Tags: girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization
Posted November 30th, 2011, in Creepy Marketing, Why I Wrote CAMD | 23 Comments
The very first blog post I ever wrote was about the Mindware catalog’s spa science kit and its not-so-tacit message to little girls. As I go around the country giving talks I now show a series of pictures from similar “science kits for girls” (which are flooding the market) to illustrate how they’re designed less to teach interest in that subject than to cultivate an obsession with beauty and consumerism. Janet Stemwedel at Scientific American just wrote a great blog post about this. She talks, for instance, about this–yet another ”Spa Science” kit: …the packaging here strikes me as selling the need for beauty product more emphatically than any underlying scientific explanations of how they work. Does a ten-year-old need an oatmeal mask? (If so, why only ten-year-old girls? Do not ten-year-old boys have pores and sebaceous glands?) …Maybe the Barbie-licious artwork is intended to convey that even very “girly” girls can find some element of [...]
Tags: age compression, girlie girl culture, Let kids be kids, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization
Posted November 18th, 2011, in Creepy Marketing, Princesses, Why I Wrote CAMD | 7 Comments
By now you’ve all heard about the Colorado mall store “Kids and Teens” that was selling crotchless thong panties for 7-year-olds (in addition to everything else, how does a crotchless thong panty WORK, exactly, I mean engineering-wise? I don’t get it). It’s unfathomable that someone came up with that product. It’s unfathomable that some buyer in Colorado thought it was, what, cute? A good idea to put in a store? And the store’s abhorrent defense was that it somehow got in there because they also sell items to teens. As if it would be somehow understandable if they were marketing crotchless thong panties (heretofore known as CTP) to your 13-year-old. Or your 15-year-old. Or your 16-year-old. And why should “kids” be shopping in the same store as “teens” to begin with? Is that appropriate? Obviously, this particular incidence of age compression was so far over the line that parents flipped [...]
Tags: CAMD, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd
Posted November 14th, 2011, in Princesses, Why I Wrote CAMD | 20 Comments
Somehow I missed last spring’s report from the commission on undergraduate women’s leadership at Princeton. It seems one of the more important and damning pieces of research on gender to come out in a while. Was there a huge fuss and I was so busy with post-book publication that I missed it? Or maybe it came out during the two weeks I was out of the country. Anyway, here’s the deal: over the last ten years, for the first time in the history of the university as a co-educational institution, there has been a significant decline in the number of female students holding major campus leadership positions–something that, as the report’s authors note, is not unique to Princeton. Plenty of elite colleges have taken their turn in the spotlight for their hostile environments towards women. (Yale, for instance, and MIT, which has undertaken a series of reports on the status [...]
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