Cinderella Ate My Daughter

by Peggy Orenstein

  Martin and I left the preschool, which was on the Arizona State campus, and strolled over to the social science building to join Fabes, several other faculty members, and a group of graduate students in a conference room. This team had spent hours watching preschoolers in action, painstakingly tagging their behaviors: solo play, parallel play, same-sex play, cross-sex play (that is, one boy and one girl), mixed-sex play. Fabes flipped open a laptop and, as an example, began projecting a video clip against the wall. The classroom I had just left came into view, but with different kids. A group of boys huddled around a table talking and playing (it was unclear exactly with what), while a gaggle of girls worked together to build a fort of blocks. Fade to black. In a second clip, a boy and a girl stood next to each other, watering plants.

  “That’s a missed opportunity,” Fabes commented, pointing at the screen. “I don’t understand why teachers don’t see this.”

  I looked at him blankly. It seemed like a good thing to me: a boy and a girl playing happily together. What was the problem? “They’re not playing together,” he corrected. “They’re playing next to each other. That’s not the same thing. People see girls and boys playing side by side and consider that interaction, but it’s not.”

  Typically, it is girls who initiate the church-and-state separation of childhood, pulling away at around age two and a half from boys who are too rough or rowdy. Shortly after that, the boys reciprocate, avoiding girls even more scrupulously than the girls did them. By the end of the first year of preschool, children spend most of their time, when they can choose, playing with others of their sex. When they do have cross-sex friendships, they tend not to cop to them in public—the relationships go underground. As much as the story of X would like us to think otherwise, that self-segregation, like toy choice, is universal, crossing all cultures—it appears, Martin said, to be innate. The threat of cooties continues, with boys and girls inhabiting their own worlds, through elementary school until middle school, when children realize there might be something to this opposite-sex business after all.

  Every cliché I have staunchly refuted plays out in childhood single-sex groups: girls cluster in pairs or trios, chat with one another more than boys do, are more intimate and cooperative in their play, and are more likely to promote group harmony. They play closer to teachers and are more likely than boys to choose toys and activities structured by adults. Boys, on the other hand, play in packs. Their games are more active, rougher, more competitive, and more hierarchical than girls’. They try to play as far as possible from adults’ peering eyes.

  Martin and Fabes make clear that they are not pushing for 1970s X-style neutrality. They do not want to discourage or even necessarily diminish segregated play. “We just want to offset its limitations,” Martin explained. “A little girl who only plays with girls and learns the gender behavior and interaction of little girls . . . well, what they do together is limited. Same with little boys.” Single-sex peer groups reinforce kids’ biases, and over time, as Lise Eliot pointed out, that changes their brains, potentially defining both their abilities and possibilities. By age four, girls—who have a small inherent advantage in verbal and social skills—have outstripped boys in those areas. Around the same time, boys, who have a slight natural edge in spatial skills, begin pulling ahead on that front.

  This separation of cultures, as anyone who was ever a child will recall, also contributes to an us-versus-them mentality between males and females. That not only provides endless material for third-rate stand-up comics but, Fabes and Martin believe, undermines our intimate relationships. Years of same-sex play leave kids less able to relate to the other sex—and can set the stage for hostile attitudes and interactions in adolescence and adulthood. “This is a public health issue,” Fabes proclaimed. “It becomes detrimental to relationships, to psychological health and well-being, when boys and girls don’t learn how to talk to one another. That divergence of behavior and communication skills in childhood becomes the building blocks for later issues. Part of the reason we have the divorce rates we do, domestic violence, dating violence, stalking behaviors, sexual harassment, is lack of ability to communicate between men and women.”

