Cinderella Ate My Daughter (17 page)

The Daring Book for Girls
, by contrast, makes the case for a separate-but-equal girls’ culture of play—one that, like its male counterpart, deserves resurrection and preservation. Any former girl (read: current mom) would find its chapters on jacks, hand-clap games, and that staple of Girl Scout campfires, the sit-upon—
the sit-upon!!!!
—pretty much irresistible. I know I did. This might be more of what the 1990s “girlie feminists”—the ones revaluing cooking and crafts—had in mind: a feminism that expects parity with boys and men, yet does not strive to be like them or see their conventional roles and behavior as more desirable. As a nod to the fact that today’s girls will not, like their forebears, live their lives in a “separate sphere” from men—as well as acknowledgment that “different” can quickly be tagged as “lesser”—the book also provides tutorials on “How to Negotiate a Salary” and “Finance: Interest, Stocks and Bonds.” Useful skills, but ones that will probably appeal primarily to mothers. Girls themselves, I would wager, will see them as the equivalent of a granola bar in the Halloween bag.

Daring Girls
was the closest thing I had seen to what I was looking for: a concept of girlhood as a community, a vision that was dynamic and character-building rather than decorative. At the same time, most of what was in the book seemed so arbitrary I wondered whether it truly upheld tradition or just created yet another trap. Segmenting play by sex, remember, may be good for sales but not necessarily for kids’ development. So you tell me which of these activities (pulled at random from the boys’ and girls’ books) seems feminine and which masculine: Building a Campfire; Making Cloth Fireproof; Fourteen Games of Tag; Five Pen-and-Paper Games; Snowballs; Cloud Formations (answers: girls, boys, girls, boys, girls, boys). Why can’t girls make crystals or juggle (those are in the boys’ book)? Why can’t boys construct a lemon-powered clock or learn Five Karate Moves (those are in the girls’ book)? Perhaps more pointedly: what about the boy who, à la
How to Be the Best at Everything
, wants to “put together the best dance routine”? Now,
that
would be “dangerous.”

Maybe the wisest course of action would be to rip off the covers of all of the books and let children choose for themselves the activities they find feminine or masculine or just plain fun. That could even help with the kind of casual, naturally occurring interaction the Sanford program’s Carol Martin and Rick Fabes are trying to foster between boys and girls. I think Daisy would enjoy such a project (once she can read). And I would, too.

As the school year went on, she rebounded from her disappointment and returned to superhero play, albeit mostly when she was by herself. She also added a new character to her repertoire named Wildcat: technically, he was a male superhero; she had feminized him with Batgirl ears and socks on her hands. I was not sure how I felt about that. I know that if I could imbue her with a superpower, it would be the ability to withstand the pressures of the culture around her, to be her own woman despite the potential costs: I would give her the courage of her convictions, the power to be the hero of her own story without ambivalence or fear, to embrace her gifts regardless of her body’s size or shape—even if I have not been fully able to embrace mine.

Meanwhile, I did a little digging about Wonder Woman. It turns out her real name was Diana, daughter of Hera, queen of the Amazons. That makes her, of all things… a princess.

Chapter Nine
-
Just Between You, Me, and My 622 BFFs

I
think it was the pig snout that put me over the line.

I was trying to meet some girls on the Internet, to chat with them in real time about how they presented themselves on social networking sites and virtual worlds—increasingly popular fantasy landscapes in which users interact with one another through avatars. How did their online selves reflect, reinforce, or differ from who they were offline? What role did this new world have in shaping their identities, their femininity? I had started by hopping onto an award-winning educational site called Whyville, whose 5 million “citizens,” largely young teens, could play games, buy “virtual goods,” and chat electronically with one another. There is no need to “friend” a person in a virtual world, so it is easy to observe (as well as talk to) complete strangers.

In order to go onto the site, I had to create an avatar—a word that once denoted the human incarnation of a Hindu deity. I put a lot of thought into what she (because I decided to remain a she) should look like. I ended up giving her—or was it myself ?—a whimsical, spiky purple ’do, glasses, a goofy grin, and, just for the heck of it, a pig snout for a nose. When I took that bad self “in world,” however, I found a land of girls with big hair and chunky highlights; full, glossy pouts; thickly lined doe eyes; and skimpy, fashion-forward outfits. Girls, in other words, who’d styled themselves like a line of hot, trendy dolls. Was that how they saw themselves? How they wished they looked? How they aspired to look? How they thought they should look? A cartoon bubble popped up above the head of a girl named “Sweetiepi,” whose avatar was staring directly at me. It said she was “whispering” with another girl, named OMGBrooke. I got the uneasy feeling they were discussing my snout.

