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I know that little girls like to dress up. I was a young girl once. I raised a daughter. I have a granddaughter. Dressing up is fine.
When my daughter was young, her daily uniform consisted of bright Oshkosh overalls and t-shirts. For her, dressing up meant going through my closet and jewelry box as well as her Dad’s closet, and picking things to try on. From her father’s fedora and baseball caps to my tie-dye t-shirts and lone bridesmaid’s dress, she tried it all. She pranced around in my high heeled shoes, loaded with bangles, necklaces and scarves.
I populated a dress up box with things I found in thrift stores that would assist in her fantasy play. I even bought a wooden stage and portable tent for her and my son to act out scenes from “productions” they staged and recreations of their favorite movies and TV shows.
There is something different happening with my granddaughter and her peers today. They have gone frill-crazy, with an avalanche of tutus, princess dresses and other such raiment in a narrow range of choices. (You have to search hard to find non-princessy, fantasy play, dress up options for girls. For young boys, one finds a predominance of pirate gear but also carpenter belts and fire hats. And, yes, I have gotten these for my granddaughter as well.)
My granddaughter is all about being a princess and a vamp. She’s 3½ years old.
Pink-Pink, You Stink and Pepto-Bismol Nightmares.
The there’s the predominance of pink. I know that pink is a predominant color for girl babies and little girls. Growing up with the nickname Candi, I was awash in pink as a girl – pink ribbons on my pigtails, pink dresses. My bedroom walls were painted pink. So much pink that I hated pink.
I see pink everywhere in the clothes aisle for little girls and tons of black clothes (a color I was forbidden to wear except as a skirt paired with a white blouse on the Sundays my choir sang at church). This obsession with pink pared garishly with black and purple takes it from pale to putrid in such places as Club Libby Lu (which targets "tween" girls ages 6 to 12).
Melissa Fletcher Stoletje does a great analysis of the princess craze in an article, Little girls carried away on a pink wave of princess products.
Yes, little girls have loved princesses for eons, ever since Cinderella lost that fabled slipper on the castle steps. But in recent times, shrewd marketing by retailers has pushed preadolescent princess worship into the stratosphere…
Does princess worship hurt a girl's self-image? Are we training a generation of damsels in distress? The jury is out on that, but some experts say the princess marketing overload is actually limiting girls' choices about what it means to be, well, a girl.
Too Soon Grown? (Painted Toes and other Salon Services)
Then there’s the trend of girls as young as preschool age getting pedicures and having their hair styled in professional salons, some of which cater to young girls exclusively. A few years back, before and even after the flood of inexpensive nail salons opened across the country, getting a first pedicure was a rite of passage. It usually happened as a special treat around a girl’s 13th birthday or graduation from middle or high school. Now it’s come to the preschool set. If you are getting a pedicure when you’re 3 and 4, to what do you graduate?
There are a number of things that have influenced this obsession with a narrowly defined girlhood, including the stealth-marketing of princesses by the Disney Corporation a few years back and, for adult women, the fashion styling of the Sex and the City crew where delectable, expensive and over-the-top femininity was pushed over comfort or athleticism. (Makes me glad my daughter came of age during the reign of the girl group TLC, with their over-sized t-shirts and baggy pants.) Even seemingly innocuous role models such as Dora the Explorer have even princessified.
As a culture, the media magnifies, codifies and promotes the importance of how women look above and beyond what they do and achieve. Adult women over the age of thirty-five have the ability to make choices about who to be, having grown up with less emphasis on how they look and
