Cinderella Ate My Daughter

by Peggy Orenstein

  But it is Bella, not the supernaturals she falls in with, who is the true horror show here, at least as a female role model. She lives solely for her man; when he leaves her in New Moon, the series’ second installment—something about needing to protect her from him, which sounds like the vamp version of “It’s not you, babe, it’s me”—she is willing to die for him as well. Realizing that she conjures Edward’s image at times of extreme danger, Bella flings herself off a cliff into a stormy sea and nearly drowns: “I thought briefly of the clichés, about how you’re supposed to see your life flash before your eyes. I was so much luckier. Who wanted to see a rerun, anyway? I saw him, and I had no will to fight. . . . Why would I fight when I was so happy where I was?”

  Oh yeah, I want my daughter to be that girl.

  Even before the self-destructiveness kicks in, Bella has little to recommend her. Scratch that: absolutely nothing to recommend her. She is neither smart, interesting, kind, graceful, nor even pretty—more Ugly Duckling than Bella Swan. She is in perpetual need of rescue. She pines for an emotionally unavailable guy who simultaneously vows to protect her and warns that his love for her might make him kill her. She repeatedly reminds him that he is too good for her, and, except for the little business about his being undead, it is hard to disagree. Edward’s (and Jacob’s) attraction to Bella—at least in the books—is inexplicable.

  There has been much hand-wringing over why today’s girls would go for such claptrap. Colette Dowling, whose best seller The Cinderella Complex explored women’s unconscious resistance to independence, has suggested that perhaps girls still feel “some fear they can’t really take care of themselves.” The social critic Laura Miller mused on Salon that “some things, it seems, are even harder to kill than vampires”—specifically, the dream of being rescued by a dreamy-looking, powerful man who instantly perceives how special you are: who will support you, adore you, and cushion you from life’s hardships. Yet why should that fantasy be dead or even surprising? We have drilled our daughters in it from the time they wore diapers—diapers decorated with Disney Princesses.

  Bella may be a Cinderella; however, she is no Aschenputtel. Her story comes squarely from the Disney tradition, in which the plotline has shifted from the heroine’s transformation to the prince’s courageous battle to possess her; she, rather than he, is reduced to a narrative device. And that—Bella’s overweening blandness—as much as the guilty-pleasure rescue fantasy, may explain the series’ appeal: Twilight’s heroine is so insipid, so ordinary, so clumsy, so Not Hot.

  Isn’t that great?

  Think about it: what a relief that must be for girls who feel constant pressure to be physically, socially, and academically perfect! Bella does not spend two hours with a flatiron, ace her calculus test, score the winning goal in her lacrosse match, then record a hit song. Bella does not spout acidly witty dialogue. Bella does not wear $200 jeans on her effortlessly slim hips. Even in the Hollywood incarnation, as played by Kristen Stewart, she is relatively plain, modestly attired, and excruciatingly awkward. Yet Edward, the most desirable dude in the room, loves her—now, that is a fairy tale. The fact that he refuses to consummate their relationship may make him all the more attractive to postpubescent girls weary of the mandate to be sexy and please boys. (The couple does consummate their relationship once in book four, on their wedding night, but readers are not privy to the moment.) So, yes, Edward, the dangerous, emotionally withholding male, is a parent’s worst nightmare. Yes, Bella’s perspective on intimacy is warped. Yes, the series glamorizes dating abuse. Yes, reading the books makes me grind my teeth until my jaw pops. And yet . . . Twilight may have given girls something they needed: a way to explore their nascent sexuality on their own terms, to feel desire rather than perform it. Sure, I prefer Buffy the Vampire Slayer, whose tough-but-vulnerable heroine meets the challenges of romance and sex head-on, but I understand the impulse. Twilight lets a girl feel heat without needing to look hot. In that way, its popularity seems less problematic than what girls see every day in magazines and on screens big and small: the example set by real-life, flesh-and-blood celebrity “princesses” as they attempt to transform from girl to woman.

