Cinderella Ate My Daughter (5 page)

Workshop executives have denied they created Abby with a licensing bonanza in mind; the fact that she is so infinitely marketable, that she dovetailed precisely with the pink-fairy-princess megatrend among girls, was apparently a mere happy coincidence. Besides, as Liz Nealon, the executive vice president and creative director of Sesame Workshop, has explained, the company was simply following the logic of dramatic convention. “If you think about
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
,” she said. “Some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl.” I don’t know which reruns she’s been watching, but the last I checked, that description fit not Mary but the airheaded Georgette—and who wants their daughters “relating” to
her
? No matter. Workshop execs claimed that Abby’s character was ideal for exploring the challenges children face when they are new at school or different from other kids. That makes all kinds of sense—because everyone knows it’s easy to fit in when you are snaggle-toothed and fat and have bad fur. What is really, really hard for a girl is being cute, sparkly, and magical.

I hate to sound like Peggy the Grouch, but it seemed disingenuous to spin the same old sweet-and-cute, pink-and-sparkly version of girlhood as an attempt at diversity or redress for some perceived historical slight. I was annoyed that the show I admired—and had loved as a child—for celebrating differences and stomping stereotypes so blithely upheld, even defended, this one. Yet it wasn’t the first time I had heard that argument. At every geographic outpost from Disneyland to Sesame Street, executives described the same “taboo-breaking” vision, with an identical self-righteous justification about “honoring the range of play patterns girls have.” All this pink-and-pretty, they claimed, was about giving girls
more
choices, not fewer. Like Disney’s Andy Mooney, marketers would tell me, “We’re only giving girls what they want,” as if magnifying kids’ desires is less coercive than instigating them. Even Dora the Explorer, who, according to Brown Johnson, the president of animation for Nickelodeon, was consciously developed as an alternative to the “Barbie image of girlhood,” morphs into something else in the toy store. During a phone conversation, Johnson told me that Dora was drawn to resemble a real child, “not tall or elongated.” She was envisioned as powerful, brave, indifferent to beauty. Her clothes were loose and functional, her hair cut in a simple bob. “Part of the DNA of Nickelodeon when it comes to gender portrayal,” Johnson said, “is to not have everyone be perfect-looking.”

But how did that square with what fans find on the shelves of Target and Claire’s: the Dora Star Catcher Lip Gloss Bracelets; Dora’s Let’s Get Ready Vanity; Dora hair care kit; Dora Style Your Own Cellphone; Dress and Style Dora? The “adorable” boogie board? Wow! Way to counteract Barbie! I could almost hear Johnson purse her lips through the phone as she prepped the corporate damage control. “There’s a delicate tension between the consumer products group and the production group,” she said crisply. Followed by the familiar phrase “One of the important aspects of Dora’s success is to not deny certain play patterns kids have.”

In 2009, Nick introduced a “new” Dora aimed at five- to eight-year-olds, whom the company referred to as tweens. This Dora was, um, tall and elongated with long, luscious hair and round doe eyes. Her backpack and map had disappeared. Rather than shorts and sneaks, she sported a fashionable pink baby-doll tunic with purple leggings and ballet flats. The character’s makeover set the Momosphere angrily abuzz: was Dora becoming a “Whora”? That was not, I imagine, the response Nick and Mattel were hoping for. But to my mind, sluttiness was not the issue. New Dora wasn’t sexy, not at all—she was
pretty
, and that prettiness was now inextricable from her other traits. No longer did she turn “gender portrayal” on its head by “not looking perfect.” New Dora stands as a reminder to her rugged little sister that she better get with the program, apparently by age five.

There’s no question that new Dora is appealing. Of course she is, just as Abby Cadabby is the quintessence of adorable. Girls love them. In a vacuum, I might love them, too. And perhaps the problem is not so much that
they
exist as what still does
not
. Abby would trouble me far less if there could be a female Muppet as surly as Oscar or as id-driven as Cookie or as goofy as Grover: if there were more “play patterns” to “honor” than just this one.

