Tags: Disney, fight fun with fun, fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted February 29th, 2012, in Boys and Girls, Equal Parenting, Princesses, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 21 Comments
In today’s Motherlode Emily Rosenbaum struggles with what seems to her to be a contradiction in the how she parents her daughter vs. her sons. The revelation was triggered when her 3-year-old girl returned from the Home Depot (with Emily’s husband) brandishing a Disney Princess light switch plate (in case you’re keeping track: that would be DP item #25,978 of the 26,000+ I mention in CAMD). It probably looked something like this: Emily was furious, but her husband said: You know, you’re reacting just the way I react when Zach wants to buy pink clothes. You should allow her to express herself as much as you let the boys do it. That pulled Emily up short. Turns out their son, Zach, “is the only boy in his second-grade class to regularly rock a pink hoodie and pink socks. Benjamin spent his toddler years dressed as Tinkerbell, and we potty trained him [...]
Tags: Disney, fight fun with fun, fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted February 29th, 2012, in Boys and Girls, Equal Parenting, Princesses, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 6 Comments
Yikes! I just realized I accidentally posted this twice. For the real version please see above. I will also copy the comments from this post into that one. Sorry!
Tags: Disney, fighting back, pink princess culture camd
Posted February 27th, 2012, in Princesses, The Weight of Weight, Why I Wrote CAMD | 4 Comments
Call it another triumph for parent-power (and the power of all those who love kids). The protests that erupted in the wake of Disney’s Feb 3 launch of “Habit Heroes,” an exhibit at Epcot purportedly designed to combat childhood obesity, resulted yesterday in the exhibit’s (and web site’s) reportedly indefinite closure. Here’s what happened: “Habit Heroes,” developed in partnership with Blue Cross and Blue Shield (who should’ve known better) was an interactive series of games in which kids teamed up with animated “heroes”–Will Power and Callie Stenics (get it??)–to defeat “villains” such as And Stink Bomb who is not only fat but has bad hygiene! Lordy, lordy. Let’s pause for a minute and talk about why shaming fat kids is not just mean but ineffective as a weight-loss strategy (just in case you don’t already know): In a letter addressed to blogger Shannon Russell the director of the National [...]
Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture, Let kids be kids
Posted February 23rd, 2012, in Equal Parenting, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups, Why I Wrote CAMD | 1 Comment
A reader named Leslie, whose daughter, Callie’s eloquent letter about Lego’s new “Friends” line was summarily dismissed by that company, just sent me this photo: Callie and her cousins made this Lego “birthday cake” for their grandmother, who is unable to eat the real deal. Here’s the family of girls and women preparing to blow out the candles. I bet they wished for creative, open-ended toys that didn’t stereotype and hyper-segment children. And guess what, Lego? THIS IS WHAT BEAUTIFUL LOOKS LIKE!!!!!!
Tags: age compression, CAMD, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization, princess culture
Posted February 13th, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Princesses, Why I Wrote CAMD | 13 Comments
Last week my publisher ran a contest on my facebook author page in which readers posted examples of the “princess industrial complex” run amok. I could not POSSIBLY choose only three from the bounty posted. So I wheedled an extra couple of books out of my publisher. I wish I could put a winner’s wreath (NOT a crown!) on everyone because each entry illustrated the reach and impact of princess/diva culture on younger and younger girls. You can see all entries by scrolling down the facebook page and hitting “older posts.” Meanwhile, would the winners please email your addresses to my publisher at: Erica.Barmash AT harpercollins.com to claim your prizes!Now, drum roll:GRAND PRIZE (signed copy of CAMD; a copy of Girls Like Us and a Harpercollins book tote): For Illustrating How Bombardment By Princess Products has Undermined Little Girls’ Imaginations and Flattened their Individuality: Beth Tischler Becker. When the children in [...]
Tags: fighting back
Posted February 5th, 2012, in Fairy Tales, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 10 Comments
Before being co-opted by Uncle Walt (and, for that matter, the Brothers Grimm), the medieval, European fairy tales were a women’s medium, an oral tradition shared over long hours of repetitive work, such as spinning (that’s where “spinsters” comes from…). The tales were the entertainment of their day: the movies, the TV, even the porn (did you really think that Rapunzel and the Prince just talked in that tower?). The Grimms recorded the tales of their time and place, but as their compendium went through a variety of reprints–and as the stories became aimed at children–the brothers took out the sex (especially the pervasiveness of incest as the motivation for a heroine’s flight) and amped up the violence. They figured, like many of the day, that scaring the beejezus out of kids would get them to behave. Personally, I love fairy tales and there are those (such as Bruno Bettelheim) [...]
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