Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter is a book I found through a friend on goodreads.com. Cinderella Ate My Daughter as a title made me smirk and drew me in immediately. I devoured the book in about a day and felt it lent weight to a much needed voice.
I highly recommend this book to parents with daughters! I do not recommend,
but insist that grandparents, aunts and uncles read it critically.It is not a secret that society is riddled with sexism and is complex for women and girls alike. The pressure on our daughters at young ages is disgusting and immense, the double standards on our adolescent girls dizzying and the objectification of all females dangerous to their mental and physical health. Being a girl in our lovely American consumer based economy means not merely being a consumer, but being both the consumer and the commodity. We are now the objects we purchase. The implications of this level of objectification are as endless as they are harmful.
The first chapter is "Why I Hoped for a Boy". I felt confident in my purchase upon reading the initial byline. I remembered finding out the sex of my first daughter, I was ecstatic and completely in love. However, the joy of having a daughter changed with time.
I love my daughter, I am still ecstatic to have her, I would not trade her for a boy, but the complexity of raising her has proved to be exhausting and even depressing - seeing the world that is waiting for her. I was shocked how quickly that world descended on us too. Within the first couple years I saw friends, relatives and strangers react to her as they might to a dog, not a tiny human. The comments/compliments were always targeted at her appearance. The gifts always targeted at dressing the female role or the toys reinforced the same limited concept of girl as princess. Though she displayed discomfort with being hugged and patted she was grabbed, hugged and even pet like a dog - much to my mortification. As both my girls have gotten older I have held out hope things would get better, instead they are complimented even more on their looks, their clothes, and still not treated with the same boundaries and respect as boys their age. What has gone wrong in our society that I might as well have given birth to a cat/dog or bunny rabbit than a communicative, intelligent human being with talents beyond pretend play and hugging?
Often the fault lies in the concept that my daughters exists for the world and not for themselves. A concept so engrained in culture it is simply understood, that girls are meant to look at and made out to be objects for others pleasure. Girls are to oogle and fondle. Perhaps that seems crass. But as a mother, I get sick of the puppy dog crap.
I need my daughters to rely on their talents, intelligence, hard work, goals and teach them how to navigate a world that will want from them in the same way they want from products they purchase – like TVs and computers. My girls need to understand to have strict boundaries, which start with a strict sense of self and confidence to stand up to a world that will aim to violate the boundaries, sense of self and confidence with its own demands. They need to know that despite what society tells them they are not here to please others, but to find autonomy and please themselves.
This book really hits the nail on the head addressing major issues that young girls face and the problems in society with how they are viewed. Orenstein's book covers topics of the history of how advertising/marketing have begun to define the boundaries of gender specific play, toys and even roles that define female identity, as well as, covering the various effects of Disney's princess power house and preteen pop star products and the preteens eventual melt downs.
Quoting Orenstien directly, "As I immersed myself in the research for this book, I began to trace a line from the innocence of Cinderella to the struggles Miley Cyrus has faced in trying to 'age up,' which in turn was connected to how regular girls present themselves on Facebook (where identity itself becomes a performance, crafted in response to your audience of 322 BFFs). It seemed that even as new educational and professional opportunities unfurled before my daughter and her peers, so did the path that encouraged them to equate identity with image, self-expression with appearance, femininity with performance, pleasure with pleasing, and sexuality with sexualization."
This book is not just a good read, but it is an important one. Many of these concepts are not necessarily new to me. Instead the book lends itself to a much needed voice. A cry that maybe we are failing our daughters, sisters, wives and mothers. Women are not objects and raising a daughter to see themselves as one is dangerous. "We need to pay more, rather than less, attention to what’s happening in their world. According to the American Psychological Association, the emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness at ever-younger ages is increasing girls’ vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: eating disorders, negative body image, depression, risky sexual behavior. Yet here we are with nearly half of six-year-old girls regularly using lipstick or lip gloss. The percentage of eight- to twelve-year-old girls wearing eyeliner or mascara has doubled in the last TWO years (I ask you: shouldn’t the percentage of eight-year-olds wearing eyeliner be zero?). " (Orenstein).
A link to the book:
Below I have included a link to lecture by an ex-model which criticizes the advertising industry for the objectification of women and girls. Literally, girls that are as young, if not younger, than my daughters. The idea that society can continue to use women/girls to sell products under an assumption that it is "just business" and fulfilling a "demand" is archaic at best and extremely damaging. I encourage strongly for people to question how, when America is supposed to be more equal than ever, is it our equality is mirrored by dramatic increase in objectification of women at younger and younger ages?
Part I: http://youtu.be/1ujySz-_NFQySz-_NFQ
Part II: http://youtu.be/E4-1xCf3I7U
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