A friend who’d read some of the chatter on my Facebook page in regards to little girls and princess marketing, and 13 year-old daughters, their feminist mothers and makeup noted with surprise that people sound angry. She has a princess-loving little girl herself. She’s happy about her daughter’s love of princesses (knowing her, she’d be happy about her daughter’s love of pirates or dinosaurs or whatever else you’d call not-princess, too). And she grew up with a glamorous mum and she’s a glamorous mom herself, contentedly so.
Anyway, her question about anger got me thinking about it more. I sometimes take the anger for granted: it’s not about princesses or makeup at all. The anger (at least mine) is about the marketing—and how the massive amounts of money have made something simple not so simple.
It’s impossible to shield one’s child from the vastness of marketing. Commercial characters are on toothbrushes and juice boxes, diapers (even the plain old Seventh Generation ones got the Lorax, which is what a PC version of the same damn thing, although at least gender neutral).
And it’s not that the marketing stops at preschool. Huge amounts of money are spent on beauty products for tween girls (what was there in my day—Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and a little astringent?).
It doesn’t stop at the kids: an article on B-list celebrities’ career revivals through motherhood ran in last weekend’s NYT; even a tweet to endorse a baby product by a b-lister can bring in $5000. Demi Moore started it, with her iconic magazine cover, all preggy and sexy. Jessica Simpson was the latest to emulate the image.
Along with our huge interest in our children—helicopter, at home, working, attachment, all that debate—comes the fact that money follows interest or interest follows money or something like that and we have cause to feel these things we’d like to control for ourselves, princesses or pierced ears or makeup or momhood are no longer so personal or even political, they are marketed. As my friend Jane Roper wrote about on her blog this week, it’s kind of amazing to go back and listen to Free to Be You and Me. Recorded 40 years ago, I’d venture that it’s more radical now than it was then—and I think I mean this solely (really?) because of marketing. When even seeds rely upon commercial characters for marketing purposes, I think it’s not such a presumptuous statement.
What’s coming at us, from airbrushed models on out, does make the personal as the personal very difficult to tease out.