I get why manufacturers play to pink—it makes good business sense. A marketing executive I spoke with at LeapFrog, which is based in Emeryville, California, told me that her company even had a name for it: “the pink factor.” “If you make a pink baseball bat, parents will buy one for their daughter,” she explained. “Then, if they subsequently have a son, they’ll have to buy a second bat in a different color. Or, if they have a boy first and then a daughter, they’ll want to buy a pink one for their precious little girl. Either way, you double your sales.” But as a parent, I wonder what all that pinkness—the color, the dominance of the play pattern it signals—is teaching girls about who they are, what they should value, what it means to be female?

A family portrait hangs near the front door of the home of a friend of mine. It is a bright, playful, almost cartoonlike painting in which they are surrounded by their worldly belongings. There is my friend, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, pressing a cell phone to her ear with one hand, her computer perched on a table close by. She and her husband are both writers; their books stand at their feet like additional family members. Their younger daughter sits cross-legged on a couch wearing a frothy tutu; their older daughter carries their son piggyback-style. The windows implausibly reflect the facade of their two-story home, as well as the kids’ wooden play structure in the backyard. You have never met them, you don’t know who they are, but those clues are enough for you to deduce their class, education, lifestyle. You can imagine them now, put them into context, can’t you?

I thought about that portrait as I wandered back to the Javits Center. It’s so tempting to say these are just toys. Some scholars would indeed argue that I’m projecting my own adult apprehension onto Fashion Angels or My Bling Bling Barbie that has nothing to do with a child’s experience of the dolls or how she plays with them. And to a point I agree: just because little girls wear the tulle does not mean they’ve drunk the Kool-Aid. Plenty of them shoot baskets in ball gowns or cast themselves as the powerful evil stepsister bossing around the sniveling Cinderella. Yet even if girls stray from the prescribed script, doesn’t it exert its influence? Don’t our possessions reflect who we are; shape, even define, our experience? The belongings surrounding my friends in their portrait form a shorthand statement about their identities—and, I might add, a pretty accurate one. So what do the toys we give our girls, the pinkness in which they are steeped, tell us about what we are telling
them
? What do they say about who
we
think they are and ought to be?

At one time, playthings were expressly intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Because of that, they can serve as a Rorschach for cultural anxieties. Take baby dolls. In the late nineteenth century, industrialization shifted the source of the family income outside the home. Without the need for free labor, middle-class couples no longer felt compelled to have more than one child. Nor were girls of the era particularly enamored with dolls: less than 25 percent in an 1898 survey cited them as their favorite toy. A few years later, however, President Theodore Roosevelt, who was obsessed with the waning birth rates among white Anglo-Saxon women, began waging a campaign against “race suicide.” When women “feared motherhood,” he warned, our country “trembled on the brink of doom.” Baby dolls were seen as a way to revive the flagging maternal instinct of white girls, to remind them of their patriotic duty to conceive; within a few years dolls were ubiquitous, synonymous with girlhood itself. Miniature brooms, dustpans, and stoves tutored those same young ladies in the skills of homemaking, while “companion” dolls—including the decidedly straight-bodied Patsy, who came with a wardrobe of little dresses—provided lessons in the feminine arts of grooming, intimacy, and caretaking. Boys, by contrast, were plied with TinkerToys and blocks, Erector sets and model trains, preparing them to step into a new world of science and industry.

That division continued, more or less, until the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Suddenly sex roles were thrown into flux. Expectations for girls were less clear, the paths to both manhood and womanhood muddled. To what, exactly, were girls now supposed to aspire? With what should they play? What would supplant washing machines and irons as preparation for their futures?

Enter Barbie.

It’s hard to imagine now, but when she was introduced in 1959, the bombshell with the high-heeled feet was considered a rebel: single and childless, she lived a glamorous life replete with boyfriends (hinting at the possibility of recreational sex). She had a beach house in Malibu (which she had apparently paid for herself), a host of exciting careers (Fashion Editor! Tennis Pro! Stewardess!), and no evidence of parents (Barbie Millicent Roberts was initially supposed to be a teenager, though her age has become nonspecific). Sure, she had a wedding gown (which was to die for), but she was not about to be trapped in a soapbox of domestic drudgery like the baby-boomer girls’ dissatisfied mothers. There is, it’s worth noting, no “Mom-with-three-ungrateful-children Barbie.” In that sense, the doll represented a new, independent vision of womanhood, an escape from “the problem that had no name.” She was a feminist icon! The hitch, of course, was that her liberation was predicated on near-constant attention to her appearance. Long before Elle Woods or Carrie Bradshaw, Barbie was the first “I am woman, see me shop” feminist, with all the inconsistencies that implied.