  Eliminating divorce or domestic violence may be an ambitious mandate for a preschool curriculum, but it’s not without basis: young children who have friends of the other sex have a more positive transition into dating as teenagers and sustain their romantic relationships better. But how does one go about changing behavior that is not merely entrenched but, apparently, inborn? Sometimes, Martin explained, it is easier than one might imagine. Take the case of the boy and girl watering the plants: an alert teacher just needs to mention how the kids are helping each other. “When teachers comment on mixed-sex or crossed-sex play, the likelihood it will happen increases. When they stop commenting, it stops happening. So they need to reinforce it.” Although the curriculum is still in its earliest phases of development, Martin said, it will focus on creating “a higher sense of unity” as a classroom rather than as girls and boys—by choosing a group mascot together, for example. Teachers will be advised not to divide children by gender when lining them up to go outside; there might be “buddy days” or other cooperative learning opportunities during which boys and girls work together. Teachers can integrate discussions of similarities into classroom activities (“Lots of kids like pizza: some are girls and some are boys”). There will also be a series of lessons about exclusion and inclusion involving “Z,” a genderless cartoon alien who is trying to figure out our world. Kids may still largely stick with their own sex, Martin acknowledged, and that’s fine, but maybe they will play more together as well.

  Consciously encouraging cross-sex play clearly runs counter to toy marketers’ goals. It also defies a hot trend in education reform: using brain research to justify single-sex classrooms in public schools. Proponents such as Leonard Sax, the author of Why Gender Matters and president of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education, claim that the differences between boys and girls are so profound, so determinative, so immutable that coeducation actually does kids a disservice. Among the assertions: boys hear less well than girls (and thus need louder teachers), see action better, and are most alert when taught while standing up in a chilly room. Girls, by contrast, like it hot—their classrooms should be around 75 degrees and decorated in warm hues—prefer sitting in a circle, and excel at seeing colors and nuances. Even if all that were true (a dubious assumption: multiple studies have, for instance, shown that sex-based hearing and vision differences are so negligible as to be irrelevant), presumably, segregation would only deepen those divides, increasing the distance between boys and girls and making them strangers to each other.

  At any rate, gender is a pretty weak predictor of a child’s potential gifts or challenges; the differences within each sex in any given realm (including math and verbal skills) tend to be far greater than the ones between them. Jay Giedd, the chief of brain imaging at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, told The New York Times that assigning kids to classrooms based on gender differences would be like assigning them to locker rooms based on height: since males tend to be bigger, you’d send the tallest 50 percent of kids to the boys’ side and the shortest 50 percent to the girls’. You might end up with a better-than-random outcome, but not by much: there are simply too many exceptions to the rule. Nonetheless, the number of single-sex public schools and classrooms has skyrocketed since the mid-1990s, due largely to the influence of Sax and his colleagues. That made me rethink Lise Eliot’s comment about her work: the presumption that we, as a society, want to bring out the full potential in all of our children. What parent would disagree with that? Yet we are often reluctant to examine assumptions and actions that amplify gender differences—even if that means we create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

  I am not against single-sex schools in the private sphere (as long as they don’t justify their existence through half-baked “brain research”)
, but I would much rather have Daisy and her classmates, male and female, take part in something like the Sanford program. I hope Martin and Fabes are right and their work can, down the line, improve relationships between the sexes, both in the workplace and in the home (at least, as Fabes joked, “we can guarantee none of our research subjects will divorce in the next five years”). I hope it encourages kids to work together more effectively regardless of differences within or between the sexes—teaching them to appreciate the bumps in the playing field rather than trying to level it entirely. But it will be years before they know for sure, before the curriculum is fully in place, before they figure out how to evaluate its long-term efficacy.

  I left Phoenix feeling less concerned that Daisy had suddenly gone femme on me—that now seemed both unavoidable and healthy. At the same time, if early experiences with mixed-sex play have a lifelong positive impact on kids’ behavior, aptitudes, and relationships, the segmentation of every possible childhood item by sex was more troubling than I had initially imagined—and for a whole new slew of reasons. I felt better educated as I headed home, better grounded in theory, but no closer to understanding how to put it into practice while raising a daughter: where was the point that exploration of femininity turned to exploitation of it, the line between frivolous fun and JonBenét? Maybe to stake out that middle ground, I needed to check out the extreme.

  Chapter Five - Sparkle, Sweetie!

