Am I now supposed to shrug and forget all that? If trafficking in stereotypes doesn’t matter at 3, when does it matter? At 6? Eight? Thirteen? I’ve spent much of my career writing about experiences that undermine girls’ well-being, warning parents that a preoccupation with body and beauty (encouraged by films, TV, magazines and, yes, toys) is perilous to their daughters’ mental and physical health. More to the point, when my own girl makes her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom - something I’m convinced she does largely to torture me - I worry about what playing Little Mermaid is teaching her. I wonder if they’d concede so readily to sons who begged for combat fatigues and mock AK-47s.
What happened to William wanting a doll and not dressing your cat in an apron? Whither Marlo Thomas? I watch my fellow mothers, women who once swore they’d never be dependent on a man, smile indulgently at daughters who warble “So This Is Love” or insist on being called Snow White. Among other phrases the bilingual doll utters: “Vámonos! Let’s go to fairy-tale land!” and “Will you brush my hair?”Īs a feminist mother - not to mention a nostalgic product of the Garanimals era - I have been taken by surprise by the princess craze and the girlie-girl culture that has risen around it. Pink, it seems, is the new gold.Įven Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, has 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. Shortly before that, Mary Drolet, a Chicago-area mother and former Claire’s and Montgomery Ward executive, opened Club Libby Lu, now a chain of mall stores based largely in the suburbs in which girls ages 4 to 12 can shop for “Princess Phones” covered in faux fur and attend “Princess-Makeover Birthday Parties.” Saks bought Club Libby Lu in 2003 for $12 million and has since expanded it to 87 outlets by 2005, with only scant local advertising, revenues hovered around the $46 million mark, a 53 percent jump from the previous year. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers. Meanwhile in 2001, Mattel brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home décor and myriad other products. “Princess,” as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls’ franchise on the planet. There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. Sales at Disney Consumer Products, which started the craze six years ago by packaging nine of its female characters under one royal rubric, have shot up to $3 billion, globally, this year, from $300 million in 2001. To call princesses a “trend” among girls is like calling Harry Potter a book. “What’s wrong with princesses?”ĭiana may be dead and Masako disgraced, but here in America, we are in the midst of a royal moment. My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”
She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess” ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal” made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office - one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games - where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam.
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