Reading: Cinderella Ate My Daughter

There's a line from Lynda Barry's One Hundred Demons that goes something like, "There were a lot of girls in my neighborhood, but no girly-girls." There were no girly-girls in my neighborhood either. I didn't even hear the phrase "girly-girl" until I was well into my twenties. That being said, I didn't entirely avoid the trappings of a late 20th-century girlhood: I had Barbies, her "dream" house, and a boatload of doll clothes. (I also had Hot Wheels and G.I. Joe dolls.) But I would have never called myself "girly."

Being a product of the 70s and 80s, I'm too old to have experienced the whole Disney princess phenomenon. Commercial princess-dom didn't really exist when I was a kid, and I preferred the ugly stepsisters to Cinderella anyway. (I know in hindsight everyone claims their childhood was less stereotypical than it really was, but I really did dig Cinderella's ugly stepsisters -- and witches of all sorts. I was a witch every Halloween I wasn't Punky Brewster. Go figure.) Peggy Orenstein did a nice job examining the current predilection for princess play and the messages the media and society are sending young girls in Cinderella Ate My Daughter .

I'm not a mother myself, so I read the book with more than a little detachment; however, it's crucial to critically look at messages society is sending girls. The whole "girly-girl" culture seems to have sprung up quite recently, but has a been a decade or more in the making. The only thing I wish was that class and race were more fully examined. (Orenstein's daughter is biracial, and she did touch not seeing faces that look like her daughter's in movies and in the toys she plays with.) Living near the poverty line growing up, I think, is what spared me from a lot of those messages.