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?
Bratz, in short, were cool.
Even if moms didn’t like the dolls—and generally, they did not—they bought them anyway, much as their own mothers had once bought Barbies: perhaps they succumbed to what marketers call the “nag factor,” or they were afraid of the “forbidden fruit” effect in which the denied toy becomes all the more alluring. Or maybe they couldn’t resist the Tokyo-A-Go-Go! Sushi Lounge, which, I have to say, was pretty special. At any rate, for seven years, Bratz gave Barbie a run for her money, gobbling up a full 40 percent of the fashion doll market. Then, in 2008, Mattel struck back, suing MGA for copyright infringement: Bratz’s creator, it seemed, had been in Mattel’s employ when he had designed the dolls. Mattel initially won the case and, within a year, ha
d all but stripped the shelves of its competitor.
Bratz’s downfall, then, had nothing to do with a drop in popularity or parental objections. Nor did it mark the end of the grade school diva. Consider the “girls’ editions” of classic board games, each of which appears to have been dipped in Pepto-Bismol. The sparkly pink Ouija board includes a deck of seventy-two cards that “Ask the questions that girls want to know.” (“Who will text me next?” “Will I be a famous actress someday?”) Pink Yahtzee includes a fuzzy shaker and dice that boast, rather than numbers, hearts, butterflies, flowers, cell phones, flip-flops, and dresses. Monopoly Pink Boutique Edition claims to be “All about the things girls love! Buy boutiques and malls, go on a shopping spree, pay your cell phone bill, and get text and instant messages.” The raspberry-tinted fantasy these products peddle assumes, like Disney Princess, that all girls long to be the fairest of them all (and the best dressed and the most popular), but something, somewhere, has shifted. The innocence that pink signaled during the Princess years, which seemed so benign, even protective, has receded, leaving behind narcissism and materialism as the hallmarks of feminine identity. The customization of these toys verges on parody; it also discourages the possibility of cross-sex friendship. Could you share your Pink Glam Magic 8 Ball with a pal who happened to be a boy? My sources say no.
With Bratz on ice, the similar My Scene and Fashionista Barbie sales soared, and the doll’s earnings rebounded. Meanwhile, in 2009 MGA rolled out Moxie Girlz, which it positioned as a toned-down Bratz for a more economically somber era. And it’s true, the clothing, though garish, is less revealing; the accessories are somewhat less excessive. But the dolls still wear the same provocative expression as their predecessors: they have similar shadow-rimmed eyes, and their lips are still freakishly full and lacquered to a high gloss. Their tagline may be “Be true * Be you,” but, like pink products all along the age span that urge girls to “be yourself,” “celebrate you,” “express yourself,” they define individuality entirely through appearance and consumption. I suspect that if Bratz had never existed, Moxies would create similar controversy, but the aesthetic of the former permanently pushed the frontiers of propriety; it effectively desensitized parents, dulled our shockability, so that now anything less bootylicious, even by just a smidgen, seems reasonable. The bigger surprise was that Mattel has skewed so hard in the other direction. In 2010, the company launched Monster High—a line of dolls, apparel, Halloween costumes, Webisodes, and eventually a television show and feature film, all aimed at girls ages six and up. Made up of the “children of legendary monsters,” the school’s student bodies resemble undead streetwalkers, only less demure. Take Clawdeen Wolf, “a fierce fashionista with a confident no-nonsense attitude” whose favorite activities are “shopping and flirting with the boys.” Her least favorite school subject is gym, because “they won’t let me participate in my platform heels.” The company’s timing was fortuitous: that summer, a federal appeals court overturned the $100 million verdict against MGA, paving the runway for the comeback of Bratz. The doll wars are on. Honestly, it is enough to make a mom beg for the days of little dustpans and baby bottles.
On the Toy Fair’s last day, I visited the Fisher-Price showroom, for which I needed a special pass: not just anyone can sneak a peek at next year’s Talking Elmo. The preschool girls’ section was decorated with a banner on which the words BEAUTIFUL, PRETTY, COLORFUL were repeated over and over (and over) in pink script. The display included a pink DVD player, a pink camera, stick-on jewelry that could be colored with pink or orange pens (and stored in a pink purse or pink jewelry box), a Cuddle and Care Baby Abby Cadabby, and a Dora the Explorer “styling head.” In the next room, a banner over the boys’ section, scripted in blue, exclaimed, ENERGY, HEROES, POWER. Among the multicolored toys were “planet heroes” action figures, a robotic dinosaur, a jungle adventure set, and a Diego Animal Rescue Railway. Outside, on the streets of Manhattan, it was the twenty-first century, but the scene here in toy land was straight out of Mad Men, as if the feminist movement had never happened.
