Such meta-observations, which appear throughout the book, are part of Orenstein’s method: she argues with herself, questions her own assumptions, ventures an assertion and then has second thoughts - all in full view of the reader. “But really, what would be the point? That story has been told, to great success and profit.” Who tart up their daughters in hopes of winning a few hundred bucks and a gilded plastic trophy who train them to shake their tail feathers on command, to blow kisses at the judges and coyly twirl their index fingers “It would be easy pickin’s for me to attack parents To her credit, Orenstein recognizes this as well-trodden ground. To reporters since the killing of the 6-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey in 1996. She turns, like many a journalist before her, to the child pageant circuit, the world of sequined “cupcake dresses” and custom-made “flippers” (dental prosthetics that disguise a gap-toothed smile) that has proved irresistible To help decipher the potential impact - if any - of the images and ideas they were absorbing about who they should be, what they should buy, what made them girls?” Girls’ adolescence,” she writes, “but where was I to turn to understand the new culture of little girls, from toddler to ‘tween,’ The author of “Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap,”Īmong other books, Orenstein is flummoxed by the intensity of the marketing blitz aimed at girls barely old enough to read the label on their Bonne Bell Lip Smackers. The toy fair is one of many field trips undertaken by Orenstein in her effort to stem the frothy pink tide of princess products threatening to engulf her young daughter. “Only if you want to make money,” he replies. 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. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits Center Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.ĭisney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. 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 Princess costumes that were - horrors! - homemade.

Mooney went to check out a “Disney on Ice” show and found himself “surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. 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

A princess ate my daughter