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.