Cinderella Ate My Daughter (6 page)

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, had 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?

W
hen 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.

Why such rancor? It wasn’t as if Pop’s parents were physically reassigning their child’s sex. Nor were they dictating Pop’s choice of toys or clothing. Besides, banning dolls and insisting a girl play solely with trucks is hardly an exercise in equality. Quite the contrary: it disparages the feminine, signals that boys’ traditional toys and activities are superior to girls’. Leaving that misconstrual aside, however, this was not the first time I’d heard the cautionary tale of the over-the-top mother forcing trucks on her despairing daughter in the name of feminism. Always attributed to “a friend of a friend,” it invariably ended with—triumphant drumroll, please!—the girl swaddling and bottle-feeding her truck “babies” (though if conventionally feminine toys were verboten, how did the girls get the bottles anyhow?). It has always smacked to me of urban legend, like the story about poisonous spiders under airplane toilet seats or cell phones sparking fires in gas stations: something that
seems
as though it ought to be true because it confirms our suspicions about the unnatural consequences that will result from meddling with the natural order of things. Either way, it illustrates how fully biological determinism has come roaring back into fashion.

Doing the math, I realized that the journalists who were most outraged by Pop were the ones who would’ve been the daughters—metaphorically or literally—of 1970s feminists, girls who had been stuffed into endless pairs of shapeless overalls (which in itself would scar a person for life). Their moms had doubtless been well meaning, but their ideals were misguided. And boring. And they backfired: there was no way all those Carries, Terris, Randis, and Jos were going to inflict that neutered femininity on their daughters. When they had children, then—which coincided with marketers’ discovery of the power of microsegmentation by age and sex—they were primed, eager, to embrace the new “postfeminist” girlie-girl. They were beyond the notion of “gender-free” childhood; they no longer needed to squash kids’ inborn preferences in the name of equality, they could
vive la différence
as Mama N. intended. Good-bye, X; hello, Cinderella.

It is impossible—or at the very least unwise—to explore the culture of girlhood without confronting the question of “nature or nurture” head-on. There
have
to be innate differences between the sexes, right? How else to explain the Machiavellian manipulations of three-year-old girls or the perpetual motion of preschool boys? How else to understand the male attraction to all things that roll or the female fascination with faces? For most of us, such beliefs are a matter of life experience, grounded in instinct and personal observation rather than a bibliography of double-blind studies. I wanted to know whether there was really
something essential and immutable about maleness and femaleness. Are boys and girls destined to be miniature Martians and Venusians? Or are they more like Canadians and Americans: mostly alike except for some weird little quirks, such as how they pronounce the word “about”? And even if the latter turns out to be true and the disparities are minimal, how much—if at all—do we really want to mess with them; how much do we want our children to be products of social engineering? As long as we don’t consider the behaviors and interests of one sex as
inferior
to the other’s, who cares? Does gender segregation matter, for either the good or the ill? What, I wondered, could science tell me about the stubbornly separate cultures of boys and girls?

To begin to answer those questions, I consulted Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of
Pink Brain, Blue Brain
, a fascinating book for which she sifted through more than a thousand studies comparing males’ and females’ brains and behaviors. She was kind enough to offer me a quick remedial lesson in biology. Male fetuses, she explained, are bathed in testosterone in the womb; that signals the reproductive organs to do the guy thing. There is another hormonal spike shortly after birth. Boy babies also tend to be larger (both their brains and bodies) and somewhat fussier than girls and are more vulnerable to illness. For the most part, however, at least in the beginning, the behavior and interests of the two sexes are nearly indistinguishable. Both go gaga over the same toys: until they’re about a year old, they are equally attracted to dolls; and until they’re around three, they show the same interest in actual babies. In other words, regardless of how we dress them or decorate their rooms, when they are tiny, children do not know from pink and blue.

Then the whole concept of labeling kicks in—sometime between the ages of two and three they realize that there is this thing called “boy” and this thing called “girl” and something important differentiates them. But whatever, they wonder, could that be? There is a legendary story about a four-year-old boy named Jeremy, the son of a psychology professor at Cornell, who wore his favorite barrettes to school one day. “You’re a
girl
,” one of his classmates said accusingly, but the boy stood firm. No, he explained, he was a boy because he had a penis and testicles. The other child continued to taunt him. Finally, exasperated, Jeremy pulled down his pants to prove his point. His tormentor merely shrugged. “
Everyone
has a penis,” he said. “Only girls wear barrettes.” (Jeremy, incidentally, is probably well into his forties by now and, I imagine, wishes people would stop repeating this anecdote.)