Back in the midnineties, the concern among parents and educators was that girls were not going online at the same rate as boys. A digital divide was looming, and it threatened to leave girls stranded on the wrong side of economic opportunity. That notion turned out to be
sooooo
twentieth century. These days, 35 million kids ages three to eighteen—80 percent of kindergartners alone—are online, though by the time you read this those numbers will surely be higher. A solid half of those users are female. Girls spend the same amount of time as boys on the Internet, but their activities differ. Predictably, more boys are gamers. They are also more likely to produce videos to post on their online profiles or sites such as YouTube. Girls, meanwhile, are out front in communication: more girls than boys blog, instant message, text, create Web pages, and join virtual worlds and social networking sites.

I skimmed that information with mounting disapproval: kids seemed to be going online so young—maybe too young. Then I remembered that Daisy had been on the Internet, tooling around the Nick Jr. site, since she was three years old. I suspect, in fact, that she first associated the word “mouse” not with a rodent but with a piece of computer hardware. I have watched with equal parts curiosity and anxiety as she has navigated with preternatural skill through the site’s games. Her obsession with the Dora pages seemed harmless enough, but what would she do next? What would she
see
next?

This was a place in my reporting, I realized, where, to gain deeper insight, I had to leave the littlest girls behind for their older sisters. For one thing, older girls can read, something that instantly expands the online experience. Beyond that, the sites for little girls were all mind-numbingly the same. The virtual worlds of BarbieGirls, Be-Bratz, Ty Girlz, Moxiegirlz were all extensions of their offline counterparts. Each featured similar games girls could play to “earn” points with which to engage in their favorite activity: shopping. They could visit virtual malls to buy stylin’ fashions for their avatars or a flat-screen TV for their virtual cribs. They could indulge in makeovers at the spa or purchase pets to pamper. They could also hone their ambitions for the future by playing at rock star or celebrity or… rock star or celebrity. On the New Dora’s “Dora Links,” for instance, the “mysteries and adventure” in which girls can engage include changing the length of their avatar’s hair, eye color, earrings, and necklace and getting “ready for a benefit concert.”

The Disney Princesses site could well be crowned the dullest of them all: a user can enter the “enchanting” world of her favorite princess and, in each one, play a version of the
identical game
: Cinderella/Belle/Sleeping Beauty/Ariel is on her way to an important parade/fair/birthday party/tea party but—
Oh no!
She forgot to pick out an outfit and now doesn’t have time! Can she count on
you
to do it for her by clicking on one of several predetermined choices? None of this is a surprise, and I am tempted to gloss right over it. Yet more and more of children’s time is spent online. Doll sales have declined by nearly 20 percent since 2005. Girls are casting them aside in favor of online play, which offers even fewer opportunities to go off script. It chilled me to read, in the market research group NPD’s report on this trend, a quote from a nine-year-old Barbie.com fan who said, “I don’t think I’m good at making up imaginary things; I didn’t know what to do with dolls.” So it is at least worth mentioning that, even more than the original toys, these sites funnel our daughters toward very specific definitions of both girlhood and play.

Sites for the youngest children are protected by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which requires “verifiable parental consent” at registration and restricts the amount of personal information—addresses, phone numbers, sex, preferences in music—corporate marketers can collect from children. Chatting is typically limited and inappropriate behavior punished by suspension or expulsion. Once children turn thirteen, however, all bets are off. They are legally considered adults online, free to join any site that is not X-rated (though since the age of users on those sites is rarely verified, they could join those as well). You would be hard pressed these days to find an eighth-grader without a Facebook account. Meanwhile, 3.7 million teens log on to a virtual world each month. Today’s platforms will probably be obsolete by the time Daisy is a teenager (if not by next year), but regardless of whatever Web site or matrix or brain implant arises to take their place, my questions remain the same: How will the Internet shape my daughter’s understanding of herself ? Will its vastness—its infinite nooks and crannies—intensify the contradictions of girlhood or provide opportunities for refuge? Will she lose control of her identity or gain new insight into it? And how can I, as a mom, sort out the legitimate from the sensationalist in the headlines about predators, anonymous bullying by peers, easy-access porn? (Try Googling “schoolgirls.com” or, as an eight-year-old daughter of a friend of mine innocently did, “cute girls.”)

I am no Luddite. I am well aware of what an incredible, creative tool the Internet can be, offering split-second access to a diversity of perspectives and information that previously seemed unimaginable. But I have heard it said that we adults are immigrants to this land of technology; our kids are natives. They use it differently than we do. They experience it differently, without our old-world accents or values. Much as the mall was for a previous generation, the Internet has become a place where they experiment with identity, friendship, and flirtation. The fact that none of it is real does not make it any less revealing.

Erin, who is fourteen, has been online since she was in third grade. “I used to love doing the painting pages on the Dragon Tales site,” she said, laughing. “I did them until I was much too old.”

