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One of my favorite expressions in college was, “Its in the ether.” It was a phrase used by my favorite high school English teacher, Ms. Cappiello, to describe the phenomenon of multiple occurrences of a single, usually random and obscure, topic in your every day life. For instance, a news report on a new discovery of dinosaur bones, followed by the discovery of an old science textbook in your parents basement with a description of the same kind of dinosaur, then, you go on a first date with a guy to the natural science museum and learn about, surprise, the same kind of dinosaur. Then, your Shakespeare professor goes off on a tangent about dinosaurs, and your poli-sci professor references the same television report you saw, leading you to believe that the entire universe is preoccupied with fossils. My teacher’s argument would be that once the first reference was released “into the ether,” you became more aware of the other occurrences, though there are others who seem to believe that the first occurrence somehow begat the second and the third.
Anyway, dinosaurs are not the point of this post. In the past couple of days, I have had an ether filled with articles and discussions about young girls and the color pink and the effect, as judged by feminists and marketing executives.
The first time I came across this topic was an article on the new character on Sesame Street, Abby Cadaby, a fairy monster with pink fur, purple glittery hair and a magic wand. (“A Girly-Girl Joins the ‘Sesame’ Boys” by Susan Dominus, NYTimes, subscription required.)A couple of weeks later, while flipping through Nicole’s copy of Bitch, I came across an article called “Sweet Nothings—Lyn Mikel Brown and Sharon Lamb on how girl power became girl marketing.” Then, over the Christmas break, this article, What’s Wrong with Cinderella, by
Peggy Orenstein, from the New York Times Magazine appeared in my inbox, thanks to Leslie.
All three articles listed above make reference to the surge of “girly girl” marketing that is all over the place these days, with bright pink and pastel purple shades of fabric and plastic covered in rhinestones and sparkles, directed to the young girls age 6 to 10. One of the main motivations for Sesame Street producers to add a “girly girl” to their successful TV show was the marketing possibilities.
The Muppet that after nine months of research was selected to embody those characteristics is not technically a girl: she is a 3-year-old fairy named Abby Cadabby. Neither monster like Zoe nor humanoid like Prairie Dawn, the calico-wearing blonde who first showed up in 1970, Abby is a purely magical creature, complete with tiny wings, a magic wand and sparkles in her hair.
There’s something suspiciously marketable, of course, about a new character who happens to be a fairy, just now in the midst of a girlish craze for tutus, tiaras and all things princessy, and as Disney prepares a big marketing push for its 2007 movie starring Tinker Bell.
The article goes on to talk about the reasons for choosing her pink fur, for using sparkles and even for her background story (her fair-in-training origins allows the show to talk about diversity, difference and heritage without adding a specific race, religion or physical location homeland for her.) The article also makes references to the Princess line, which is the subject of the other NY Times article, the one that I identified strongly with. In it, a woman watches (in horror) as her three year old daughter embraces everything Princess, falling prey to Disney’s ubiquitous marketing.
At the grocery store one day, my daughter noticed a little girl sporting a Cinderella backpack. “There’s that princess you don’t like, Mama!” she shouted.
“Um, yeah,” I said, trying not to meet the other mother’s hostile gaze.
“Don’t you like her blue dress, Mama?”
I had to admit, I did.
She thought about this. “Then don’t you like her face?”
“Her face is all right,” I said, noncommittally, though I’m not thrilled to have my Japanese-Jewish child in thrall to those Aryan features. (And what the heck are those blue things covering her ears?) “It’s just, honey, Cinderella doesn’t really do anything.”
Over the next 45 minutes, we ran through that conversation, verbatim, approximately 37 million times, as my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks — all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart — as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler. What was it about my answers that confounded her? What if, instead of realizing: Aha! Cinderella is a symbol of the patriarchal oppression of all women, another example of corporate mind control and power-to-the-people! my 3-year-old was thinking, Mommy doesn’t want me to be a girl?
