Cinderella Ate My Daughter

by Peggy Orenstein

  I spoke with Mooney one day in his fittingly palatial office in Burbank, California. In a rolling Scottish burr that was pretty darned Charming, he told me the now-legendary story: how, about a month into his tenure, he had flown to Phoenix to check out a “Disney on Ice” show and found himself surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were—horrors!—homemade. How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as “Princess.” It was a risky move: Disney had never marketed its characters separately from a film’s release, and old-timers like Roy Disney considered it heresy to lump together those from different stories. That is why, these days, when the ladies appear on the same item, they never make eye contact. Each stares off in a slightly different direction, as if unaware of the others’ presence. Now that I have told you, you’ll always notice it. And let me tell you, it’s freaky.

  It is also worth noting that not all of the eight DPs are of royal extraction. Part of the genius of “Princess,” Mooney admitted, is that its meaning is so broadly constructed that it actually has no meaning. Even Tinker Bell was originally a Princess, though her reign did not last. Meanwhile, although Mulan (the protofeminist young woman who poses as a boy to save China) and Pocahontas (an Indian chief’s daughter) are officially part of the club, I defy you to find them in the stores. They were, until late 2009, the brownest-skinned princesses, as well as the ones with the least bling potential. You can gussy up Pocahontas’s eagle feathers only so much. As for Mulan, when she does show up, it’s in a kimonolike hanfu, the one that makes her miserable in the movie, rather than in her warrior’s gear. Really, when you’re talking Princess, you’re talking Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, and Belle (the “modern” Princess, whose story shows that the right woman can turn a beast into a prince). Snow White and Jasmine are in the pantheon, too, though slightly less popular.

  The first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. Within a year, sales had soared to $300 million. By 2009, they were at $4 billion. Four billion dollars! There are more than twenty-six thousand Disney Princess items on the market, a number which, particularly when you exclude cigarettes, liquor, cars, and antidepressants, is staggering. “Princess” has not only become the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created, it is the largest franchise on the planet for girls ages two to six.

  To this day, Disney conducts little market research on the Princess line, relying instead on the power of its legacy among mothers as well as the instant-read sales barometer of the theme parks and Disney Stores (Tiana, the much-ballyhooed “first African-American Princess,” was somewhat of an exception, but we will get to her in a later chapter). “We simply gave girls what they wanted,” Mooney said of the line’s success, “although I don’t think any of us grasped how much they wanted this. I wish I could sit here and take credit for having some grand scheme to develop this, but all we did was envision a little girl’s room and think about how she could live out the princess fantasy. The counsel we gave to licensees was: What type of bedding would a princess want to sleep in? What kind of alarm clock would a princess want to wake up to? What type of television would a princess like to see? It’s a rare case where you find a girl who has every aspect of her room bedecked in Princess, but if she ends up with three or four of these items, well, then, you have a very healthy business.” Healthy, indeed. It has become nearly impossible for girls of a certain age not to own a few Princess trinkets. Even in our home, where neither Steven nor I have personally purchased a Princess item, several coloring books, a set of pencils, a Snow White doll, and a blow-up mattress have managed to infiltrate.

  Meanwhile, by 2001, Mattel had brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home decor, and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a two-part episode in which she turns into a “true princess,” the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer products division released a satin-gowned Magic Hair Fairytale Dora with hair that grows or shortens when her crown is touched. Among other phrases the bilingual doll utters: “Vámonos! Let’s go to fairy-tale land!” and “Will you brush my hair?”

  I do not question that little girls like to play princess: as a child, I certainly availed myself of my mom’s cast-off rhinestone tiara from time to time. But when you’re talking about 26,000 items (and that’s just Disney), it’s a little hard to say where “want” ends and “coercion” begins. Mooney was prepared for that concern and for my overall discomfort with the Princesses, who, particularly in his consumer products versions, are all about clothes, jewelry, makeup, and snaring a handsome husband.

  “Look,” he said, “I have friends whose son went through the Power Rangers phase who castigated themselves over what they must’ve done wrong. Then they talked to other parents whose kids had gone through it. The boy passes through. The girl passes through. I see girls expanding their imagination through visualizing themselves as princesses, and then they pass through that phase and end up becoming lawyers, doctors, mothers, or princesses, whatever the case may be.”

  He had a point. I have never seen a study proving that playing princess specifically damages girls’ self-esteem or dampens other aspirations. And trust me, I’ve looked. There is, however, ample evidence that the more mainstream media girls consume, the more importance they place on being pretty and sexy. And a ream of studies shows that teenage girls and college students who hold conventional beliefs about femininity—especially those that emphasize beauty and pleasing behavior—are less ambitious and more likely to be depressed than their peers. They are also less likely to report that they enjoy sex or insist that their partners use condoms. None of that bodes well for Snow White’s long-term mental health.