I’m not saying that Fisher-Price (or Mattel or Disney or even MGA) is engaged in some nefarious scheme to brainwash our daughters—or, for that matter, our sons. They wouldn’t make those products or spin those sales pitches if they didn’t work, and it’s not as though little girls themselves are laying down the cash. So again I found myself mulling over why we parents want to—even need to—amplify the differences between boys and girls. If the baby doll propaganda of the early twentieth century reflected adult fears that white girls would reject maternity, what anxieties account for the contemporary surge of pink-and-pretty? The desire to prolong innocence, to avoid early sexualization, may be part of it, but that does not explain the spike in cosmetics sales for preschoolers, press-on nails for six-year-olds, or R-rated fashion dolls. There is some evidence that the more freedom women have, the more polarized a culture’s ideas about the sexes become: an annual survey administered to students at the University of Akron since the 1970s, for instance, found greater differences in perceived gender-related traits over time, especially when it came to femininity. The conviction that women are more “sympathetic,” “talkative,” and “friendly” rose significantly among both male and female respondents. And although women no longer saw “athleticism” or “decisiveness” as inherently masculine, men still did. Men also felt that women had become both more domineering and more timid, while associating masculinity more strongly than ever with the adjectives “adventurous,” “aggressive,” “competitive,” and “self-confident.”
How is one to interpret that trend? Does it indicate a need to keep the sexes distinct, one we eagerly reinforce in our youngest children? A deep-seated fear that equality between men and women will create an unappealing sameness? Or could it be that, with other factors stripped away, so many barriers broken down, we can finally admit to difference without defensiveness? Maybe even if girls aren’t born loving pink, precisely, their behaviors, tastes, and responses are nonetheless hardwired, at least to a degree, and today’s parents are able to accept that without judgment, even savor it. Perhaps the segregation of girl and boy cultures is inevitable. Biologically driven.
Clearly, before going any further, I needed to understand, once and for all, how much of children’s gender behavior was truly inborn and how much was learned. Yet, as I left the Fisher-Price showroom, I wondered: even if nature proved dominant, what impact might this new separate-but-equal mentality have on children’s perceptions of themselves, one another, and their future choices?
Chapter Four - What Makes Girls Girls?
When I was in seventh grade, my English teacher assigned our class “X: A Fabulous Child’s Story.” Originally published in Ms. magazine and later as a stand-alone picture book, it was a kind of sci-fi fable about a child, code-named X, whose sex would not be revealed until it announced itself at puberty. The scientists conducting this “Very Important Xperiment” provided X’s parents with a manual containing tens of thousands of pages of instructions (there were “246½ pages on the first day of school alone!”). Mom and Dad cared for X equally; both parents played dolls and trucks with the child, shot marbles, and jumped rope. And guess what? It turned out that X “Xcelled” at everything—spelling, running, baking, football, playing house! Under X’s influence, X’s classmates threw off the yoke of gender tyranny: boys ran vacuums and girls ran lawn mowers. Irate parents demanded that X be evaluated by a shrink, who, tears of joy streaming down his (yes, his) cheeks, declared that X was “the least mixed-up child I’ve ever Xamined.”
And they all lived neutrally ever after.
The story was supposed to illustrate how gender, really, is all a bunch of socially constructed hooey, which was the prevailing belief of the time. We were, our teacher told us, totally Free to Be You and Me (a play, as it happens, I would be cast in a few years later, performing in shorts, toe socks, and “Mork from Ork” rainbow-striped suspenders). Or were we? Flash forward
three decades to 2009, when a real-life story of X caromed across the Internet: a Swedish couple had decided to indefinitely conceal their child’s gender. Pop (the pseudonym they gave the child in interviews to protect the family’s privacy) was two years old when the story broke. According to the newspaper Svenska Dagbladet, Pop’s wardrobe included dresses and trousers; Pop’s parents changed the child’s hairstyle regularly. Pop was free to play with whatever Pop wished. “It’s cruel to bring a child into this world with a blue or pink stamp on its forehead,” Pop’s mother proclaimed.
My sister journalists disagreed. Strongly, and not just because of the challenge posed by avoiding a definite pronoun in writing. Attitudes had shifted profoundly. Not only were there no second-wave feminist huzzahs for Pop’s parents’ courage in attempting to buck the new pressures of hypergendered childhood (less than a century ago—when, if you recall, all children wore frilly white dresses and unshorn hair until at least age three—Pop’s androgyny would have been no biggie), but one writer decried the “violence committed on the child’s sense of self” in denying Pop overt knowledge of Pop’s sex, calling what the parents were doing tantamount to “child abuse.” Another grimly invoked the example of a “militant feminist friend” who let her daughter play only with cars and trucks—until the day she found the girl rocking a blanket-wrapped Tonka while feeding it a bottle through its chassis. Several cited the classic 1967 case of David Reimer, one of a pair of twin boys, who was raised as “Brenda” after a bungled circumcision left him—whoops!—without a penis. When he discovered the truth as a teenager, David underwent reconstructive surgery and received testosterone injections to become a boy again, saying he had felt male all along; at age thirty-eight, he declared the experiment of his life a failure and committed suicide.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter Page 5