The author tells that the " first Princess items, released with no marketing plan, no focus groups, no advertising, sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. "In one study of eighth-grade girls, for instance, self-objectification - judging your body by how you think it looks to others - accounted for half the differential in girls' reports of depression and more than two-thirds of the variance in their self-esteem." "According to the American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior." To be different from the crowd, you have to become one of the crowd. You have no self-confidence unless and until you conform to an artificially contrived standard of beauty. Fairness creams would have us believe that beauty is only skin deep, and what is skin deep is what matters. Look around in India, and advertisers are hand-in-glove with companies to push that message out as aggressively as they can, to children as well as adults. "What was the first thing that culture told her about being a girl? Not that she was competent, strong, creative, or smart but that every little girl wants - or should want - to be the Fairest of Them All." Separately, there are more than fifty pages of notes, acknowledgments, bibliography, and index.
However, there is some fluff and filler too, that seems to serve little purpose other than to puff up the book to a more acceptable 200 pages. There is much to like and recommend in this book. We are taken to toy shops, those cheap Made-in-China Barbie dolls as well as those selling dolls that cost several times more, to kids' pageants, to the world of fairy tales, and what the originals say and what the ersatz Disney monstrosities have twisted them into, teenage pop singing sensations that cannot wait to grow up even as they pretend they aren't, and yes - the world of teenage sexed-up role models in TV serials like Hannah Montana and the like.
The article attracted a ton of attention, and morphed into this book. " I fretted over what playing Little Mermaid, a character who actually gives up her voice to get a man, was teaching her." "Her" as in Daisy, the author's daughter. The seeds of this book were laid in 2006, when the author wrote an article called " 'What's Wrong with Cinderella?' which ran on Christmas Eve in The New York Times Magazine." The article itself was a response to the "Princess" obsession everyone seemed to be afflicted with.
Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, by Peggy Orenstein “Why be a role model when you can be simply a model?" One icon begets another, more veneer, more commercialized, crasser.
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