  Perhaps you are now picturing poor, hapless girls who are submissive, low-achieving, easily influenced: the kind whose hair hangs in front of their faces as they recede into the background. I know I have a hard time connecting such passivity to my own vibrant, vital daughter. Yet even can-do girls can be derailed—and surprisingly quickly—by exposure to stereotypes. Take the female college students, all good at math, all enrolled in advanced calculus, who were asked to view a series of television commercials: four neutral ads (showing, say, cell phones or animals) were interspersed with two depicting clichés (a girl in raptures over acne medicine; a woman drooling over a brownie mix). Afterward they completed a survey and—bing!—the group who’d seen the stereotyped ads expressed less interest in math- and science-related careers than classmates who had seen only the neutral ones. Let me repeat: the effect was demonstrable after watching two ads. And guess who performed better on a math test, coeds who took it after being asked to try on a bathing suit or those who had been asked to try on a sweater? (Hint: the latter group; interestingly, male students showed no such disparity.)

  Meanwhile, according to a 2006 survey of more than two thousand school-aged children, girls repeatedly described a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight As and be the student body president, editor of the newspaper, and captain of the swim team but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone, be very thin, and dress right.” Rather than living the dream, then, those girls were straddling a contradiction: struggling to fulfill all the new expectations we have for them without letting go of the old ones. Instead of feeling greater latitude and choice in how to be female—which is what one would hope—they now feel they must not only “have it all” but be it all: Cinderella and Supergirl. Aggressive and agreeable. Smart and stunning. Does that make them the beneficiaries of new opportunities or victims of a massive con job?

  The answer is yes. That is, both are true, and that is what’s so insidious. It would be one thin
g if the goal were more realistic or if girls were stoked about creating a new femininity, but it’s not and they aren’t. The number of girls who fretted excessively about their looks and weight actually rose between 2000 and 2006 (topping their concern over schoolwork), as did their reported stress levels and their rates of depression and suicide. It is as if the more girls achieve the more obsessed they become with appearance—not dissimilar to the way the ideal of the “good mother” was ratcheted up just as adult women flooded the workforce. In her brilliant book Enlightened Sexism, Susan Douglas refers to this as the bargain girls and women strike, the price of success, the way they unconsciously defuse the threat their progress poses to male dominance. “We can excel in school, play sports, go to college, aspire to—and 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, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing, about pleasing men and being envied by other women.”

  A new banner unfurled over the entrance of Daisy’s preschool when I dropped by one fall morning: a little girl, adorned with a glittering plastic-and-rhinestone tiara and matching earrings, grinned down from it. WELCOME TO OUR CAMPUS, the banner read. The image might have irritated me in any case—even my kid’s school had bought into the idea that all girls should aspire to the throne—but what was really cringe-making was the fact that this was part of a Jewish temple. When I was growing up, the last thing you wanted to be called was a “princess”: it conjured up images of a spoiled, self-centered brat with a freshly bobbed nose who runs to “Daddy” at the least provocation. The Jewish American Princess was the repository for my community’s self-hatred, its ambivalence over assimilation—it was Jews turning against their girls as a way to turn against themselves. Was this photograph a sign we had so transcended the Goodbye, Columbus stereotype that we could now embrace it?

  “What about Queen Esther?” asked Julie, the mother of one of Daisy’s classmates, when I questioned the picture’s subtext. “She saved the Jewish people. Shouldn’t girls try to be like her?”

  Julie, a forty-five-year-old owner of a Web consulting company, was among several mothers I had asked to join me after drop-off for a chat about princess culture. Each one had a preschool-aged daughter obsessed with Disney royalty. They also knew I had my qualms about the subject, which they did not necessarily share. I wanted to know, from a mother’s perspective, why they allowed—in some cases even encouraged—their girls to play princess. Did they think it was innocuous? Beneficial? Worrisome? Healthy?

  “I think feminism erred in the 1960s by negating femininity,” announced Mara, a thirty-six-year-old education consultant who was currently home with her kids. Her voice sounded tight, almost defiant. “That was a mistake. I want my daughter to have a strong identity as a girl, as a woman, as a female. And being pretty in our culture is very important. I don’t want her to ever doubt that she’s pretty. So if she wants to wear a princess dress and explore that side of herself, I don’t want to stand in the way.”

  She folded her arms and collapsed back on her chair, as if she had said her piece. But before I could respond, she cocked her head and added, “On the other hand, I also have a son, and we really encourage his intelligence. I worry about that. A reward for her is ‘You look so pretty, you look so beautiful.’ People tell her that all the time, and we do, too. We tell him, ‘You’re so smart.’ ”

  Dana, a thirty-eight-year-old stay-at-home mom, who had been watching Mara with a slightly awestruck expression, spoke up. “For me it’s a matter of practicality,” she said. “Having those Disney Princess outfits around the house is really helpful for the endless playdates. And Eleanor loves to swim, so she identifies with Ariel.”

  I began to ask Dana how she felt about the rest of the Little Mermaid story, but she cut me off. “Oh, I don’t let the actual story in the house,” she said. “Just the costumes. Eleanor doesn’t know the stories.”

  That turned out to be Mara’s policy, too. The issue to her was not princesses, it was plotlines. “Those stories are horrible,” she said, making a face. “Every single one is the same: it’s about romance, love, and being rescued by the prince. I will protect my daughter from that.”

