I ached for Holly and her daughter, for the complicated position they were in. Yet I realized that along with that concern and love I did feel a certain . . . relief. Because, as Holly said, my own daughter is thin. True, she may still someday struggle, but I don’t have to worry that she will be teased about her size on the first day of summer camp. I wish appearance did not matter so much, that it did not confer so much power. But given that it does, I find that I am grateful for hers. Does that make me a hypocrite?
Women. Beauty. Power. Body. The ideas and images remain so muddled, so contradictory; how to disentangle them for our girls? By the end of kindergarten, Daisy had, blessedly, exited the Disney Princess phase. “The princesses are just, like”—she struck a “lovely Carol Merrill” pose and simpered—“ ‘I’m so pretty, Handsome Prince, won’t you rescue me?’ ” Later she added, “All Sleeping Beauty ever does is sleep.”
I admit to feeling a smidge of guilt (along with pride) at that pronouncement, because it was a reasonable approximation of what I had been drilling into her head for three years—but then again, if Disney could try to brainwash my child, I suppose I could, too. At any rate, I waited anxiously for what might come next: would I be moaning over Monster High? Were we bound for Tinker Bell’s Pixie Hollow, a realm of moralistic nice girl/mean girl dynamics? Would I have to decide whether to empty my wallet for that full-on American Girl rig (I had been sorely tempted by a newly introduced historical doll, a Russian-Jewish girl from the early twentieth century, whose accessories included a $68 “Sabbath set”)? Instead, she surprised me: for her sixth birthday, she asked for a Wonder Woman costume.
Finally, a stage I could get with! I was even willing to up the ante: why stop at Wonder Woman? I trolled eBay for action figures of Hawkgirl and Big Barda (a superheroine from the 1970s who defends her milquetoast husband). I scored a PVC-free Supergirl lunch box. I searched YouTube for snippets of the short-lived animated Spider-Woman TV series from 1980. Yes, it gave me pause that the lunch box was pink, that, given her druthers, Big Barda preferred housewifery to crime fighting, and that all of the superheroines have the proportions of Kim Kardashian—more mammary than muscle. It disappointed me, though did not surprise, when Daisy declined a friend’s offer of a Wonder Woman from his bobblehead collection: the head was too big for the body, she explained to me later, and the face was, well, kind of butch (my word, not hers). On the other extreme, she was so appalled by Hawkgirl’s excessive assets that she never took the toy out of the box. And one day while drawing Supergirl, who wears a miniskirt and a crop top, she mused, “Sometimes girl superheroes show their belly buttons. I don’t know why.” So I hadn’t exactly succeeded in finding a strong feminine image that wasn’t idealized or sexualized, but how far was I willing to push it? Maybe the message that power does not play without the pretty will mess her up in ten years, but right now, I needed something to say yes to; like so many moms, I was willing to compromise to find some mutually acceptable middle ground.
Besides, I figured there were intriguing possibilities in this new phase. Little girls may have more real-life role models than they used to, more examples of how to be in the world, but they have precious few larger-than-life heroes, especially in the all-important realm of fantasy, where they spend so much of their free time. It’s true, as we’ve seen, that the research on gender and play indicates (with the big blinking caveats that there are vast variations within, as opposed to between, the sexes and that nature is heavily influenced by nurture) that little boys are more readily drawn to competitive, rough-and-tumble games, while little girls (again, big blinking caveat, see above) strive for group harmony over individual dominance. But all that aside, let’s face it, the options for girls have not exactly been compelling. Who can even remember Batgirl’s secret identity? (She was Barbara Gordon, the commissioner’s daughter—or, in some versions, his niece.) And, with all due respect, Wonder Woman’s invisible airplane is . . . how to put this delicately—lame compared with the gleam of a Batmobile. Still, I think superhero play, when it is not overdetermined by the Justice League script, has something specific to offer girls, something beyond an outlet for aggression or even the satisfaction (similar to Bettelheim’s claims for fairy tales) of gaining control in an arbitrary world.
