I finally came unhinged in the dentist’s office — one of those ritzy pediatric practices tricked out with comic books, DVDs and arcade games — where I’d taken my 3-year-old daughter for her first exam. Until then, I’d held my tongue. I’d smiled politely every time the supermarket-checkout clerk greeted her with “Hi, Princess”; ignored the waitress at our local breakfast joint who called the funny-face pancakes she ordered her “princess meal”; made no comment when the lady at Longs Drugs said, “I bet I know your favorite color” and handed her a pink balloon rather than letting her choose for herself. Maybe it was the dentist’s Betty Boop inflection that got to me, but when she pointed to the exam chair and said, “Would you like to sit in my special princess throne so I can sparkle your teeth?” I lost it.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I snapped. “Do you have a princess drill, too?”
She stared at me as if I were an evil stepmother.
“Come on!” I continued, my voice rising. “It’s 2006, not 1950. This is Berkeley, Calif. Does every little girl really have to be a princess?”
My daughter, who was reaching for a Cinderella sticker, looked back and forth between us. “Why are you so mad, Mama?” she asked. “What’s wrong with princesses?”
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She writes about the difficulties in raising her daughter in a culture that still constructs childhood along a clear gender binary — but one in which “female” not only means pink and princesses, but ambition and success, too. We rightly celebrate feminist milestones, like the fact that more girls are playing sports, that most colleges are at least 50% female, that medical and law schools have more female applicants than male applicants, that high-school girls are more highly-achieving than ever. The problem, though, is that these girls are loaded with the burden of not only being as successful and ambitious as their male peers, but looking and acting perfect while they do it. I look back at the girls in high school who were the Homecoming and Prom queens and princesses, and they epitomize this pressure: a single girl would be a two-sport athlete, a cheerleader, a club president, a member of Honor Society, and preparing to head off to a good four-year college. And sweet. And beautiful. I wasn’t exactly one of those girls (I was too mean), but I can certainly relate to the pressures of having to do well academically while being self-effacing and feminine enough to not come off as threatening. It’s exhausting. It takes a whole lot of effort, and a fair amount of money, too — because femininity is more of an achievement than a natural state, and it takes products and processes and little rituals and repeated denials and lots of work, on top of the “real” work of getting straight A’s or doing well at your job. So how Orenstein phrased it really hit home with me:
It doesn’t seem to be “having it all” that’s getting to them; it’s the pressure to be it all. In telling our girls they can be anything, we have inadvertently demanded that they be everything. To everyone. All the time.