  Chapter Seven - Wholesome to Whoresome: The Other Disney Princesses

  The photograph captures its subject in that liminal space between girlhood and womanhood. She sits naked, seemingly perched on an unseen bed, a satin sheet clasped to her chest as if caught by surprise. Her hair is tousled, her lipstick slightly mussed. Has she just woken up? If so, was she alone? She gazes at the viewer over one shoulder, her languorous eyes just a touch defiant.

  In many ways, it is an artful portrait: the contrast between pale skin and dark hair; the sculptural folds of the sheet; the vulnerability of her emerging sexuality; the shock of her scarlet lips. Maybe if the girl had been older—say, eighteen rather than fifteen—or if she hadn’t spent the previous two years positioning herself as the world’s most responsible role model for eight-year-olds (a Faustian, if lucrative, bargain), it might all have been perceived differently. But she wasn’t. And she had. The girl, of course, was Miley Cyrus, also known as Hannah Montana. Until the publication of that photo in the June 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, she had represented all that was good and pure and squeaky clean about Disney’s intentions toward our daughters: the promise, begun in the Princess years, that if parents stuck with the brand—letting girls progress naturally from Cinderella to the Disney Channel divas with their TV shows, movie spin-offs, and music downloads—our daughters could enjoy pop culture without becoming pop tarts. Remember the in-house survey at Disney in which moms associated Princess with the word “safe”? That is how we’re meant to perceive the entire brand, from toddler to tween. Safe. Innocent. Protective. Sheltering. So when that image blazed across the Internet, parents felt not only furious but betrayed. “Miley Cyrus is younger than my daughter!” railed one daddy blogger. A second wrote, “Holy Hell! What on earth were her parents thinking?” A mom fumed, “She is a child for God’s sake,” and another, referring to the Everest of available Hannah Montana gear, wryly quipped, “Bonfire anyone?”

  Poor little rich girl! Miley was quoted in the accompanying article as saying she thought her seminudity was “really artsy. It wasn’t in a skanky way,” then later had to backpedal hard, releasing a formal mea culpa to her fans. “I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen.” Still there was speculation: how premeditated was this “slip”? Was she apologizing all the way to the bank? Were Miley and her master-“minder” father, the country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, consciously trying to nudge the singer’s image, to prepare her for the next step of her career? In the VF profile, the writer Bruce Handy asked, “How do you grow up in public, both as a person and as a commodity?”

  I reread that sentence several times as I scrutinized the notorious photo. Handy might more specifically have wondered how you grow up in public as a woman and a commodity, what Miley’s attempts and missteps would mean not only for her but for her millions of worshipful fans. By the time girls are five, after all, the human Disney Princess du jour is meant to supplant the animated ones in their hearts. Miley. Lindsay. Hilary. Even, once upon a time, Britney (who launched her career in 1993 as a Mouseketeer on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club). All were products of the Disney machine. Each girl’s rise became fodder for another media fairy tale, another magical rags-to-riches transformation to which ordinary girls could aspire. But some two hundred years after the Grimm brothers first published their stories, had that trajectory become any more liberating? The nineteenth-century Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White served as metaphors, symbols of girls’ coming-of-age, awakening to womanhood. The contemporary princesses do as well, and though the end point may be different—marrying the handsome prince has been replaced by cutting a hit single—the narrative arc is equally predictable. In their own way th
eir dilemmas, too, illuminate the ones all girls of their era face, whether publicly or privately, as they grow up to be women—and commodities.

