Cinderella Ate My Daughter / Peggy Orenstein

Cinderella ate my daughter: dispatches from the front lines of the new girlie-girl culture by Peggy Orenstein. 245 p.

The whole "Disney Princess/everything must be pink" trend for girls over the last few years was pretty scary for me, even though I don't have any kids, so this book looked interesting. Orenstein is a journalist, so the book is written in a casual, user-friendly style, although she does include lots of endnotes, which I appreciated. I learned some entertaining things, such as why none of the Disney Princesses make eye contact with each other when they're on the same product (it's because each Princess is the center of her own story, so they can't acknowledge that there's more than one princess at a time), and some truly scary things, such as research that shows that girls who dress "sexy" at an early age end up very disconnected from their own feelings at puberty--when asked how something makes her feel, such a girl is likely to respond with what she thinks she looks like, or say something like "I feel like I looked good." And I must agree with Orenstein--why, when so much of the current cartoons and dolls and other merchandise is supposed to "empower" girls, why does it seem to empower them only to shop or become rock stars or models?

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