The article goes on to discuss (again with dismay) how the “girls” aisles at toy stores, clothing stores and home decor stores are filled with flowers, hearts, baby animals and every shade of pink imaginable, while boys get soccer balls, firemen and automobiles.
“Playing princess is not the issue,” argues Lyn Mikel Brown, an author, with Sharon Lamb, of “Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.” “The issue is 25,000 Princess products,” says Brown, a professor of education and human development at Colby College. “When one thing is so dominant, then it’s no longer a choice: it’s a mandate, cannibalizing all other forms of play. There’s the illusion of more choices out there for girls, but if you look around, you’ll see their choices are steadily narrowing.”
I went through a very adamant phase of my life, from age 8 to age 18 where I absolutely refused to wear any shade of pink. I have never been much of a “girly girl” anyway, preferring to spend most of my time as a child, riding bikes, building forts, climbing trees, fishing, camping and playing in the mud. In my childhood mind (and I admit, still a little today) wearing pink and engaging in my favorite forms of outdoor play were totally incompatible; one could not do both under any circumstances. It probably didn’t hurt that my Easter dresses, church clothes and “nice” clothes given to my parents by my grandmothers were all pink and I was not allowed to get them dirty at all. For me, wearing pink gave others, mostly the boys on the block who were starting to believe in cooties, an excuse to exclude me. There were enough people, (the teachers and principal at my middle school, camp councilors, older women at my church, the boys I played with etc.) who told me that because I was a girl, there were things that I couldn’t/should’t/ wouldn’t be allowed to do, like play kickball at recess or set up tents on camping trips, or watch football while “the women” were cooking dinner. There was very little that mad me so angry as a child as when I was told I couldn’t do something because I was a girl.
And so, as a modern feminist, I am not sure where I should come down on this topic. As a member of the “third wave” of feminism, I do believe in choices- women should be able to choose whether or not they want to have a career, get married to a man or a woman, have an abortion or 12 kids. So little girls should be allowed to choose to dress up as Cinderella for Halloween, just as she should be allowed to dress up as a police officer or a firefighter. At the same time, looking at the marketing of female characters for little girls, I am worried that those choices are being made for them. Those bastards somewhere in the marketing department turned Dora the Explorer into a Princess? Are they kidding? How on earth is she going to explore the jungle with her friend, Boots the monkey, while wearing a pink satin dress and a crown? How will I keep my children from falling into the marketing trap, that starts with princess gowns and graduates up to Brats dolls and tee shirts that say across the chest, “Who needs school when you’ve got these?” in bright pink letters?
I am actually disappointed that Mulan and Pocahontas got roped into the Disney Princess line. Mulan ran away from her world of glitter and pink flowers in her hair, and Pocahontas spent the entire movie dressed in animal skins, canoeing, fishing and playing outside. When I was a kid, I would have thrown temper-tantrums in a toy aisle for a Pocahontas bow and arrow and deer skin dress or a Mulan coat of armor and a stuffed red dragon, even if none of those items came in pink.
I’m horrible at goodbyes. Really, tragically bad at them. And mostly I try to avoid them. Say, by skipping the country to not have to face the whole “graduation” thing. Or managing to dodge any farewells to friends while in Australia. And always choosing phrases like, “See you soon.” Saying goodbye, even if I’m going to see you or talk to you in ten minutes, makes me aware that something is ending and can’t be retrieved. Goodbyes give me an awareness of the persistence of time passing that I often like to forget.
Last week was my last day of my contracts and property classes and I’m frankly not dealing with it well at all. I once had a wonderful professor who that coming to the end of a class was a kind of death. Classes do take on a life of their own, a life that is brutally and forcefully cut off. And the first semester of law school is particularly intense. You get thrown into a whole body of knowledge and way of thinking that you do not understand and you feel like a child again, starting something totally new and incomprehensible, and you rely on these professors to guide you through it.