  The year 2000 was a banner year for monarchy. At least at Disney. Because, just as Andy Mooney was having his “could’ve had a V8” moment at the Phoenix ice show, realizing that the hundreds of girls who were using their imaginations to dress as Cinderella could instead be buying official licensed products, Anne Sweeney, then president of the Disney Channel Worldwide, was preparing a coronation of her own. Up until that point, the network broadcast mainly classic cartoons for the toddler set as well as films like Pollyanna that harkened back to the golden age before Walt himself was (supposedly) cryopreserved. Like Mooney, Sweeney, who had a ten-year-old son, saw a marketing vacuum that begged to be filled: the “underserved” 29 million or so kids who were hovering between Mickey Mouse and MTV. The trick was to find shows that appealed both to tweens and to the parents who still monitored their viewing habits. Nickelodeon had hit the mark a few years earlier with the charming Clarissa Explains It All, proving in the process that a female lead could play to both sexes (previous conventional television wisdom had held that while girls would watch a male protagonist without complaint, the reverse was untrue, so hanging a show on a female star would instantly halve your market share). Sweeney, too, saw potential in a perky, semiempowered female character, though—again like Mooney—I’m not sure she realized how monumental that decision would come to be. At any rate, she gave the green light to Lizzie McGuire, a sitcom starring the then-twelve-year-old Hilary Duff, which portrayed the frothy fun and foibles of a just-like-you-but-cuter middle school girl.

  Lizzie premiered as a weekly show on the Disney Channel in January 2002; it was an instant smash and overnight launched Duff as Disney’s first multiplatform “mogurl.” Within a year, Lizzie was airing daily. There were a series of spin-off Lizzie books, a Lizzie clothing line, and a Lizzie sound track (which went platinum). Duff’s face graced Happy Meals, dolls, games, room decor, jewelry. The Lizzie McGuire Movie, released in 2003, debuted at number two its opening weekend and grossed nearly $50 million in the United States. Its sound track also went platinum. Duff quit the franchise soon after the film’s release, when Disney refused to meet her price on a new contract. She has subsequently attempted, with mixed success, to re-create that empire on her own. For its part, Disney simply replicated Lizzie’s formula with a new “property,” former Cosby kid Raven-Symoné: filming sixty-five episodes of her equally inoffensive show, That’s So Raven, in rapid succession—before the star could age—then airing them at leisure (not to mention ad nauseam). There was the now-familiar tsunami of merchandise. The hit movies included The Cheetah Girls, based on a series of books about four high schoolers who start a band (Raven starred as the lead singer, Galleria, a word that, as it happens, means “shopping mall”). As Disney Channel’s first original musical, The Cheetah Girls not only launched its own ginormous juggernaut but laid the groundwork for the eventual monolith High School Musical.

  Then came Hannah. For those of you who may have spent the last decade on planet Romulus, Hannah Montana is a sitcom about a girl with a secret: Miley Stewart (played by Miley Cyrus, who took on the role at age thirteen) is an ordinary teen by day, but by night she becomes—a POP STAR! Only her best friends know the truth; everyone else is miraculously fooled by the Barbie-blond wig she wears onstage. Apparently, in Miley Stewart’s world—unlike Miley Cyrus’s—there are no paparazzi with telephoto lenses camped outside celebrities’ homes, no journalists asking annoying questions, no Internet gossips analyzing their every move or circulating incriminating cell phone pics (one nosey parker reporter does catch up to her in the Hannah Montana movie, only to be won over by her cornpone charm). Miley Stewart’s father and minder/manager is played by Billy Ray Cyrus, who—wait for it—is Miley Cyrus’s real-life father and minder/manager! (He’s also the mullet-haired impresario behind the song “Achy Breaky Heart.”) Hannah Montana debuted in March 2006; as of this writing, it boasted a reported 200 million viewers globally. The album Hannah Montana 2/Meet Miley Cyrus spent twelve consecutive weeks in Billboard’s top five, the first double album to do so since Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life in 1977. Tickets for Miley/Hannah’s 2007 seventy-city Best of Both Worlds Tour sold out within minutes; some were later scalped for thousands of dollars. The limited-release 3-D film of the event earned the highest per screen box-office average ever and went on to gross $70 million; a year later, Hannah Montana: The Movie pulled in more than $155 million worldwide. The amount of stuff with Hannah/Miley’s face on it rivals that of all the animated princesses combined. Toys “R” Us even sells Hannah Montana hand sanitizer. According to Portfolio magazine, Cyrus is on track to be worth $1 billion by her eighteenth birthday (eat her dust, Duff ).

