Writer Peggy Orenstein Takes on 'Girlie-Girl' Culture

Peggy Orenstein is an award-winning writer who focuses on issues affecting girls and women. Her books include the New York Times best-selling memoir Waiting for Daisy and the best-selling School Girls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap. 

Her newest book is Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, which focuses on the dangerous side of “princessmania” and its impact on young girls.

Orenstein grew up in Minneapolis, MN in the 1960s and '70s. Her daughter, Daisy, is 7. 

Orenstein will be at Alameda's  on Tuesday, March 22, at 7 p.m.

Patch interviewer Laurie Wagner spoke with Orenstein from her home in Berkeley last week.

If your daughter Daisy's generation has the Disney princesses, what did our generation have? Historically, toys were supposed to give children a sense of what we believed their adult roles would be. We were told our adult roles would have to do with homemaking, so we had baby dolls, Suzy Homemaker appliances and Easy-Bake Ovens.

The hardcore marketing culture that I talk about in my book didn't develop until the '80s. That’s when we get the whole notion of little girls as divas and being focused on play sexiness and appearance. Little girls today are being told that their adult roles will be as consumers who define themselves through appearance and narcissism

Do you think we had the same pressures to be thin, pretty and hot? Not at age 3 or 8. But by the time we were teenagers, yes.

In the book you talk about helping our daughters see themselves from the inside out rather than the outside in. How does the consumer culture play into this? The media sexualizes girls. It trains them to become desirable to others, which teaches them to become really great objects, but doesn’t encourage them to understand their own sexuality and their desires, which is important because  that’s what empowers them to make decisions, to say yes and no, which is healthy.

What are some ways you are supporting Daisy in seeing herself from the inside out? I try to find ways to celebrate her femininity that are internally grounding. For Halloween, Daisy went as Athena instead of Cinderella. Athena is a strong feminine type, so Daisy got to wear a great outfit, a thing on her head. It was very internal for her, very different from being Cinderella, which is about being looked at. I'm not saying Daisy can't be pretty or she has to play with trucks, it’s just about expanding the idea of what femininity, girlhood and womanhood can mean beyond this incredibly narrowing vision that's being sold to little girls.

How can a mother, who also feels the pressure to look good, deal with her unconscious desire for her daughter to be appealing? How can we not poison our children? That is the nut of it; that is what we mothers specifically wrestle with, and if we could answer that question, we could also have world peace. Here we are dealing with the loss of our own beauty, some of us starting to think about spending a lot of money to do things that we never thought we would do, and we’re trying to tell our daughters that they’re wonderful just as they are.

A major issue in our society is weight. I read a study which found that 42 percent of first, second and third grade girls want to be thinner. What's your experience? I was just having this discussion with a girlfriend who has a daughter who has a tendency to be physically big, and we were talking about how to simultaneously maintain a healthy body size and also love that body.  

Daisy and I have started talking about weight because that's something a child her age is starting to pick up on, the whole demonizing of fat. It's so hard not to make fat into a character flaw.

So when I'm reading her books, it means I censor stuff when they talk about fat people. But then you get to Roald Dahl and he really hated fat people. I love Roald Dahl, but I do try and pull it out if it's a descriptor of a bad person in a book or used in a negative way. And I talk to Daisy. I say, “Honey, everybody’s body has a healthy size. Some people’s healthy size is bigger, some is smaller. Sometimes it can be unhealthy to be too big or too small. What you want is to have a healthy body for you.”

What did you think of the Dove campaign for girls with regular bodies? Do you think there's traction there? Yes, they're trying to express something positive, but it’s also controversial because they had some serious constraints and contradictions. While they were looking for women with different body sizes, they had stringent requirements for what their facial features should look like. So even within their attempts to broaden they were still conforming. 

How do think that parents can support girls who are 13 to 16, or is it too late? It's about getting into the dialogue with them. At that age, censorship and severe limitation of what they can watch or buy is not going to play the way it will with my 7-year-old, but you can engage them in conversations about what they think about what they’re doing. You don’t want your daughter to dress like the Amish, but at the age that she is, is the way she’s dressing an expression of her wanting to be hot to others or her trying to express something about herself?

You've written so much about girls. What did having a girl teach you that your research couldn't? I fretted about having a daughter, but Daisy has made me a stronger, more connected woman because I have to be. If you're really conscious and want to think about how this kind of target marketing affects your daughter, it forces you to work it through yourself. It's been a huge growth experience for who I am as a woman.

Check out Peggy Orenstein's website, with resources for parents.

Laurie Wagner is a writer, writing teacher and life coach. She hosts 27 Powers, a series of literary and artistic events bringing nationally known peronalities to the Island. You can find out more at www.27powers.org.