And so I felt abandoned the other day at the end of contracts. My professor is an incredible woman who, if you’ve seen the movie Legally Blonde, might remind you of the female professor who ejects Elle in the first class. This woman will tear you apart in front of eighty of your peers and leave you feeling hopelessly stupid. And yet, she has in many ways served as a mentor and a mother figure to us. She has had us over to dinner complete with homemade peach cobbler and will make you a cup of tea and listen to your infinite anxieties anytime. And today she told a wonderful story. A story of when she was teaching her first contracts class at the University of Houston.
One of her students was a boy named Kyle. And she was talking to Kyle before class and he said to her “We’ll ma’am I’m not very bright, but my friend Steve, he convinced me that I was smart enough to make it through high school and college and now in law school and he always helped me out. And well, Steve, he doesn’t have to work hard at all ‘cause he’s so smart and charming. But I’m so glad he’s at law school with me to help me out.” And she talked about how when Steve went to find his first job, working for a solo practitioner in Tyler, Texas, he told the old gruff man hiring him, “My friend Kyle’s coming too.” To which the old man replied, “No, I can’t afford to pay both of you.” So Steve said, “Fine, then we’ll split the one salary and if revenues go up when we come, we’ll renegotiate.” The man accepted, and Steve and Kyle moved to Tyler, where they both met their wives and started families. So many years down the line our professor got a phone call and the voice on the other side said “Hi Professor. This is Steve. I saw you at a conference in London, and I thought I’d call up to say hello.” And he proceeds to tell her how he moved from Tyler to Houston to New York to London through connections and all that. So then she said, with some trepidation in her voice, “Well congratulations on your success. But…how’s Kyle?” To which Steve quickly replied “Oh he’s down the hall if you want to talk to him.” And mildly shocked she said, “Oh no, no. Just, how did he end up in London with you?” And Steve said, “Well, Kyle’s good at some things I’m not, and I’m good at some things Kyle’s not. And so we’ve just stuck together through it all and helped each other out.”
And then our professor, mentor and guide, with the slightest hint of a tear in her eye, said to us, “So that’s really all I want to tell you at the end of this class. You don’t need me. You need each other.” And walked out.
I was going to end my blog post there, but I decided I have to share one more story. My civil procedure class also came to a close the other day. My professor walks up to the front of the room and says “I hear [contract’s prof] gave a really moving speech and even teared up a little. Well, I tried crying once; it didn’t work for me. Also, I’d say come and have lunch with me or keep in touch, but you all never do that either. So this time I’m going to be clear: don’t call me, don’t invite me to lunch, don’t send me an email ten years down the road letting me know you’re a wildly successful litigator. I don’t care. I never want to see or hear from any of you again. Go to hell.” And walked out.
And so I’m happy that there are contracts professors in the world. People who remind me that while we have guides and mentors, it is really our peers, our friends, our generation (all of you) who will mean the most in the end. But I’m also glad I have civil procedure teachers who remind me not to take this goodbye thing too seriously, and that hell perhaps ain’t such a bad place to go after all.
Leslie, Nicole, SciTeacher, my baby sister and I won trivia tonight! $50 to spend on beer at The Corner Pub. Thank goodness it’s Wednesday.
We all knew that Mama Mia was composed of Abba songs and that the STD nicknamed “the clap” was gonorrhea. The science teacher got the science question wrong, the English majors got the fictional character question wrong, the Texan didn’t know the Blue Bonnet Bowl was in Huston and none of us knew who the quarterback selected by the Falcons in 1991 from Mississippi State was.
But we did know that the only one of four theme songs not sung by the star of the television show was the theme to Growing Pains. More specifically, the drunkest of us knew the answer to the final bonus question. We bet big, as big as we could, and it paid off. We went from last place to first place with one question. I am sure there is a life lesson in that somewhere.
If you’re in Atlanta this week, drinks are on us.
Bring on the Queen!
I am not a scientist, nor a politician, nor a documentary film maker, nor a business person looking to get in on the “green” movement
in any profitable way that I can. However, if this isn’t global warming, I don’t know what is.
