Cinderella Ate My Daughter (16 page)

That was certainly not the case for the inexperienced-but-babelicious Sarah Palin, whom McCain chose as his running mate. Never mind that as governor of Alaska, she used her position to pursue personal vendettas, hired cronies to fill vacant posts, and fired officials who crossed her. Or that in an interview with CBS news anchor Katie Couric, she was unable to name a single periodical she read regularly to stay informed. Or that, when asked by CNBC, she could not describe the job of the vice president. Palin had been dubbed “America’s Hottest Governor,” and that propelled her forward. In the weeks after her nomination, top Internet searches involving her name included “Sarah Palin
Vogue
,” “Sarah Palin bikini,” and “Sarah Palin naked.” As with Clinton, the former beauty queen’s appearance—her clothing, glasses, and hairstyles (not to mention how much they cost)—seemed as relevant to her leadership potential as her policies. How were girls supposed to interpret that?

I know it is not the 1950s. It’s not even the 1970s. Women are university presidents, governors, surgeons, titans of industry—even if not in the numbers one would wish or expect. Yet though we tell little girls “You can be anything you want to be,” we know, from life experience, that that is still not quite true. At least not without a price. It’s not as if when Daisy was three and announced that she wanted to be a firefighter I chimed in with “Honey, that’s great, but last week I read an article about a woman at a firehouse in Austin, Texas, who came to work after a big promotion to find that her male coworkers had smeared her locker with human excrement.” Still, as my daughter waited expectantly for me to read that bumper sticker, I did wonder how much to tell her—and when—about the tensions that persist around women and power.

Not surprisingly, friends have given Daisy a library full of “girl-positive” picture books designed to address this very issue. But, as with the “feminist” princess tales, I find I rarely pull them out—not only because they seem a tad spinachy but because they often undermine their own cause. Take
Elenita
, a magic realist tale about a Mexican girl who wants to be a glassblower. Her father says she can’t do it: she is too little, and besides, the trade is forbidden to women. The lesson, naturally, is that with a little ingenuity girls can be glassblowers or stevedores or [fill in the blank]. Nice. Still, I found myself hesitating over the “girls can’t” section. Daisy had never heard that “girls can’t be” or “girls can’t do,” whether glassblowers, firefighters, or baseball players. Why should I plant the idea in her head only to knock it down? Even my treasured
Free to Be You and Me
, rather than teaching Daisy that William deserves a doll and mommies are people, merely confused her. “What’s a sissy?” she asked me as we listened to “Dudley Pippin.” And, later, during a sketch in which one newborn baby (voiced by Mel Brooks) is trying to convince another (Marlo Thomas) that
he
is the girl, “Why did that baby just say that girls can’t keep secrets?” Overt discrimination and stereotyping may be less pervasive than when I was a child, but how can I explain—and gird her against—the subtler kinds that remain?

Daisy’s birthday falls in the middle of summer. So from the end of July all the way through Labor Day, she happily zipped around the backyard swinging her lasso of truth and repelling bullets with her golden bracelets, upholding the forces of justice. Then school started, and within a few weeks I found her Wonder Woman gear balled up behind her dress-up bin. I asked what had happened, and she shrugged.

“None of the other girls want to play superheroes,” she said.

They don’t? I asked. Really?

“Not for very long, anyway,” she hedged. “Mostly they just want to play
princess
.” She looked dolefully up at me.

Suddenly I recalled the other part of the superhero story—that the gift of power elevates but also isolates. That’s fine if you are a comic book character, not so much if you are a six-year-old girl. Now, I don’t know if what she said was entirely true—her female classmates were hardly a bunch of pink-bots—but it didn’t matter: that was her perception. This is the kind of thing all the books about raising smart, strong girls fail to mention. Frequently, after I have given a lecture on the topic myself, someone has commented, “My daughter
does
speak up and stand up for herself, and she
doesn’t
wear trampy clothes or caked-on makeup. And do you know what she gets called? A bitch.” To which I nod sympathetically and say, “If you don’t toe the line, whether you are a girl or an adult woman, you do risk being punished. But you have to believe she will ultimately be better off.” Now I realized what cold comfort that was. No one wants her child to be the sacrificial lamb to a cause. No one wants her daughter to feel excluded by her peers, to be ostracized for having the wrong clothes, hair, or pop preferences. No one wants her daughter to be caricatured on a bumper sticker. If Holly’s daughter, Ava, did not fit the feminine ideal by chance, my daughter seemed to be rejecting it by choice. That was what I had wanted, right? For her to share my values, accept my wisdom? Yet I wondered where it would lead her.