I went through a brief Wonder Woman phase myself in the early 1970s. Even then I could not have told you much about the character’s backstory, but I didn’t care: all I knew was that I had an excuse to fasten a towel around my neck with a clothespin and climb onto the roof of a friend’s garage. The distance to the next building was slightly longer than my leggy child’s stride, yet I took a deep breath and leapt—screaming “Wonder Woman! Wonder Woman!”—my towel cape streaming behind me. In that moment of flight, soaring between the two rooftops, I felt—no, I knew I was—invincible; the sensation was equal parts exhilarating and frightening. What might I dare to do next? What else was possible?
As a writer, I have revisited that memory in my work more often than any other. It was so different from my typical, earthbound play, and the emotions it elicited were so unfamiliar—feelings of freedom, of power. And isn’t that ultimately the superhero’s task: coming to grips with the gifts and challenges of power—accepting it, demanding it, wielding it wisely, grappling with moral choices about the nature of might and goodness? Those themes, so rarely explored in the culture of little girls, would seem particularly relevant given the complexities women can still face as leaders. Consider a 2007 survey of 1,231 executives in the United States and Europe, ominously subtitled Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don’t. Conducted by Catalyst, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of women in business, it found that female managers who behave consistently with gender stereotypes—prioritizing “work relationships” and expressing “concern for other people’s perspectives”—were liked but considered to be ineffective. Those who were seen as behaving in a more “male” fashion, on the other hand—who “act assertively, focus on work task, display ambition”—were seen as competent but roundly disliked. I was tempted, initially, to dismiss that as a generational issue, something that would take care of itself as old-timers aged out of the workforce. Except that, according to a 2008 J. Walter Thompson report, “Millennial Women Face Gender Issues,” 40 percent of men in their twenties still say they would prefer a male over a female boss. Nor, when you think about it, have the wildly different connotations of Superman and Superwoman changed over time: the former is mysterious, admirable; the latter is hectic, harried, a woman who does too much and none of it well. That is not something I would want for myself or my girl. Besides, really, how many of us would like to be referred to as the Woman of Steel?
I was mulling over those disparities one sunny Saturday morning as Daisy and I strolled along Berkeley’s Fourth Street on our way to our favorite breakfast joint, passing boutiques that sold handcrafted Japanese paper, diaphanous Stevie Nicks–inspired frocks, wooden toys imported from Europe. This was a few weeks before the 2008 Democratic primaries. Daisy spied a bumper sticker plastered on a mailbox: a yellow caricature of Hillary Clinton leering out from a black background. Big block letters proclaimed THE WICKED WITCH OF THE EAST IS ALIVE AND LIVING IN NEW YORK.
“Look, Mama,” Daisy said, excitedly. “That’s Hillary. What does it say?” What should I have told her? It’s not that I thought that Senator Clinton was a victim—she often gave as good as she got. So it was not the attack that disturbed me so much as the form it took, the default position of incessant, even gleeful misogyny toward an unapologetically assertive (even aggressive) high-achieving woman. Contemplating the months of LIFE’S A BITCH, DON’T VOTE FOR ONE T-shirts, the silver-plated thighs of the Hillary nutcrackers (Woman of Steel!), the comparison to the bunny-boiling Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction, I had often wondered whether Clinton was a symbol of how far we’d come as women or how far we had to go. Was she proof to my girl that “you can do anything” or of the hell that will rain down on you if you try? Was she a
Wonder Woman or more like the hundred-plus superheroines listed on the Web site womeninrefrigerators.com—so named because they had all been depowered, raped, driven insane, or chopped up and stuffed in a refrigerator? Damned if you do, doomed if you don’t indeed.
Nothing so horrific happened to then-Senator Clinton (though Republican presidential candidate John McCain did respond, “Excellent question!” to someone at a campaign event who asked, “How do we beat the bitch?”); still, analysis of her actual policies was dwarfed by chatter—among both Republicans and Democrats, men as well as women—about the senator’s hair, the pitch of her voice, the thickness of her ankles, her “likability,” her relative femininity. Rush Limbaugh declared that Americans didn’t want to watch a woman grow old in the White House. The journalist Christopher Hitchens called her an “aging and resentful female.” Writing in the anthology Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary, the novelist Susanna Moore wished that Clinton were more sensuous. And then there was the real debate: over her pantsuits. In a typical swipe, The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan wrote, “The mind . . . strays from more pressing concerns to ponder the sartorial: How many pantsuits does Hillary Clinton have in her closet?” There may have been a host of legitimate reasons to support Barack Obama over Clinton, but among them seemed to be that she was not young, pretty, slim, or stylish enough to represent the nation.