Whether you love or loathe Barbie, you cannot have grown up in the last half century untouched by her influence. Movies have been made about her (check out the bootlegs of Todd Haynes’s banned film
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story
on YouTube); books have been penned (
Forever Barbie
is a must). What other toy can make such claims? In one 11.5-inch polyvinyl chloride package, she embodies fifty years of cultural ambivalence over standards of beauty and appropriate role models for girls. My own relationship with the doll has evolved from desperately wanting one as a kid (my mom, an instinctive anticonsumerist, forbade any plaything that you had to add to, ruling out not only Barbie but Lego, Hot Wheels, and nearly everything else fun) to, in the apotheosis of my “wymyn’s studies” phase, condemning the doll as a tool of the patriarchy to, these days, finding her kind of quaint.

Maybe “quaint” is the wrong word. What Barbie has become is “cute,” in the way I described earlier: in which the toys we buy for our kids jump-start our own moribund sense of wonder. It is an interesting twist—when Barbie was introduced, moms disapproved of her, looking askance at her pinup proportions. That was precisely her appeal to girls: she helped them to stake out their turf in the land of “cool.” Fifty years later, baby boomers and Gen Xers who had treasured the doll were so eager to share her with their own daughters that they didn’t wait until the girls were eight to twelve (Barbie’s original demographic); they presented her to their three-year-olds. That instantaneously made her anathema to her intended market. A headline-grabbing 2005 British study revealed that girls aged six to twelve enjoyed torturing, mutilating, and microwaving their Barbies nearly as much as they liked dressing them up for the prom. What interested me about the report, though, was the reason
the researchers offered for that behavior: girls “saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown.” Rather than sexuality or sophistication, then, Barbie was now associated with baby stuff.

As her audience dipped younger, Barbie herself began to change. Today’s pleasantly open-faced dolls barely resemble the original. Yes, the vintage version was based on a German sex toy, but the effect was urbane rather than tawdry. Early Barbie exuded a self-knowing poise; her eyes cut to the side as if she harbored a secret. She was not even especially beautiful: the effect was more of a Grace Kelly–like elegance. I
still
wouldn’t mind having one of those. Twenty-first-century Barbie’s eyes are rounder and wider and point directly forward; the fire engine red pout has transformed into a friendly pink smile; the curves of her face have softened; her hair is shinier and blonder. All of this has made the doll look warmer, younger,
prettier
. Even her breasts have shrunk (at least a little) while her waist has been broadened. The astronauts, surgeons, and presidents of her glory days have been largely replaced by fairies, butterflies, ballerinas, mermaids, and princesses whose wardrobes are almost exclusively pink and lavender (with the occasional foray into turquoise). Original Barbie would be appalled: her palette was never so narrow—even her tutu was silver lamé. Yet the “cuter” Barbie became, the lower her sales fell: in the fourth quarter of 2008 alone, they sank by 21 percent. Some of that was a by-product of the tanked economy, but the exodus had begun long before. Following the cute-begets-cool formula (with “cool” carrying increasingly “hot” connotations), girls as young as six were rejecting the watered-down, mom-approved doll for something edgier, something called, appropriately enough, Bratz.

Bratz dolls were released in 2001 by a small, privately owned company called MGA—just months, as it happened, after the debut of the Disney Princesses—and they aimed to catch girls just as they aged out of that line, to seamlessly usher them into a new, more mature fantasy. With their sultry expressions, thickly shadowed eyes, and collagen-puffed moues, Bratz were tailor-made for the girl itching to distance herself from all things rose petal pink, Princess-y, or Barbie-ish. Their hottie-pink “passion for fashion” conveyed “attitude” and “sassiness,” which, anyone will tell you, is little-girl marketing-speak for “sexy.” Rather than donning a Cinderella gown and tripping off to the ball themselves, which would be woefully juvenile, seven-year-olds could send their Bratz Princess doll—rocking a tiara, purple fitted corset, and black net skirt—off in her limo to party in a Vegas Bratz pal’s hot tub. How awesome was that? Bratz brilliantly distilled Barbie’s acquisitiveness while casting off the rest: why be a role model when you can be simply a model?