In their insightful book
Packaging Girlhood
, Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown write that the culture ultimately offers a girl two models for female identity. She can be “for the boys”—dress for them, perform sexually for them, play the supportive friend or girlfriend. Or she can be “one of the boys,” an outspoken, feisty girl who hangs with the guys and doesn’t take shit. The latter starts out as the kindergarten girl who is “independent and can think for herself.” That would be my daughter. The trouble is, Brown and Lamb say, being “one of the boys” is as restrictive as the other option, in part because it discourages friendship with other girls: a girl who is “one of the boys” separates herself from her female peers, puts them down, is ashamed or scornful of anything associated with conventional femininity.

I was already seeing inklings of that attitude from Daisy. In kindergarten, her best friends were all male; she was sometimes the only girl at a birthday party. That was fine, but she also turned down a playdate with a female classmate, dismissing her as “too pinkie-pink.” While looking for sandals online, she rejected pair after pair as too pretty/flowery/pink/girlie. She finally found some flip-flops to her liking in the boys’ section (with a supersecret maze embedded in the outsole!). I appreciated the critique of the footwear industry, but her disdain made me uneasy: I thought back to our conversation several years before in the grocery store, when I had tried to explain my aversion to Cinderella. Had my worst fears during that episode come to pass? Rather than becoming more conscious of manipulation, had she instead learned that the things associated with girls—and by extension being a girl itself—were bad? Was the long-term impact of pinkness—all those one-off Scrabble boards and skateboards—to divide girls against themselves? Certainly, I didn’t want her to think that all things snips ’n’ snails—like, gulp, superheroes?—were
superior
. It was one thing to reject the image of girlhood being sold to her, another to reject girls who might embrace it. All I had wanted was to offer her a sense of worth as a girl that was not contingent on the cut of her clothes, a femininity grounded in something other than the bathroom mirror. Still, I had wanted her to stay allied with other girls. There had to be something like that out there, right?

For a moment, back in the early 1990s—before Britney, before Miley, before Princess and Bratz—it looked as if there might be. It is hard to recall now, but the idea of linking the word “girl” with “power” seemed minimally implausible and to most a contradiction in terms. Yet, launched by the punk-influenced Riot Grrrl movement (which replaced “girl” with a growling
grrrl
), “Girl Power” became a dare, a taunt, a primal scream: it was the word “slut” scrawled across the belly of a fleshy, shaved-headed young woman in a miniskirt and combat boots who was passing out hand-printed copies of her ’zine about incest. Set to a beat by bands like Bikini Kill (whose songs included “Suck My Left One”), the movement went alt-rock mainstream with Hole, whose frontwoman, Courtney Love, pioneered the “kinderwhore” look: ripped baby-doll dresses with fishnets, tiny plastic barrettes in badly dyed hair, overdone smeared makeup. The Riot Grrrls rejected market-driven images of femininity. Their cri de coeur, “Revolution Girl Style Now!” was all about female solidarity, self-reliance, and do-it-yourself media. They were not always pretty. They were not always palatable. They were also not for actual
girls
: although as a thirty-year-old I dug the movement, as a mom—call me old-fashioned—I would not especially want my first-grader “reappropriating” the word “cunt.”

Enter the Spice Girls. With one impossibly infectious 1996 hit, “Wannabe” (you remember: “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends”), they plucked the rrrrage right out of “Grrrl Power,” rendering it apolitically appealing to the tweenybopper set and, more important, to their parents. Their opportunistic philosophy—most of the Pre–Fab Five had never met before auditioning for the band—was “about a positive attitude to life, getting what you want, and sticking by your friends.” Who could argue with that? The Spices also offered girls a range of identities that nonetheless let them feel part of the group, a perfect developmental fit with the band’s demographic. I recall endless conversations in which my nieces discussed which Spice they were—Sporty, Scary, Baby, Posh, or Ginger—then which Spice I was, then which Spice every female they had ever met might be, including their eighty-year-old grandmother (Old Spice, of course). It was tedious, but if not exactly grrrlishly subversive—where was Chubby Spice? Brainy Spice? Bi-Curious Spice?—it did not seem exactly
offensive
. At least, I figured, they weren’t obsessed with the Backstreet Boys. This was a good ten years before
Hannah Montana
debuted, and I appreciated seeing them scream their heads off over other girls, rocking out to music that was made for them and about them. It was actually kind of exciting: the Spices were all about the girlfriends, Girlfriend. At least, that’s what they claimed.