  At six in the morning on a summer Saturday in Austin, Texas, Taralyn Eschberger was getting ready to sparkle. She was perched on a chair in the Hill Country Ballroom of a Radisson hotel, her blue eyes still bleary with sleep as a makeup artist fussed around her, plucking sponge rollers from her hair, teasing and combing out the curls, preparing to augment them with a cascading hairpiece whose strawberry blond shade precisely matched Taralyn’s own. Next, to bring out her features, came blush, candy pink lipstick, cerulean eye shadow, black liner and mascara; then press-on nails that simulated a French manicure. The makeup artist held up a hand mirror, and Taralyn nodded, satisfied. A little bronzer on her legs to even out her spray tan (which keeps her from looking washed out under harsh stage lights), and she would be ready to compete for the $2,000 Ultimate Supreme prize at the Universal Royalty Texas State Beauty Pageant.

  Did I mention that Taralyn was five years old?

  Taralyn’s mom, Traci, a former dancer turned medical sales rep, watched from a few feet away, smiling. She could well have been a beauty queen herself: tall and slim, with highlighted blond hair, enviably perky breasts, gleaming white teeth, and, even at this hour of the morning, her own makeup meticulously in place. She showed me the dress Taralyn would wear in the pageant, a two-piece off-the-shoulder turquoise number with a crystallized Swarovski rhinestone-encrusted bodice, a frothy, multitiered tutu skirt, and a detachable choker necklace. Serious contenders like the Eschbergers can pay up to $3,000 a pop for these hand-sewn “cupcake dresses,” though since the seamstress who made this one “just loves Taralyn” and uses the girl as a model, Traci got it at cost. Even so, the $16,000 Taralyn had won so far during her year in competition wouldn’t nearly cover her expenses: the dance coach, the makeup artist, the home tanning equipment, the head shots, the extravagant frocks and swimwear, not to mention the entry fees—which can run as high as $1,000—as well as travel, accommodations, and meals for the thirty pageants she’d attended in Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. With that level of investment, Traci said, you had better bring your best game: you had better be prepared. You had better pay attention to every detail, and every detail had better be perfect. In addition to hair and makeup, girls in the tooth-losing phase famously wear “flippers”—custom-made dental prosthetics that cover any gaps to create a flawless smile. Taralyn had one but rarely used it. “When the judges are sitting further away from the stage, it does make their smile look bigger,” Traci said. “But it doesn’t look natural. It doesn’t look like her. I like her cute little smile.”

  Taralyn hopped off the chair, presented herself for Traci’s approval. “You look just like a princess!” the older woman exclaimed, and her daughter grinned. I recalled museum portraits I had seen of eighteenth-century European princesses—little girls in low-cut gowns, their hair piled high, their cheeks and lips rouged red—that were used to attract potential husbands, typically middle-aged men, who could strengthen the girls’ families’ political or financial positions. So, yes, I thought, I suppose she does look like a princess.

  Any sane mother would find the pageant world appalling, right? They would feel queasy, as I did, at overhearing a woman advise her six-year-old that “one of the judges is a man, so be sure you wink at him!” or a father telling a TV reporter that he enjoys getting a sneak peek at what his four-year-old will look like when she’s sixteen. It would be easy pickin’s for me to attack parents who tart up their daughters in hopes of winning a few hundred bucks and a gilded plastic trophy; who train them to shake their tail feathers on command, to blow kisses at the judges and coyly twirl their index fingers into their dimpled cheeks.