That was certainly not the case for the inexperienced-but-babelicious Sarah Palin, whom McCain chose as his running mate. Never mind that as governor of Alaska, she used her position to pursue personal vendettas, hired cronies to fill vacant posts, and fired officials who crossed her. Or that in an interview with CBS news anchor Katie Couric, she was unable to name a single periodical she read regularly to stay informed. Or that, when asked by CNBC, she could not describe the job of the vice president. Palin had been dubbed “America’s Hottest Governor,” and that propelled her forward. In the weeks after her nomination, top Internet searches involving her name included “Sarah Palin Vogue,” “Sarah Palin bikini,” and “Sarah Palin naked.” As with Clinton, the former beauty queen’s appearance—her clothing, glasses, and hairstyles (not to mention how much they cost)—seemed as relevant to her leadership potential as her policies. How were girls supposed to interpret that?
I know it is not the 1950s. It’s not even the 1970s. Women are university presidents, governors, surgeons, titans of industry—even if not in the numbers one would wish or expect. Yet though we tell little girls “You can be anything you want to be,” we know, from life experience, that that is still not quite true. At least not without a price. It’s not as if when Daisy was three and announced that she wanted to be a firefighter I chimed in with “Honey, that’s great, but last week I read an article about a woman at a firehouse in Austin, Texas, who came to work after a big promotion to find that her male coworkers had smeared her locker with human excrement.” Still, as my daughter waited expectantly for me to read that bumper sticker, I did wonder how much to tell her—and when—about the tensions that persist around women and power.
Not surprisingly, friends have given Daisy a library full of “girl-positive” picture books designed to address this very issue. But, as with the “feminist” princess tales, I find I rarely pull them out—not only because they seem a tad spinachy but because they often undermine their own cause. Take Elenita, a magic realist tale about a Mexican girl who wants to be a glassblower. Her father says she can’t do it: she is too little, and besides, the trade is forbidden to women. The lesson, naturally, is that with a little ingenuity girls can be glassblowers or stevedores or [fill in the blank]. Nice. Still, I found myself hesitating over the “girls can’t” section. Daisy had never heard that “girls can’t be” or “girls can’t do,” whether glassblowers, firefighters, or baseball players. Why should I plant the idea in her head only to knock it down? Even my treasured Free to Be You and Me, rather than teaching Daisy that William deserves a doll and mommies are people, merely confused her. “What’s a sissy?” she asked me as we listened to “Dudley Pippin.” And, later, during a sketch in which one newborn baby (voiced by Mel Brooks) is trying to convince another (Marlo Thomas) that he is the girl, “Why did that baby just say that girls can’t keep secrets?” Overt discrimination and stereotyping may be less pervasive than when I was a child, but how can I explain—and gird her against—the subtler kinds that remain?
Daisy’s birthday falls in the middle of summer. So from the end of July all the way through Labor Day, she happily zipped around the backyard swinging her lasso of truth and repelling bullets with her golden bracelets, upholding the forces of justice. Then school started, and within a few weeks I found her Wonder Woman gear balled up behind her dress-up bin. I asked what had happened, and she shrugged.
“None of the other girls want to play superheroes,” she said.
They don’t? I asked. Really?
“Not for very long, anyway,” she hedged. “Mostly they just want to play princess.” She looked dolefully up at me.