Around the time the Spice Girls broke, something called “girlie feminism” was also on the rise: far less threatening than Riot Grrrls, it held that women’s traditional roles and skills (whether scrubbing floors, nurturing relationships, or knitting) had intrinsic value; that sexual equality need not require gender neutrality; that painting your nails and wearing a
PORN STAR
T-shirt were, if not radical acts, at least a woman’s right, a viable form of self-expression and personal pleasure. That is, if done by the right people for the right reasons with the right soupçon of irony. The arguments were provocative but difficult to control. Just as they had with Riot Grrrls, Spice Girls skimmed off the easily consumable surface of girlie feminism—cute clothes! makeup!—and tossed its transgressive core. Rather than “empowering,” then, the Spice World battle cry, “Strength and courage and a Wonderbra!” became increasingly confusing, especially to fans who weren’t old enough to know what a Wonderbra actually was. By 1998, when Ginger Spice ditched her so-called forever friends, “girl power” had devolved into little more than an empty slogan on a shrunken pink T-shirt. The phrase may have started the decade representing one irony, but it ended by expressing quite another. Those extra
r
’s in Riot Grrrl, which had heralded a rejection of consumerized femininity, were replaced by the now-ubiquitous
z
(as in Ty Girlz, Moxie Girlz, Bratz Girlz, Baby Phat Girlz, Glitter Girlz, Clique Girlz, “Disney Girlz Rock”), which embraced it.
Z
did not seek to expand choices, break down barriers, address injustice.
Z
signaled “empowerment” as the power to shop, old-school stereotypes recast as the source of liberation rather than an impediment to it.

Disney Princesses, Miley Cyrus, child-friendly makeup, the proliferation of pink, are all outgrowths of that marketing sleight of hand. And, since the Riot Grrrls dispersed, no homegrown culture has risen up to challenge them. Mothers, meanwhile, want (really, really want, as the Spice Girls might sing) so desperately to guide their daughters to an authentic, unconflicted balance of feminism and femininity, one that will sustain rather than constrain them. Witness, for instance, the success of two “advice manuals” for girls published in 2008:
The Daring Book for Girls
and
The Girls’ Book: How to Be the Best at Everything
(as well as their endless sequels, such as
The Double-Daring Book for Girls
and
How to Be the Best at Everything Again
). Both volumes were spin-offs of
The Dangerous Book for Boys
, a gilt-embossed paean to old-school adventure whose tantalizing chapters on building a go-cart and making secret ink from (presumably your own) pee induced nostalgia among fathers—typically the ones purchasing the book—for their own huckleberry childhoods, those halcyon days before cable, Wii, Facebook, and cell phones. The girls’ books, however, do something entirely different. Rather than harking back to—heaven forbid!—bygone days, they evoke nostalgia for a time that has yet to be, a girlhood that we mothers may wish we’d had but did not, one that we hope will nourish our daughters and prepare them to be the kind of women we’re not sure we were fully able to become.

The Girls’ Book
, published by Scholastic, is solidly in the
z
camp: that extra X chromosome, it implies, stands for Xcessorize, and “having it all” comes with a hefty credit card debt. The book may advise readers on “how to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope,” but its more realistic fare includes how to “act like a celebrity,” “make your own luxury bubble bath,” and “give yourself a perfect manicure.” I’m not above seeking a little pick-me-up at the cosmetic counter myself, mind you, but I am not nine years old. Even so, in some ways, I mourn what has been taken from me by the rise of this girlz-with-a-
z
culture—when I was pregnant, I imagined occasionally playing “manicure” with my daughter as my mom had with me; I had a bag of old (probably bacteria-infested) lipsticks and eye shadows that I planned to bequeath to her for dress-up play. But by the time Daisy was three, I had tossed them all and become a hard-liner on all questions of nail polish and makeup. That was for grown-ups, I would tell her, not for little girls. Period. I know my response was extreme, possibly excessively so. But there was so much more out there than when I was a girl that urged her to define herself from the outside in, to believe identity was for sale; adding to all that, even in a small way, felt too much like collusion.