Tags: pink-washing
Posted May 3rd, 2012, in Breast Cancer, Creepy Marketing | 9 Comments
Over the past couple of months, I tried to get a number of editors to bite on this story: the town of Redbank, NJ (which calls itself “hippest town in NJ” thereby, ipso facto, making it not) has painted itself pink “to raise awareness of the importance of breast cancer prevention, detection, and treatment.” I wanted to take apart the whole premise, possibly doing an annotated “memo” of its press release a la Harper’s. Couldn’t get anyone to go for it. I was reminded of the concept again today by Anthony Moro, husband of Rachel Cheetham Moro, the author of The Cancer Culture Chronicles blog (and inspiration to activists everywhere) who died earlier this year of breast cancer. Rachel died in the hospital sponsoring this event. And she would have hated. it. As Anthony writes on the blog, “painting the town pink”: …doesn’t help prevent death from breast cancer. More mammograms don’t [...]
Tags: CAMD, Disney, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted April 24th, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Princesses, Why I Wrote CAMD | 25 Comments
The garden used to be a wholesome place where you could wrest your child away from the tentacles of licensed products, right? No more. the ever-brilliant Rebecca Hains has made me aware of Burpee’s new Disney Princess seeds (oh yes, that’s what I wrote). Needless to say, the ladies only grace flower packets—Mickey, Donald and the rest get vegetables because, as Rebecca notes, “princesses are meant to be gazed on; they are delicate beauties…” Too bad for boys who will now doubtless be expected to reject the flower patch. Meanwhile, Rebecca points out that while regular seeds cost about a buck a pack, The DP ones weigh in at $1.99. That’s quite the royalty tax Disney’s levying ! Then there’s the mark-up accompanying Disney Princess plant labels which cost a whopping $2.97 for 6 while the regular labels are a mere $1.99 for twenty. Rebecca concludes so beautifully [...]
Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted April 24th, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 1 Comment
I’ve been off-line for two weeks which is like two centuries in social media time. Here are some of the things I’ve apparently missed. A reader sent me a photo of Kraft’s Girlz cheese. Beyond the gratuitous sexualization of dairy products…um, cheese pods???? This one is from the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum: So, blue or gray for historical accuracy and pink….for girls? I would hate to have been wearing pink in a field of gray. Seriously, pink Confederate soldier caps? As a 7-year-old, my parents took me to Gettysburg. I happily popped my traditional Union blue soldier hat atop my favorite outfit: a red-and-white striped t-shirt (decorated with a jaunty, patriotic blue anchor), cut-off jean shorts and navy blue sneakers. If my scanner weren’t broken, I’d post a Kodak moment of my brothers and me decked out in our caps, dangling our legs over a cannon, waving Old Glory. [...]
Tags: fight fun with fun, fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization, princess culture
Posted April 5th, 2012, in Boys and Girls, Creepy Marketing, Equal Parenting, Princesses, Why I Wrote CAMD | 29 Comments
I can’t get this new study on preschoolers and outdoor play out of my mind. Initially brought to my attention by KJ Dell’Antonia at Motherlode, it found that roughly half of parents of preschoolers did not take their children outside to play regularly–suggesting that those children are not getting the level of physical activity they need (see KJ’s post for important caveats). But here’s the kicker: parents were 16% more likely to take preschool boys outside than preschool girls. Why? Researchers theorized it was ingrained (and probably unconscious) stereotypes about how much exercise girls need. This sets the stage for sedentariness in adolescence and beyond. Which, I’m guessing, plays into distorted body image and unhealthy dieting. Great for the 60.9 billion dollar diet industry (with its 95% failure rate); not so great for girls. So you know I’m going to loop this back to the Princess Industrial Complex, right? Girls don’t seem to [...]
Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture
Posted March 21st, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups, Why I Wrote CAMD | 4 Comments
Ah, the ironies of our media culture. First the film version of “The Lorax” commercialized anti-consumerism by pimping out its namesake to seventy corporate sponsors (including IHOP pancakes and Mazda cars). Now comes the deluge of “Hunger Games”-inspired products that are so contrary to the books’ message that they seem like a parody. Take the press release I received today: SAVING FACE in The Hunger Games – Best Beauty Solutions to Shed the ‘Tribute Tomboy’ Hi Peggy, Hope you’re doing well! In just two days the world will be watching as Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and the rest of their star-studded cast take center stage in The Hunger Games… so with all the hype surrounding the premiere, I figured you might enjoy this fun story idea! Fighting to the death doesn’t always end pretty (case in point, Glimmer’s notorious tracker jacker scene), but Katniss Everdeen made it look so easy, [...]
Tags: age compression, Barbie, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization, princess culture
Posted March 18th, 2012, in Barbie, Creepy Marketing, Princesses, The Weight of Weight, Why I Wrote CAMD | 17 Comments
Yesterday I posted a link on my facebook page to an article on CNN.com called “Fat is the New Ugly on the Playground,” which featured a few nice quotes by yours truly. In response to the post were comments including the following: Excuse me in my experience fat has always equalled ugly on the playground, ain’t nuthin new here, take it from a former fat kid. ‘Fat’ has always been ugly on the playground, or any where else for that matter! I’m not sure why this is all of a sudden breaking news. Absolutely true. Fat kids—boys as well as girls—have long been tormented, demonized and excluded by their schoolmates. In CAMD I talk about the history of American attitudes towards fat—the reasons it came to be seen as a moral issue, a character flaw; how it became particularly taboo for women whose avoirdupois was once considered sexy. Check out an [...]
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: Disney, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd
Posted January 29th, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Princesses, Why I Wrote CAMD | 9 Comments
Oh my God, Cinderella’s ball gown ate Mulan!!! No!!!!!!! The one Disney “princess” (though she is no princess and never marries a prince) I loved, the one I gave my daughter to stave off the others, the one I scoured ebay to find has been made pink and pouffy! Poor Mulan, this against everything the character stands for! It was bad enough that the old Mulan doll came wearing a hanfu, which, if you’ve seen the movie (as I have, approximately forty million three hundred and seven times) she despised. The hanfu (a Chinese kimono) was how they served her up hoping she’d bring “honor to us all” by being pretty and marrying well. But Mulan didn’t want to do that, even before she snuck off to join the military. She always wanted to be her own person. Anyway, Rebecca Hains, whose book Growing Up With Girl Power just came [...]
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: girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization
Posted November 30th, 2011, in Creepy Marketing, Why I Wrote CAMD | 22 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 [...]
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