The point is, the whole penis-vagina thing does not hold quite the same cachet among the wee ones as it does among us. Yet if toting the standard equipment is not what makes you male or female, exactly what does?

Well,
duh
, it’s barrettes.

At least that’s what kids think: it is your clothing, hairstyle, toy choice, favorite color. Slippery stuff, that. You can see how perilously easy it would be to err: if you wore pink or your mom cut your hair too short, you might inadvertently switch sex. It could happen: until around age five kids don’t fully realize that their own identities (not to mention their anatomies) are fixed. Before that, as far as they’re concerned, you could grow up to be either a mommy or a daddy. And they don’t understand that other people’s sex stays the same despite superficial changes—that a man who puts on a dress is still a man—until as late as age seven. “In general, the concept of permanence is hard for children to grasp,” Eliot said. “The prefrontal cortex of the brain is what looks to the future, and that’s the slowest part to develop. Another example would be death: young children have a very hard time understanding that a pet or a person they love who has died is gone forever. They may listen to what you say and seem to get it, but secretly they believe it can change.”

It makes sense, then, that to ensure you will stay the sex you were born you’d adhere rigidly to the rules as you see them and hope for the best. That’s why four-year-olds, who are in what is called “the inflexible stage,” become the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police. Suddenly the magnetic lure of the Disney Princesses became more clear to me: developmentally speaking, they were genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to
prove
they are girls, when they will latch onto the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to stridently shore up their femininity.

Initially, as a parent, I found this came as a bit of a relief. The pod princess that had taken over my daughter’s body did not represent a personal failure on my part; it was entirely unrelated to anything I did or did not do, wear, or say. I couldn’t even blame it on her preschool classmates. Her extremism, it turns out, was natural, something kids will and, apparently, should go through. At the same time, that left me in a quandary: Did that mean my battle to minimize the pink and the pretty had been misguided? Worse than that, was it actually harmful? I flashed on a trip to the grocery store—the O.K. Corral of our Disney Princess showdowns. Daisy had pointed to a Cinderella sippy cup. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she had shouted.

“Mmm-hmm,” I’d said noncommittally.

“Why don’t you like her, Mama?” she had asked. “Don’t you like her blue dress?”

I’d had to admit I did.

She had thought about that. “Then don’t you like her face?”

“Her face is all right,” I’d said, though I was not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Teutonic features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really
do
anything.”

Over the next forty-five minutes, we would run through that conversation, verbatim, approximately thirty-seven million times, as Daisy pointed out Cinderella Band-Aids, Cinderella paper cups, Cinderella cereal boxes, Cinderella pens, Cinderella crayons, and Cinderella notebooks—all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a three-year-old trapped in a shopping cart—as well as a bouquet of Cinderella Mylar balloons bobbing over the checkout line (any day now, I had muttered to myself, they’ll come out with Cinderella tampons). The repetition had been excessive, even for a preschooler. At the time I’d wondered what it was about my answer that confounded her. Now, in retrospect, I fretted: what if, instead of helping her realize “Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control, and power to the people!” my daughter had been thinking “Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?” By forbidding her immersion in Princess products, had I unintentionally communicated that being female (to the extent that Daisy was able to understand it) was a bad thing? Wasn’t there something else she could cling to, some other way she could assert her femininity, besides dousing herself in Sleeping Beauty perfume? In one kindergarten class I read about, for instance, boys hopped to the front of the room to get their milk at snack time; during art, girls skipped to the shelf where paper was kept. Hopping made you a boy, skipping a girl. Anyone who got it “wrong” was subject to ridicule. That may sound absurd, but really, is it any more random than declaring that only girls can wear skirts?

But the Big Kahuna of sex differences, according to Eliot, is toy choice. Boys push cars, girls push strollers. You even see it in primates. In a 2002 study, researchers gave two stereotypically masculine toys (a police car and a ball), two stereotypically feminine toys (a doll and a cooking pot), and two neutral toys (a picture book and a stuffed animal) to forty-four male and forty-four female vervet monkeys. The vervets had never seen the items before and were (obviously) unaware of their connotations. The results? Though males and females were similarly drawn to the neutral items, the males gravitated toward the boy toys, while the females went for the doll and—grrr!—the cooking pot. A fluke? Maybe, but six years later, that finding was replicated by a second group of researchers studying rhesus monkeys. Meanwhile, among us humans, girls who are born with a genetic disorder that causes them to produce high levels of male hormones are more physically active than other girls and favor traditional “boy” toys.