Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture, Let kids be kids, pink princess culture camd
Posted December 31st, 2011, in Boys and Girls, Creepy Marketing, Equal Parenting, Princesses, Recommendations, Why I Wrote CAMD | 19 Comments
In the wake of my recent NY Times editorial on nature, nurture, gender and the new Lego Friends line, a reader sent me this photo of the gifts she and her husband gave their 5-year-old son this Christmas: her husband’s old Lincoln Log and Tinker Toy sets. He was born in 1972. He (the husband/father) was born in 1972. The Tinkertoys package explicitly states, “For boys and girls.” And note the girl happily building a ranch on the cover of the Lincoln Logs! Their son’s response: “I didn’t know these were for girls, too!” Point made (my point, that is). FYI, you can still get gender-neutral Lincoln Logs (with pictures of cabins on the box, no kids shown). But there is also this set: Again, necessary? Why? How does it affect the potential for boys and girls to interact? Play together? Is it relegating girls to pink and pretty [...]
Tags: age compression, CAMD, Disney, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted December 14th, 2011, in Princesses, Recommendations Girls, Why I Wrote CAMD | 39 Comments
Did Disney blink in releasing its new “age-appropriate” Sofia the First princess character and TV show? If Sofia is deemed “just right” for preschoolers, after all, wouldn’t that mean the now re-labeled “adult” princesses…aren’t? Yet for the past ten years, the Princess concept has been sold (and sold and sold) to the exact same demographic with the Disney assurance that they are “developmentally appropriate,” ”safe,” and imparting good values. No more. Sofia, they assure us, won’t be about romantic fantasy. She won’t need a prince to make her happy, a message that, according to one report Disney recognizes as a “legitimate worry” for parents and a “bad message for little girls.” Yet when I spoke with Disney execs while reporting Cinderella Ate My Daughter, they poo-pooed my concern, insisting that the romantic story lines and passive heroines of “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Little Mermaid” etc.–which, again, they were shilling to the very same preschool girls they now [...]
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