Suddenly I recalled the other part of the superhero story—that the gift of power elevates but also isolates. That’s fine if you are a comic book character, not so much if you are a six-year-old girl. Now, I don’t know if what she said was entirely true—her female classmates were hardly a bunch of pink-bots—but it didn’t matter: that was her perception. This is the kind of thing all the books about raising smart, strong girls fail to mention. Frequently, after I have given a lecture on the topic myself, someone has commented, “My daughter does speak up and stand up for herself, and she doesn’t wear trampy clothes or caked-on makeup. And do you know what she gets called? A bitch.” To which I nod sympathetically and say, “If you don’t toe the line, whether you are a girl or an adult woman, you do risk being punished. But you have to believe she will ultimately be better off.” Now I realized what cold comfort that was. No one wants her child to be the sacrificial lamb to a cause. No one wants her daughter to feel excluded by her peers, to be ostracized for having the wrong clothes, hair, or pop preferences. No one wants her daughter to be caricatured on a bumper sticker. If Holly’s daughter, Ava, did not fit the feminine ideal by chance, my daughter seemed to be rejecting it by choice. That was what I had wanted, right? For her to share my values, accept my wisdom? Yet I wondered where it would lead her.
In their insightful book Packaging Girlhood, Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown write that the culture ultimately offers a girl two models for female identity. She can be “for the boys”—dress for them, perform sexually for them, play the supportive friend or girlfriend. Or she can be “one of the boys,” an outspoken, feisty girl who hangs with the guys and doesn’t take shit. The latter starts out as the kindergarten girl who is “independent and can think for herself.” That would be my daughter. The trouble is, Brown and Lamb say, being “one of the boys” is as restrictive as the other option, in part because it discourages friendship with other girls: a girl who is “one of the boys” separates herself from her female peers, puts them down, is ashamed or scornful of anything associated with conventional femininity.
I was already seeing inklings of that attitude from Daisy. In kindergarten, her best friends were all male; she was sometimes the only girl at a birthday party. That was fine, but she also turned down a playdate with a female classmate, dismissing her as “too pinkie-pink.” While looking for sandals online, she rejected pair after pair as too pretty/flowery/pink/girlie. She finally found some flip-flops to her liking in the boys’ section (with a supersecret maze embedded in the outsole!). I appreciated the critique of the footwear industry, but her disdain made me uneasy: I thought back to our conversation several years before in the grocery store, when I had tried to explain my aversion to Cinderella. Had my worst fears during that episode come to pass? Rather than becoming more conscious of manipulation, had she instead learned that the things associated with girls—and by extension being a girl itself—were bad? Was the long-term impact of pinkness—all those one-off Scrabble boards and skatebo
ards—to divide girls against themselves? Certainly, I didn’t want her to think that all things snips ’n’ snails—like, gulp, superheroes?—were superior. It was one thing to reject the image of girlhood being sold to her, another to reject girls who might embrace it. All I had wanted was to offer her a sense of worth as a girl that was not contingent on the cut of her clothes, a femininity grounded in something other than the bathroom mirror. Still, I had wanted her to stay allied with other girls. There had to be something like that out there, right?
For a moment, back in the early 1990s—before Britney, before Miley, before Princess and Bratz—it looked as if there might be. It is hard to recall now, but the idea of linking the word “girl” with “power” seemed minimally implausible and to most a contradiction in terms. Yet, launched by the punk-influenced Riot Grrrl movement (which replaced “girl” with a growling grrrl), “Girl Power” became a dare, a taunt, a primal scream: it was the word “slut” scrawled across the belly of a fleshy, shaved-headed young woman in a miniskirt and combat boots who was passing out hand-printed copies of her ’zine about incest. Set to a beat by bands like Bikini Kill (whose songs included “Suck My Left One”), the movement went alt-rock mainstream with Hole, whose frontwoman, Courtney Love, pioneered the “kinderwhore” look: ripped baby-doll dresses with fishnets, tiny plastic barrettes in badly dyed hair, overdone smeared makeup. The Riot Grrrls rejected market-driven images of femininity. Their cri de coeur, “Revolution Girl Style Now!” was all about female solidarity, self-reliance, and do-it-yourself media. They were not always pretty. They were not always palatable. They were also not for actual girls: although as a thirty-year-old I dug the movement, as a mom—call me old-fashioned—I would not especially want my first-grader “reappropriating” the word “cunt.”
Cinderella Ate My Daughter Page 14