, Big Barda preferred housewifery to crime fighting, and that all of the superheroines have the proportions of Kim Kardashian—more mammary than muscle. It disappointed me, though did not surprise, when Daisy declined a friend’s offer of a Wonder Woman from his bobblehead collection: the head was too big for the body, she explained to me later, and the face was, well, kind of butch (my word, not hers). On the other extreme, she was so appalled by Hawkgirl’s excessive assets that she never took the toy out of the box. And one day while drawing Supergirl, who wears a miniskirt and a crop top, she mused, “Sometimes girl superheroes show their belly buttons. I don’t know why.” So I hadn’t exactly succeeded in finding a strong feminine image that wasn’t idealized or sexualized, but how far was I willing to push it? Maybe the message that power does not play without the pretty will mess her up in ten years, but right now, I needed something to say yes to; like so many moms, I was willing to compromise to find some mutually acceptable middle ground.

Besides, I figured there were intriguing possibilities in this new phase. Little girls may have more real-life role models than they used to, more examples of how to be in the world, but they have precious few larger-than-life heroes, especially in the all-important realm of fantasy, where they spend so much of their free time. It’s true, as we’ve seen, that the research on gender and play indicates (with the big blinking caveats that there are vast variations within, as opposed to between, the sexes and that nature is heavily influenced by nurture) that little boys are more readily drawn to competitive, rough-and-tumble games, while little girls (again, big blinking caveat, see above) strive for group harmony over individual dominance. But all that aside, let’s face it, the options for girls have not exactly been compelling. Who can even remember Batgirl’s secret identity? (She was Barbara Gordon, the commissioner’s daughter—or, in some versions, his niece.) And, with all due respect, Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane is… how to put this delicately—
lame
compared with the gleam of a Batmobile. Still, I think superhero play, when it is not overdetermined by the
Justice League
script, has something specific to offer girls, something beyond an outlet for aggression or even the satisfaction (similar to Bettelheim’s claims for fairy tales) of gaining control in an arbitrary world.

I went through a brief Wonder Woman phase myself in the early 1970s. Even then I could not have told you much about the character’s backstory, but I didn’t care: all I knew was that I had an excuse to fasten a towel around my neck with a clothespin and climb onto the roof of a friend’s garage. The distance to the next building was slightly longer than my leggy child’s stride, yet I took a deep breath and leapt—screaming “Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman!”—my towel cape streaming behind me. In that moment of flight, soaring between the two rooftops, I felt—no, I
knew
I was—invincible; the sensation was equal parts exhilarating and frightening. What might I dare to do next? What else was possible?

As a writer, I have revisited that memory in my work more often than any other. It was so different from my typical, earthbound play, and the emotions it elicited were so unfamiliar—feelings of freedom, of power. And isn’t that ultimately the superhero’s task: coming to grips with the gifts and challenges of power—accepting it, demanding it, wielding it wisely, grappling with moral choices about the nature of might and goodness? Those themes, so rarely explored in the culture of little girls, would seem particularly relevant given the complexities women can still face as leaders. Consider a 2007 survey of 1,231 executives in the United States and Europe, ominously subtitled
Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t.
Conducted by Catalyst, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of women in business, it found that female managers who behave consistently with gender stereotypes—prioritizing “work relationships” and expressing “concern for other people’s perspectives”—were liked but considered to be ineffective. Those who were seen as behaving in a more “male” fashion, on the other hand—who “act assertively, focus on work task, display ambition”—were seen as competent but roundly disliked. I was tempted, initially, to dismiss that as a generational issue, something that would take care of itself as old-timers aged out of the workforce. Except that, according to a 2008 J. Walter Thompson report, “Millennial Women Face Gender Issues,” 40 percent of men in their
twenties
still say they would prefer a male over a female boss. Nor, when you think about it, have the wildly different connotations of Super
man
and Super
woman
changed over time: the former is mysterious, admirable; the latter is hectic, harried, a woman who does too much and none of it well. That is not something I would want for myself or my girl. Besides, really, how many of us would like to be referred to as the Woman of Steel?

I was mulling over those disparities one sunny Saturday morning as Daisy and I strolled along Berkeley’s Fourth Street on our way to our favorite breakfast joint, passing boutiques that sold handcrafted Japanese paper, diaphanous Stevie Nicks–inspired frocks, wooden toys imported from Europe. This was a few weeks before the 2008 Democratic primaries. Daisy spied a bumper sticker plastered on a mailbox: a yellow caricature of Hillary Clinton leering out from a black background. Big block letters proclaimed
THE WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST IS ALIVE AND LIVING IN NEW YORK
.

“Look, Mama,” Daisy said, excitedly. “That’s Hillary. What does it say?” What should I have told her? It’s not that I thought that Senator Clinton was a victim—she often gave as good as she got. So it was not the attack that disturbed me so much as the form it took, the default position of incessant, even gleeful misogyny toward an unapologetically assertive (even aggressive) high-achieving woman. Contemplating the months of
LIFE’S A BITCH, DON’T VOTE FOR ONE
T-shirts, the silver-plated thighs of the Hillary nutcrackers (Woman of Steel!), the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of
Fatal Attraction
, I had often wondered whether Clinton was a symbol of how far we’d come as women or how far we had to go. Was she proof to my girl that “you can do anything” or of the hell that will rain down on you if you try? Was she a Wonder Woman or more like the hundred-plus superheroines listed on the Web site womeninrefrigerators.com—so named because they had all been depowered, raped, driven insane, or chopped up and stuffed in a refrigerator? Damned if you do, doomed if you don’t indeed.

Nothing so horrific happened to then-Senator Clinton (though Republican presidential candidate John McCain did respond, “Excellent question!” to someone at a campaign event who asked, “How do we beat the bitch?”); still, analysis of her actual policies was dwarfed by chatter—among both Republicans and Democrats, men as well as women—about the senator’s hair, the pitch of her voice, the thickness of her ankles, her “likability,” her relative femininity. Rush Limbaugh declared that Americans didn’t want to watch a woman grow old in the White House. The journalist Christopher Hitchens called her an “aging and resentful female.” Writing in the anthology
Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary
, the novelist Susanna Moore wished that Clinton were more sensuous. And then there was the
real
debate: over her pantsuits. In a typical swipe,
The Washington Post
’s Robin Givhan wrote, “The mind… strays from more pressing concerns to ponder the sartorial: How many pantsuits does Hillary Clinton have in her closet?” There may have been a host of legitimate reasons to support Barack Obama over Clinton, but among them seemed to be that she was not young, pretty, slim, or stylish enough to represent the nation.