Erin and three of her friends were sitting in her family’s Albany, California, living room. Her mother had set out an array of healthy snacks for us—hummus with carrots, fresh strawberries—but the girls shunned those for a bucket of shamrock-shaped, green frosted sugar cookies bought at the grocery store in celebration of Saint Patrick’s Day. Each one here today had been online since she was seven or eight. Each carried her cell phone as if it were a fifth limb. Each owned an iPod touch. Each used computers daily, often in the privacy of her bedroom. Naturally, they all had Facebook accounts, which, judging from my communication with them, they checked numerous times during the school day. They’d had some amazing experiences online: one of the girls, Katie, fourteen, who had been adopted as an infant, told me she had found her birth mother on Facebook. So she’d friended her. “It was an open adoption, so I always knew her name,” Katie explained, “but she’d never visited or anything. She was only seventeen when I was born.” The two ended up meeting in person some months later, when the woman passed through San Francisco. “It was cool,” Katie said, though she had no plans to see the woman again. The casual way she related the story confused me. Finding your birth mother with a few clicks—on Facebook, of all things—would seem momentous, yet Katie was treating it like it was no big deal. Maybe she was just playing it cool, but I wondered whether the unlimited possibility for connection had somehow devalued its worth.

Each of these girls had more than 400 friends on the networking site—one, Felicia, had 622—which was so unremarkable that I almost didn’t note it. But really? Six hundred twenty-two friends? There were only about 250 students in her entire grade at school. One of my favorite books as a child was Joan Walsh Anglund’s
A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You
. These days, a better title might be
A Friend Is Someone You Have Actually Met in Person
. There is no way Felicia could know all those people offline, though she claimed to have at least
met
each of them. Even so, 622 people can witness everything she writes, every picture she posts. Six hundred twenty-two people can pass that information on to
their
622 friends. Six hundred twenty-two people are watching her, judging her, at least in theory, every hour of every day. How does that influence a child’s development?

Apparently, quite a bit. In short order—a matter of a few years—social networking and virtual worlds have transformed how young people, male as well as female, conceptualize both their selves and their relationships. According to Adriana Manago, a researcher at the Children’s Digital Media Center in Los Angeles who studies college students’ behavior on MySpace and Facebook, young people’s real-life identities are becoming ever more externally driven, sculpted in response to feedback from network “friends.” Obviously, teens have always tested out new selves among their peers, but back in the dark ages (say, in the year 2000), any negative response was fleeting and limited to a small group of people they actually knew. Now their thoughts, photos, tastes, and activities are laid out for immediate approval or rejection by hundreds of people, many of whom are relative strangers. The self, Manago said, becomes a brand, something to be marketed to others rather than developed from within. Instead of intimates with whom you interact for the sake of the exchange, friends become your consumers, an audience for whom you perform.

The impact, back in the offline world, appears to be an uptick in narcissistic tendencies among young adults. In the largest study of its kind, a group of psychologists found that the scores of the 16,475 college students who took the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006 have risen by 30 percent. A full two-thirds of today’s young adults rank above average; excessive self-involvement is associated with difficulty in maintaining romantic relationships, dishonesty, and lack of empathy. And, it turns out, empathy, too, seems in measurably shorter supply: an analysis of seventy-two studies performed on almost 14,000 college students between 1979 and 2009 showed a drop in that trait, with the sharpest decline occurring since 2000. Social media may not have instigated that trend, but by encouraging self-promotion over self-awareness, they could easily accelerate it.

I don’t mean to demonize new technology. I enjoy Facebook myself. Because of it, I am in touch with old friends and relatives who are scattered around the globe. It has also served as a handy vehicle to promote my work, to alert the readers among my “friends” that I have published something new. Yet I am also aware of the ways Facebook and the microblogging site Twitter subtly shifted my self-perception. Online, I carefully consider how any comments or photos I post will shape the persona I have cultivated; offline, I have caught myself processing my experience as it occurs, packaging life as I live it. As I loll in the front yard with Daisy or stand in line at the supermarket or read in bed, part of my consciousness splits off, viewing the scene from the outside and imagining how to distill it into a status update or a Tweet. Apparently, teenagers are not the only ones at risk of turning the self into a performance, though since their identities are less formed, one assumes the potential impact will be more profound.

Girls, especially, are already so accustomed to disconnecting from their inner experience, observing themselves as others might. Unlike earlier generations, though, their imagined audience is all too real: online, every girl becomes a mini-Miley complete with her own adoring fan base that she is bound to maintain. In fact, if you try to choose the screen name “Miley” in a virtual world, you will be told no dice, though you can be Miley1819 or higher, if you would like. According to Manago, girls attract the most positive feedback when they post provocative photos or create hot avatars—as long as they don’t go too far. Just as with real celebs, then, girls online engage in perpetual, public negotiation between appearing “beautiful, sexy, yet innocent” (which they reportedly want) and coming off as “a slut” in front of hundreds of people (which they do not). Perhaps that high-wire act, as much as anything, reveals the lie of girls’ popular culture: if the sexualization and attention to appearance truly “empowered” girls, they would emerge from childhood with more freedom and control over their sexuality. Instead, they seem to have less: they have learned that sexiness confers power—unless you use it (or are perceived as using it). The fastest way to take a girl down remains, as ever, to attack her looks or sexual behavior: Ugly. Fat. Slut. Whore. Those are the teen girl equivalent of kryptonite.