Book 18: Pinkness Is Bad

I picked this book up next because of James May. Dan and I enjoy watching Top Gear but we are all caught up with current season. Well, James May, the somewhat nerdy presenter on Top Gear has a number of other BBC shows out, including some toy-based ones, so we've been watching those to get our UK fix. One of the toy shows was something along the lines of "Top Toys from My Sisters' Cupboard". It was actually pretty interesting and in it, May talks about the relatively recent association of pink with girls. (Apparently 100 years ago, pink was associated with boys and blue with girls.) The tv show didn't really do more than touch on that change, but I wanted to know more. I thought Cinderella Ate My Daughter might be a good starting place to learn more.

Well, it sorta was. It does talk about the relatively new pink-girl association (apparently it was viewed as pastel red and red was a boy color) but after finishing the book, I have to think that there was a less painful way to learn about that.

The book seems to be written by one of those type of people that read way too much into everything. Every commercial item is a way for big business to screw over the people, subjugate women and crush non-white, non-Aryan ethnicities. So yeah, cheerful point of view. By the time I had hit the half-way point of the book, I had rolled my eyes so many times I was getting dizzy.

The book seems to mostly be the author worrying about what will happen to her daughter as she drinks the Kool-Aid of the Disney Princess pink poofy dress trend. Then, about half way through the book when her daughter chooses to leave the Princess track (after three years of confessed maternal brainwashing) the author begins to fret about what will happen to her daughter now that she is "rejecting [the feminine ideal] by choice". Look, I'm not saying raising a daughter - or any kid - is (or ever has been) easy. Shoot, there's a reason I have cats (and it's not just because they're cheaper). But honestly, I wanted something that looked at why pink and princesses were the big thing for girls now. Where did it come from? How did it get so massive? What does it tap into in girls that has caused this pink princess explosion? And sure, while were on the topic, how about that "uptick in narcissistic tendencies among young adults" you mentioned? Instead, 80% of the book seemed more in the style of news teasers - "Your child's favorite toy might be slowly killing them. Find out what it is at six tonight!"- more sensational anecdotes to stir people up than actual information.

I did say 80% so there was some actual science-based fact spattered throughout the book. Just a tad. But it wasn't explored enough. One section says that boys, when unobserved, had a 50% likelihood of playing with typical "boy" toys as they did with "girl" toys. However, it doesn't say how they played so I immediately wondered if pulling the head off of a Barbie constituted "playing". Even if it didn't and the "playing" was real playing, that information was contradicted somewhere around chapter four or five when another study showed that humans and monkeys alike tended to gravitate towards toys seen as typical for their gender. (The author was apparently offended that the female monkeys played with the cooking pot.) These study results were just mentioned in passing. I wanted something deeper.

And that brings up a question. The author states:

I may want my girl to do and be whatever she dreams of as an adult, but I also hope she will find her Prince (or Princess) Charming and make me a grandma. I do not want her to be a fish without a bicycle; I want her to be a fish with another fish. Preferably, a fish who loves and respects her and also does the dishes, his share of the laundry, and half the child care.

But what if her daughter ends up someone like me? I did not grow up in a household where it was expected that the woman cook - quite the opposite as the typical cook was my dad. And yet I'm finding that I enjoy doing (and would rather do) 95% of the cooking now. I don't demand (or want) Dan to do half of our household chores and I don't want him to demand from me half of our household income. (I will be honest - when I worked, I brought in less than half of our income but Dan still did the majority of our household chores, especially cooking.) So what happens if the author's progressively raised, brainwashed to be anti-pink and anti-princess child grows up and wants to *gasp* be a housewife and *double gasp* likes pink? Or *triple gasp* does't give the author grandchildren? What if that ends up being her daughter's dream?

Honestly, I'd like to learn more about this topic (the princess phenomenon & how it ties into increased narcissism, not the author's desires for her daughter's future) but addressed in a more academic way. There was just enough interesting information in this book to make me want to keep reading (more so to keep reading about the topic than this book in particular) but I can't say I can recommend this book to anyone.