  Thinking back on my own girl’s inexplicable acquaintance with the Snow White story, I had to wonder whether that was possible. I’d believed I could keep out the tales and the toys but had failed on both counts. What were the odds, then, that you could permit one without the other? I had spent a lot of time with Dana’s daughter and already knew she could give a full recitation of Ariel’s story. Dana shrugged. “Well, yeah, she hears it from her friends,” she admitted. “But at least not at home.”

  What gave those mothers pause, then, was the fantasy the stories promoted that a man would take care of you. Yet the tales also provide the characters with some context, a narrative arc. Cinderella may ride off with the prince, but before that, she spends much of her time dressed in tatters, offering children object lessons about kindness, forbearance, and humility. Without that backstory, what was left? What did they imagine a storyless “princess” represented to the girls?

  That’s when Julie piped up. “I think it’s all about being looked at,” she said, “being admired. And about special treatment.” She rolled her eyes. “Receiving it, not giving it.”

  “And it’s fun,” Dana pointed out.

  Hell, yeah, it’s fun. Who doesn’t love nail polish with flower appliqués? Who doesn’t like to play dress-up now and again, swoosh about in silk and velvet? Daisy once whispered conspiratorially to me, “Mom, did you know that girls can choose all kinds of things to wear, but boys can only wear pants?” There it was: dressing up fancy, at least for now, was something she felt she got to do, not something she had to do. It was a source of power and privilege, much like her game of Snow White in which the action revolved around and was controlled by her.

  Whereas boys . . . even here in Berkeley, a friend’s seven-year-old son was teased so ruthlessly about his new, beloved pink bike that within a week he refused to ride it. It is quite possible that boys, too, would wear sequins if only they could. Isabelle Cherney, a professor of psychology at Creighton University, found that nearly half of boys aged five to thirteen, when ushered alone into a room and told they could play with anything, chose “girls’ ” toys as frequently as “boys’ ”—provided they believed nobody would find out. Particularly, their fathers: boys as young as four said their daddies would think it was “bad” if they played with “girls’ ” toys, even something as innocuous as miniature dishes. Boys were also more likely to sort playthings based on how they perceived gender roles (such as “Dad uses tools, so hammers are for boys”), whereas girls figured that if they themselves enjoyed a toy—any toy—it was, ipso facto, for girls. So it seems that, even as they have loosened up on their daughters, dads continue to vigorously police masculinity in their sons. I believe it: consider the progressive pal of mine who proudly showed off the Hot Wheels set he had bought for his girl but balked when his boy begged for a tutu. Who’s to say, then, which sex has greater freedom?

  I am almost willing to buy that argument: that boys are the ones who are more limited; that little girls need to feel beautiful; that being on display, being admired for how they look, is critical to their developing femininity and fragile self-esteem; that princess sets their imaginations soaring; that its popularity is evidence that we’ve moved past 1970s feminist rigidity. Except that, before meeting with the preschool moms, I had flipped through a stack of drawings each child in Daisy’s class had made to complete the sentence “If I were a [blank], I’d [blank] to the store.” (One might say, for instance, “If I were a ball, I’d bounce to the store.”) The boys had chosen to be a whole host of things: firemen, spiders, superheroes, puppies, tigers, birds, athletes, raisins. The girls fell into exactly four camps: princess, fairy, butterfly, and ballerina (one especially enthusiastic girl claimed them all: a “princess, butterfly,
fairy ballerina”). How, precisely, does that, as Disney’s Andy Mooney suggested, expand their horizons? The boys seemed to be exploring the world; the girls were exploring femininity. What they “got” to do may have been uniquely theirs, but it was awfully circumscribed. “Yeah, I was surprised,” the teacher admitted when I asked about it. “The girls had so little range in their ideas. We tried to encourage them to choose other things, but they wouldn’t.”

  Of course, girls are not buying the 24/7 princess culture all on their own. So the question is not only why they like it (which is fairly obvious) but what it offers their parents. Julie may have been onto something on that front: princesses are, by definition, special, elevated creatures. And don’t we all feel our girls are extraordinary, unique, and beautiful? Don’t we want them to share that belief for as long as possible, to think that—just by their existence, by birthright—they are the chosen ones? Wouldn’t we like their lives to be forever charmed, infused with magic and sparkle? I know I want that for my daughter.

  Or do I? Among other things, princesses tend to be rather isolated in their singularity. Navigating the new world of friendships is what preschool is all about, yet the DPs, you will recall, won’t even look at one another. Daisy had only one fight with her best friend during their three years of preschool—a conflict so devastating that, at pickup time, I found the other girl sobbing in the hallway, barely able to breathe. The source of their disagreement? My darling daughter had insisted that there could be only one Cinderella in their games—only one girl who reigned supreme—and it was she. Several hours and a small tantrum later, she apologized to the girl, saying that from now on there could be two Cinderellas. But the truth was, Daisy had gotten it right the first time: there is only one princess in the Disney tales, one girl who gets to be exalted. Princesses may confide in a sympathetic mouse or teacup, but, at least among the best-known stories, they do not have girlfriends. God forbid Snow White should give Sleeping Beauty a little support.