Cinderella versus Oxum
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Oxum, the goddess
I recently read “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.” It’s a book about how and why little girls are systematically bombarded with Disney princesses, the color pink, sexualized dolls like Bratz and Monster High, baby beauty pageants, and the like.
Emília is only three months old and yet I felt compelled to read this book. Why now? It might be because we are already faced with questions about her femininity, and she is barely out of her newborn-looking-like-a-bald-alien phase.
Here, it’s common to pierce a baby girl’s ears at birth. So common that hospital nurses often offer their services (for a small fee) to do the piercing. I have pierced ears. I have nothing against earrings. But my husband and I didn’t want to pierce Emília’s ears. It’s not that I didn’t want my daughter to suffer the pain of piercing–as a newborn she’d never remember it. I simply wanted her to be a baby. No jewelry. No make-up. No accessories. Just a chubby, temperamental, lovely baby. This has proven difficult to explain to the many well-meaning people who comment on why our baby’s ears are not pierced. “Why not?” they ask in a shocked or reproachful tone, as if James and I had announced to them that we’d decided never to bathe our daughter.
So, I was thinking about femininity when I read a reference to Peggy Orenstein’s book in the New York Times. The book is a quick read. It’s interesting, at times funny, and at times a little preachy and over-the-top. There are many moments when Orenstein’s conversations with her own daughter rubbed me the wrong way, in that I felt she overvalued the masculine: Tonka trucks and dragon bike helmets are good while fairies and princesses are bad. But overall Orenstein makes some really valuable points about how, over the past 20 years, Disney princess culture has been aggressively and strategically marketed to little girls, how oftentimes shopping is the only path to intimacy between mothers and daughters, how “wholesome” dolls like the American Girl collection are often too expensive for most little girls to own, and how associating the color pink with little girls is a relatively new phenomenon.
“In the era before Maytag,” Orenstein writes, “all babies wore white as a practical matter since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them…when nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered a mire masculine hue, as pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary…symbolized femininity.”
There is a photo of my grandfather from around 1903. In it, he must be about three years old. He wears a dress and has long hair. Back then, androgyny was the norm for children of a certain age. Now, even hospital bracelets in the maternity ward are pink or blue.
I have not banned pink from Emília’s nursery or her wardrobe. Why would I? Our house on the farm is painted dark salmon pink. We have some lovely and fragrant pink tea roses outside of our door. I own pink shirts and a hot-pink purse. I like to shop, wear nice clothing and make-up, have mani-pedi’s, get my hair cut and styled, wear jewelry. But I do not believe that these things make me feminine–they do not define me as a person or as a woman. But how to communicate this to my daughter? There are so many mixed messages for girls (and women) today: Cherish your body, but don’t obsess. Looks don’t matter, but you have to work-out. Clothing is superficial, but take pride in your appearance.
In her book, Orenstein cites studies saying that children are vulnerable to long-term, consistent influences of marketing and advertising. If little girls are constantly bombarded with make-up kits, princess garb, dolls called “Bratz,” purses that have the words “spoiled” and “fashionista” scrawled across them, will this mean that they will grow up with a warped sense of femininity? Will they believe that that being a girl means being a spoiled fashionista? According to Orenstein, the answer is yes. In our modern culture, Orenstein writes, little girls “learn how to act desirable but not how to desire, undermining rather than promoting healthy sexuality.”
If we buy Emília a Barbie, are we promoting unhealthy sexuality? If we tell her she is beautiful, is this wrong? What girl, or woman for that matter, doesn’t want to be called beautiful? If Emíla wants to be a fairy princess for Halloween, should we force her to be a pirate? What if she genuinely likes princesses? What worries me about Orenstein’s anti-princess sentiment is the following: if, as parents, we constantly assume our daughter is falling prey to some Disney marketing scheme, and that her desires are not her own, then I’m not trusting her ability to know herself or to express her own likes and dislikes.
Here in Brazil there is an African religion called Candomblé that is quite popular, especially where we live in the northeast. According to one Candomblé origin story, when the great god Oxalá made the world, he initially created 17 lesser gods or orixas. One was a goddess named Oxum. The other sixteen gods ignored her, not knowing that when Oxalá “chose all good things/ He also chose their keeper/And this was a woman.” So, as long as Oxum was ignored, nothing the other sixteen divinities did on earth was successful. There was no rain, no birth, no health, no love. Eventually they went to Oxum and asked for her help, and her forgiveness. Like a princess, Oxum wears a gold crown and a beautiful yellow gown. But she is also worshipped for being a loving mother, an old crone, a seductress, a coquette, a guardian, an angel of mercy, a laughing nymph, a feared and respected goddess. Oxum carries both a mirror and a knife. On a superficial level, the mirror is a symbol of her vanity, the knife of her capacity for vengeance. But looking deeper at the goddess, the mirror is a symbol of self-knowledge and honesty. The mirror is also a way to look behind her, to see her enemies. Or her past. Apart from self defense, the knife serves many functions–cooking, skinning, hunting, cutting hair and cloth. If only the Disney princesses could be as versatile as Oxum. This is what I hope to communicate to Emília–femininity takes many forms. Femininity can be powerful.
By the end of her book, Orenstein gives good advice. Stress what your daughters body can do rather than how it is decorated. Praise her accomplishments, not just her looks. Make sure she is media literate–that she understands what is an advertisement and what is not. Make sure she knows which women are real and which are fictional.
Themocracy