Right Now for
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It is approximately 70 degrees outside, with only 6 days until Christmas. I understand that other parts of the country are getting snowed in, there is no power in the Pacific Northwest blah blah blah. Clearly, I am only concerned with what directly affects me, and I had to pull out my spring/summer wardrobe yesterday, to avoid sweating through all my clothes when I walked to work. 70 degrees on December 19.
Don’t tell my Yankee parents, but man, I love the South.
My first thread here. I’m posting from school here as my first period class works through their semester exam. Remember exams as a student? Stressful times for many — you should be reviewing all of your old notes, working through study guides, cramming in information for the test, spending a good 60/90/120 minutes working through the exam.
Well, I’m finally getting to experience exams from the other side now — as a teacher. Let me tell you, it’s awesome. I get to kick back, relax, this is the student’s time, not mine. All I have to do is run the scantrons through, grade a few free-response papers (SHORT answers), and record the grades. And these last three days are half-days too! Life is good.
This holiday season, give the gift of Motivation. Expertly bottled by world-renowned specialists, this beautiful glass bottle holds a year’s supply of motivation, enough to make any New Year’s resolution stick and to ensure those Christmas lights get taken down before Halloween. Act now and receive this sample of “Purpose and Drive” lotion, yours free with your purchase of Motivation. Visit our website or these fine retailers to purchase Motivation for your loved ones this Christmas.
Motivation; use a little, do a lot.
If only I could simply go to the store and pick some of that up. I find myself in a rut lately. As stress at work due to budget meetings and publishing deadlines loom closer, I am less and less motivated to accomplish anything outside of the office. Exhaustion certainly plays its part as well, but I know that, when motivated, I can push through tiredness to accomplish plenty.
In college, there were things that could help to produce motivation- a fast approaching deadline, a looming final, the stress of lots to do, or even a genuine love of an activity, like theater productions. Sometimes, the very feeling for accomplishment for completing a task can be enough motivation to get me started- like cleaning a room or doing laundry. By the end, I can point to a pile of folded laundry and say, “I did that today.”
One week, I wake up on Sunday morning, and I am off to the races. My alarm goes off and I don’t hit the snooze button once. I start a pot of coffee and clean the kitchen while I wait for it to brew. Toss some laundry in the washer, finish cleaning off the dining room table and sit down to eat a muffin while flipping through the morning paper. The clock strikes 10 and I sit down to complete an essay, or a paper, or finally, finally putting all those recipes printed off the Internet into a binder to keep them safe. Last Sunday, I stayed in bed until noon, read the New York and watched two movies. Nothing was different about this Sunday morning, other than I woke up motivated.
What can one do when motivation is flagging and no amount of pressure, deadlines, or even fear of failure can create enough motivation to get one started. My head knows, and has known, that I should be working on my latest writing project, but my body will not be moved from its horizontal position on the couch, in front of the TV or holding a book.
There is always the possibility of asking someone, a person with large amounts of patience, love and general friendly feelings towards you, for a push. A shove off the couch, away from the TV, out of the apartment, and into a more work-orientated area. I would not have survived college without these people. There are friends out there who will sit with me at Dunkin Donuts for hours, just to keep me on task, or people who will listen to me babble on and on about what I plan to write, or even individuals who offer to read my poorly written first draft and provide feedback, knowing it will get you moving in the right direction.
This does not solve the original problem, however. To ask for help, one must have the motivation to pick up the phone, or write an email. Also, this is where the cliche about leading a horse to water kicks in- friends can lead you to the coffee shop but they can not make your fingers type. They can point out that you have worn the same clothes for three days, but should never be asked to do your laundry for you.
So this Christmas, all I want is a giant bottle of Motivation, $39.99 plus tax at your local department store, right next to the display of “The Meaning of Life,” “Purpose and Drive” and “Direction-by Calvin Klein.”
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