  Hannah’s appeal is obvious: she is the fresh-faced girl next door with just enough gumption to make her interesting to kids but not so much as to be threatening to parents. Fans love her wardrobe and bouncy girl-power-lite lyrics; and, for the most part, the songs don’t make adults’ ears bleed. Hannah is by no means perfect: the show filters its sunny lessons (usually some version of “be yourself”) through the lens of celebrity, subtly suggesting that famousness itself is the greatest possible achievement—even as it denies that is the case. Clarissa and Lizzie were comparatively real—or at least real-esque—teens, closer to the ones that graced the small screen back in the day when you had to stand up to change the channel. In that bygone era, Marcia Brady was ashamed to have her boyfriend see her in braces. These days, Hannah Montana, hired as the face of an international campaign for acne cream, is horrified to discover a zit has been Photoshopped onto her billboard-sized forehead. Both characters eventually learn that “looks aren’t everything,” yet the package that lesson is wrapped in could not be more different (and, for the record, Hannah/Miley, who has her own clothing line at Walmart, notably hedges on that moral, telling her best friend, “Looks are important, but they’re not everything”).

  But maybe in a celebrity-saturated world, that is mere quibbling. Better Hannah Montana than the Pussycat Dolls, aimed at the same demographic, who gyrate to lyrics such as “Don’t cha wish your girlfriend was a freak like me.” Hannah, like the animated princesses, is, more or less, blandly unobjectionable. Her chirpy, if insipid, wholesomeness acts as an assurance to parents—just like playing princess—that our little girls are still little girls. Until, that is, they are not.

  The thing is, as Maurice Chevalier once chortled, little girls grow bigger every day. Child stars have always been pesky that way, and how to handle their inevitable maturation has been a perpetual challenge for the entertainment industry. Even Shirley Temple had to grow up: by the time she had reached age eleven, Fox had terminated her studio contract, effectively putting her out to pasture. Although she subsequently made a few small films, she never reclaimed her childhood success and, to her credit, gracefully exited the business by age twenty-one. Around the same time, MGM forced the sixteen-year-old Judy Garland to bind her breasts for her role as little Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz (the blue gingham pattern on her dress was also chosen to obscure her womanly figure). In the early 1960s, Annette Funicello, who famously “blossomed” during her stint as an original Disney Mouseketeer, defied Mr. Disney by donning a navel-baring swimsuit in the “Beach Party” movies; though she was twenty-one at the time, her rebellion sparked a scandal.

  It may be all well and good for today’s pop princesses to play the G-rated role model at fourteen or fifteen, but by sixteen it no longer feels so sweet: adulthood looms. How can those self- proclaimed paragons prove to the world that they are grown? How can they leave their Snow White reputations behind? What guidance can they offer to their carefully cultivated legions of idolizing prepubescent fans? The answer has become so familiar that it seems almost written into the script. They cast off their values by casting off their clothes. Hilary Duff appeared almost in the buff on the cover of Maxi
m magazine (as did Clarissa’s Melissa Joan Hart—who, by then better known for Sabrina, was touted by the lad mag as “your favorite witch without a stitch”). So many photos of the scantily clad Vanessa Hudgens, High School Musical’s “good girl,” have circulated on the Internet that she has been accused of posting them herself to earn some adult street cred. In the video for her breakout hit, “Dirrty,” Christina Aguilera, another former Mouseketeer, stepped into a boxing ring clad in a bra, red thong, and ass-baring chaps: “Shake a little somethin’ (on the floor) I need that, uh, to get me off,” she sang to a roaring crowd, feigning (I hope) masturbation and, later, simulating intercourse with half-naked greased-up men. I Know Who Killed Me, a film starring the postadolescent Lindsay Lohan, whom the critic Roger Ebert had once compared to Jodie Foster, was declared by the New York Post to be “a sleazy, inept and worthless piece of torture porn.” Lohan, who admitted to drug use in Vanity Fair (note to child stars: do not let yourself be profiled by that magazine), has also taken several spins through the revolving door of rehab and cannot seem to keep track of either her panties or her court-mandated alcohol-monitoring bracelet. In the summer of 2010, she was sentenced to a brief, highly publicized jail term after violating probation for a DUI.