  But really, what would be the point? That story has been told, to great success and profit. Toddlers & Tiaras, which each week follows families through a different pageant, has been a megahit for TLC, and the more evil and clueless the “momsters” it covers, the better. Traci herself was once featured on the show, grabbing Taralyn’s arm and reprimanding her for flubbing a routine. (“They filmed two days of positive footage,” Traci told me, “then that was what they chose to air. We were stupid to fall for it. We were dumb.”) MTV, HBO, The Tyra Banks Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, and even England’s august BBC have all featured the “controversy” over baby beauty queens. The formula each of those followed was as clever as it was foolproof: a parade of preschoolers tricked out like Las Vegas showgirls was followed by commentary from psychologists who (with good reason) link self-objectification and sexualization to the host of ills previously mentioned—eating disorders, depression, low self-esteem, impaired academic performance. The moms defend their actions, the psychologists rebut, the moms get the last word, the girls take the stage again, and the piece is over. The shows purport to be exposés, but in truth they expose nothing, change nothing, challenge nothing. What they do is give viewers license, under the pretext of disapproval, to be titillated by the spectacle, to indulge in guilty-pleasure voyeurism. They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualization of little girls—way over the line—where, exactly, is that line, and who draws it and how? What might those little princesses reveal about how the rest of us, we supposedly more enlightened parents, raise our own daughters?

  A spangled blue curtain hung behind the stage of the Radisson’s ballroom. A row of glittering tiaras and banner-draped trophies—some up to five feet high—stood in front of it. A table off to one side was laden with smaller trophies, giant teddy bears, and “goodie bags” stuffed with candy and toys. Every contestant at a Universal pageant walks away with a prize; for that privilege, they pay a mandatory $295 general entry fee (which includes the Formal Wear competition), a $125 DVD fee, a $15-per-person admission fee, plus optional fees of $50 to $100 each for additional events such as the swimsuit competition, facial beauty, “Mini Supremes” (which carries a $200 cash prize), talent, and hair/makeup. It was easy to see how child pageants, which are the fastest-growing segment of the pageant market, have become a reported multibillion-dollar industry.

  Universal Royalty had already been featured three times on Toddlers & Tiaras. It is the country’s largest “high-glitz” child pageant system, according to its owner, Annette Hill, a former child beauty queen herself, whose two grown daughters were also pageant vets. A tall African-American woman dressed simply in a black sheath, her hair swept into a French twist, Miss Annette, as she is known, was also the pageant’s mistress of ceremonies: she stood behind a lectern introducing contestants in e
ach category, from infants on up. Her nonstop stage patter included the children’s names, their favorite foods (pizza for the older kids; “a big plate of mashed bananas” for the babies), TV shows (“Hannah Montana, of course”), hobbies (“swimming, talking on the phone, and shopping and shopping and shopping!”), as well as a detailed description of each outfit. The girls strutted across the stage in turn, pausing to wave at the judges or to pose with their chin on folded hands, jiggling their heads like baby dolls newly come to life. Surprisingly, few were classically pretty and several were on the chunky side—stripped of their glitz, I would never have pegged them for pageant queens. But beauty was not exactly what they were being judged on. It was more about how well they performed pageant conventions—the walk, the stage presence, the nonstop smile, the nymphet moves—and, of course, the flashy outfits and gaudy makeup. Judges and parents referred to this as “the total package.”

  Taralyn was one of the front-runners in the pageant’s sweet spot, the four- to six-year-old division, in which competition was fiercest. Her chief rival, Eden Wood, was a chubby-cheeked, tow-headed four-year-old from Taylor, Arkansas (population 566), who had been on the pageant circuit since age one. Eden’s mother, Mickie (who, like many of the moms, was once a contestant herself), was notorious for her on-the-spot, uninhibited coaching. Most of the girls’ mothers used hand signals, similar to the kind you would see at high-end dog shows, to remind their daughters of where they were supposed to walk, when to stop, when to spin. But Mickie planted herself a few yards behind the judges, out of their sight lines but well within her daughter’s, and performed Eden’s routine exuberantly right along with the girl. Mickie was a big, busty woman, but she could still shake it. It was a mesmerizing sight—together mother and daughter bent their arms at the elbow, turned up their palms, and twirled. Together they blew kisses over their shoulders at the judges, together they vamped and waved, together they leaned forward and shimmied. Their movements were so synchronized that it seemed as if they were attached by an invisible string, marionette and puppeteer. Periodically Mickie punctuated their dance with encouraging shouts of “E. E.!” and “Go, baby!” and “Get it, girl!” Miss Annette, meanwhile, noted that Eden’s ambition was “to rule the world.”