Who provides the raw materials for little girls' dreams?
Where do they find inspiration for the costumes they dress up in and the characters they play? In what petri dish do they grow their culture?
Here's an interesting insight on the origins of Disney Princess phenomenon, from the New York Times review of Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture:
"The 'princess phase.' So inevitable is this period in the maturation of girls today that it should qualify as an official developmental stage, worthy of an entry in Leach or Brazelton: first crawling, then walking, then the urgent desire to wear something pink and sparkly....Yet the princess phase, at least in its current hyper-feminine and highly commercial form, is anything but natural, or so Peggy Orenstein argues in Cinderella Ate My Daughter. As she tells the story, in 2000 a Disney executive named Andy Mooney went to check out a 'Disney on Ice' show and found himself 'surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were — horrors! — homemade. How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as "Princess." ' Mooney’s revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market; in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.
Disney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center in New York, at which the merchandise for girls seems to come in only one color: pink jewelry boxes, pink vanity mirrors, pink telephones, pink hair dryers, pink fur stoles. 'Is all this pink really necessary?' Orenstein finally asks a sales rep.
'Only if you want to make money,' he replies...."
Read the rest of the review of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Is Pink Necessary?
Peggy Orenstein continues the investigation in her chock-full blog. A couple of her more recent reflections on the subject: "Disney Princesses: The Gateway Drug" and "Cinderella’s Ball Gown Ate Mulan".
Great Geek Debates: Disney Princesses vs. Hayao Miyazaki
"Young children are still developing their capacity to distinguish fact from fiction. It seems reasonable to assume they are more influenced by the stories we give them than an adult, who is better able to separate himself from the impact and message of a story....Being a parent of girls, I have an almost primal reaction to the Walt Disney princess industrial complex. The sight of a Jasmine costume marketed to my 5-year-old can cause me to break out in hives. It isn’t so much the bare midriff, although I think that does have an influence on how my 5-year-old perceives and relates to her body. My frustration comes from the quality of the stories themselves. The stories of the Disney princess industrial complex follow a formula which sells massive amounts of princess swag but can be highly problematic in what it teaches young girls about their worth and value.
My 5-year-old is just now finishing her education about the difference between real and pretend. Kindergarten seems to help. I cringe when she plays dress-up and pretends to be one of the princesses from the Disney canon. It just creeps me out, like I am watching my child pretend to play Britney or Lindsey or their apprentice Miley, all three of which got their start as child stars with Disney.
Which is why I am grateful my geek instincts led me to be a somewhat early adopter of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli anime. I have been hooked since I first saw Spirited Away, and I have found his work to provide a needed vaccine for my girls against the creeping illness of princess-itis....
One of the major reasons Disney princesses are so effective as marketing vehicles for children is they distill what it means to be a girl or boy down to a highly simplified formula easy for young children to grasp. Put on a princess dress and I am a girl. Wear a sword, I am a boy. Such stereotyping works really well for a 3- to 6-year-old mind which is just beginning to grapple with gender differences and their consequences. As effective as these stereotypes can be at selling princess products to young girls, these oversimplified notions of gender become problematic when you examine what a princess does."
Read on for Erik Wecks's "three most important reasons why I would rather have my daughter pretending to be any Miyazaki heroine over a Disney princess"...
Posted by Alison Humphrey at May 28, 2012 11:23 AM