Thread by @AbhinavAgarwal

This is one thread on how the media, conglomerates like Disney and others sexualize childhood and children to make them more profitable consumers.

https://twitter.com/AbhinavAgarwal/status/1495275952297099267

This is a second thread on the same topic, with excerpts from "Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture", by Peggy Orenstein.

amzn.to/3p07OE8
#media #society #childhood #sexualization

3/
"What was the first thing that culture told her about being a girl? Not that she was competent, strong, creative, or smart but that every little girl wants - or should want - to be the Fairest of Them All."

4/
"According to the American Psychological Association, the girlie-girl culture's emphasis on beauty and play-sexiness can increase girls' vulnerability to the pitfalls that most concern parents: depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, risky sexual behavior."

5/
"In one study of eighth-grade girls, for instance, self-objectification - judging your body by how you think it looks to others - accounted for half the differential in girls' reports of depression and more than two-thirds of the variance in their self-esteem."

6/
"The first Princess items,released with no marketing plan, no focus groups,no advertising,sold as if blessed by a fairy godmother. Within a year, sales had soared to $300 million. By 2009, they were at $4 billion. There are more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market"

7/
"Meanwhile, by 2001, Mattel had brought out its own “world of girl” line of princess Barbie dolls, DVDs, toys, clothing, home decor, and myriad other products. At a time when Barbie sales were declining domestically, they became instant best sellers."

8/
"Even Dora the Explorer, the intrepid, dirty-kneed adventurer, ascended to the throne: in 2004, after a two-part episode in which she turns into a “true princess,” the Nickelodeon and Viacom consumer products division released a satin-gowned Magic Hair Fairytale Dora..."

9/
"Why do we hanker after these toys for our children? Because a child's "wide-eyed excitement over the products we buy them pierces through our own boredom as consumers and as adults, reconnecting us to our childhoods: it makes us feel again.""

10/
"Children weren't color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them."

11/
"What's more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength."

12/
" … It was not until the mid-1980s, when amplifying age and sex differences became a dominant children's marketing strategy, that pink fully came into its own"

13/
"Even the image of a girl as having a doll as their favorite toy is relatively new. "less than 25 percent in an 1898 survey cited them as their favorite toy.""

14/
"Baby dolls were seen as a way to revive the flagging maternal instinct of white girls, to remind them of their patriotic duty to conceive"
Theodore Roosevelt, obsessed with the waning birth rates among white Anglo-Saxon women, began waging a campaign against "race suicide.""

15/
"Enter Barbie.
It's hard to imagine now, but when she was introduced in 1959, the bombshell with the high-heeled feet was considered a rebel: single and childless, she lived a glamorous life replete with boyfriends (hinting at the possibility of recreational sex)."

16/
" … She (Barbie) was a feminist icon! The hitch, of course, was that her liberation was predicated on near-constant attention to her appearance."

17/
"Parents couldn't wait to share Barbie with their daughters - "they didn't wait until the girls were eight to twelve (Barbie's original demographic); they presented her to their three-year-olds. That instantaneously made her anathema to her intended market."

18/
"With their sultry expressions, thickly shadowed eyes, and collagen-puffed moues, Bratz were tailor-made for the girl itching to distance herself from all things rose petal pink, Princess-y, or Barbie-ish."

19/
"Their (Bratz's) hottie-pink “passion for fashion” conveyed “attitude” and “sassiness,” which, anyone will tell you, is little-girl marketing-speak for “sexy.”
So you had to have Bratz for Barbie's original demographic."

20/
"Bratz brilliantly distilled Barbie's acquisitiveness while casting off the rest: why be a role model when you can be simply a model? Bratz, in short, were cool."

21/
"the magnetic lure of the Disney Princesses: developmentally speaking,they were genius, dovetailing with the precise moment that girls need to prove they are girls,when they'll latch onto the most exaggerated images their culture offers in order to shore up their femininity."

22/
"MTV, HBO, The Tyra Banks Show, Good Morning America, Nightline, and even England’s august BBC have all featured the “controversy” over baby beauty queens."

23/
"The shows purport to be exposés, but in truth they expose nothing, change nothing, challenge nothing. What they do is give viewers license, under the pretext of disapproval, to be titillated by the spectacle, to indulge in guilty-pleasure voyeurism."

24/
"They also reassure parents of their own comparative superiority by smugly ignoring the harder questions: even if you agree that pageant moms are over the line in their sexualization of little girls—way over the line—where, exactly, is that line, and who draws it and how?"

25/
How do pageant moms rationalize their behavior?
"Two strategies particularly caught my eye. The first was "denial of injury" - the idea that the children are not harmed by the experience and may actually benefit."

26/
"The second was "denial of responsibility": they may personally disapprove of pageants, but their four-year-olds so wanted to compete that they had no choice but to comply."

27/
Remember Cinderella? Her stepsisters? And the magic slipper? How does the original tale unfold?
"As usual, the stepsisters try on the tiny golden slipper before Cinderella does; in order to jam their big fat clodhoppers into it, one slices off her heel and the other her toe."

28/
"By the time girls are five, after all, the human Disney Princess du jour is meant to supplant the animated ones in their hearts. Miley. Lindsay. Hilary. Even, once upon a time, Britney (who launched her career in 1993 as a Mouseketeer on The All-New Mickey Mouse Club)."

29/
"All (Miley. Lindsay. Hilary. Britney.) were products of the Disney machine. Each girl's rise became fodder for another media fairy tale, another magical rags-to-riches transformation to which ordinary girls could aspire."

30/
"Unlike Madonna, Britney, on the other hand, publicly insisted on her chastity (at least for a while). She was not only a loud-and-proud virgin, urging other girls to follow her example, but acted willfully clueless about the disconnect between her words and deeds."

31/
"It was her (Brittany) stubborn disingenuousness - her winking detachment from her actions and impact - that eroticized Britney's (not so) innocence and, unintentionally or not, that of the millions of elementary school-aged girls who slavishly followed her."

32/
"Even "Hannah is by no means perfect: the show filters its sunny lessons (usually some version of "be yourself") through the lens of celebrity, subtly suggesting that famousness itself is the greatest possible achievement - even as it denies that is the case."

33/
"A century ago, female self-improvement did not presume a stint under the scalpel, hours at the gym, or even a trip to the cosmetics counter."

34/
"In her indispensable book The Body Project, the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg wrote that for girls growing up before World War I, becoming a better person meant being less self-involved: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, cultivating empathy."