Girls, what you see is not what you are, or what you can achieve

Girls, what you see is not what you are, or what you can achieve
Suzy Freeman-Greene
March 12, 2011
Comments 20

Most Barbies are now fashionistas vogueing for the catwalk.
They're small things, in isolation, but they start to add up. A make-up tent at a primary school fete; a girl dressed for the boudoir on kinder pyjama day (heeled slippers, slinky robe); a firstgrade school assignment in which hairdressing is the girls' most popular career choice.

So much of what young girls do today— their toys, games, aspirations—is tied up with looking good. I've become almost blase about the fairy party makeovers and Disney Princess plague. It's the grooming of young fashionistas and shopaholics I find especially odious, as if life were all about ''expressing yourself'' through shopping, make-up and clothes.

Even Barbie's career options seem to be shrinking. She has been an astronaut, pilot and doctor, but in Myer's toy department most Barbies are now fashionistas vogueing for the catwalk. (There's apparently a bespectacled Barbie computer engineer but good luck finding her).Nintendo's girlie games include Style Boutique (own a fashion store) and Fashion Designer-Style Icon. Myer also sells ''craft kits'' where you make lip balm or give manicures.

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Isn't craft about creating, not preening? A company calledWild Science, meanwhile, sells a ''Secrets of Cosmetics Science'' pack where you make clay face-masks. There are, naturally, no boys on the packaging for this game. (OrWild Science's other one, a perfume laboratory.)

Why can't girls be interested in science for its sense of wonder and possibility—not as a path to the beauty industry?

These are strange times for girls. As American journalist Peggy Orenstein notes in her new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, images of girls' success at school and university abound—yet the push to make their appearance the epicentre of their identities has intensified, from a younger age.

The trend is commercially driven—if you code products along gender lines you'll sell more. And what could be handier for companies than selling girls the idea that shopping is one of life's greatest, most empowering, rewards?Websites aimed at young girls, writes Orenstein, such as BarbieGirls, Be-Bratz orMoxiegirlz all feature games where they ''earn'' points to be spent virtual shopping.

As children's toys are circumscribed along gender lines, things become selfperpetuating. Kids want peer approval, so boys often avoid ''girly stuff'' and vice versa. But children's brains are highly malleable. Single-sex peer groups can reinforce kids' biases and, over time, as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has pointed out, this changes their brains, potentially limiting abilities and ambitions.

Even books read at primary school are often gender demarcated. Recently,my seven-year-old brought home two books from the Girlz Rock! and Boyz Rule! series (published byMacmillan). The girls' book was set in a shopping mall; the boys' was about camping and fart jokes. Interestingly, Penguin has just launched a series of historical novels for young girls that will allow them to step away from contemporary life. Publisher Jane Godwin told The Canberra Times the historical storylines would encourage girls to believe you can be valued not for ''your glamour, your make-up or your mobile phone'' but for qualities such as strength, resourcefulness and sensitivity to others. So much for contemporary life. The influence of marketing might seem a trivial issue but it gets results. This week The Age reported that kids found breakfast cereal tastier when it came in a box displaying cartoon characters.

Another American study has found that female college students exposed to just two sexist ads showed less interest in maths and science-related careers than classmates who watched gender-neutral ads.

In Australia, researchers have found that girls as young as seven have a poorer body image than boys. In a culture that has given us Botox, body-policing gossip mags and The Biggest Loser, improving your appearance has somehow been equated with transforming what's inside. This is rubbish. Yet mothers are often the ones buying kids this ultra girly stuff. It's hard not to. You can only say ''no'' so often. In her book Enlightened Sexism, author Susan Douglas has suggested that Western women may be unconsciously defusing the threat to male dominance posed by their progress in the workplace by obsessing over their faces, figures, clothing and ability to please men. It's a scary thought. It can be fun to dress up and look good, but are we launching our daughters on the same oppressive treadmill?

Of course, there are lots of toys and kids' TV shows featuring girls with more on their minds than looking good, from Bindi Irwin to the TV character CJ the DJ. And body image is a growing concern for older boys, too. But Orenstein's book contains an interview with Deborah Tolman, a professor of human sexuality studies at New York's City University, which is pretty disturbing. ''By the time they are teenagers,'' said Tolman, ''the girls I talk to respond to qestions about how their bodies feel—questions about sexuality or desire—by talking about howtheir bodies look. They will say something like, 'I felt like I looked good.'''

Rather than enjoying their own erotic pleasure, these girls were most concerned about how they looked during sex. This obsession with appearances is surely a perfectly scented prison, restricting girls who deserve more.

Suzy Freeman-Greene is an Age senior writer

Follow the National Times on Twitter: @NationalTimesAU

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Comments
20 comments so far
Good one Suzy. I borrowed some books form the library the other day to read to my three year old. One of them featured a dad at home with the kids doing mundane things like washing, baking a cake, etc. It was a shock that that character wasn't a mummy... and I was appalled at what I'd unthinkingly got used to. While I avoid the worst excesses of the girlie shit on offer at retailers, I feel a bit inadequate to the task of exposing my daughter to the sorts of activities dads expose to boys (husband is away a lot). Ideas, anyone?

EL | Bentleigh - March 12, 2011, 10:27AM
Look, I'm a feminist, or rather, an equalist, but I love Barbie! To me she not only opitimises femininity, and as feminists we should embrace and celebrate our femininity, but she says, I dont need a man, he's merely an accessory, and Barbie has had varied careers as a doctor, pilot, vet, etc - she kinda says "we can have it all!"

I'm not saying men are 'accessories', but I'm saying it's good to have a role model that doesn't 'NEED a man'! And this is important because females should evolve to not NEED a man, but perhaps be an equal in relationships and WANT a man if that is her chosen persuasion! lol

Anyway, I think the world is what you see it as, and if you focus on the 'pinkification of females' then that is what you will see and notice! If you acknowledge and embrace women as being equal to men in society and the workplace you will notice more women getting ahead, receiving promotions and gaining the ground and equality we so desperately seek! ;)

that is all...

Wow! | just wow - March 12, 2011, 10:30AM
Wow! Fantastic article - thank you so much for this much needed article on the insidious effect of marketing on young girls - its really a seriously concerning phenomenon, and as I see it, just part of the backlash against the latest surge in feminism -its the instilling at an ever younger age of the 'professional beauty requirement' - talked about at length by Naomi wolfe in The Beauty Myth. I won't even go into the moral bankruptcy of corporations seeking increased profits from this sort of appalling promotion of sexism and stupid gender stereotypes.

Good to see some mention of the current brain research - I wonder if parents would allow themselves to be so laissez faire on this issue if they knew it had a real chance of harming their girls brain and hence personality development, and of their ability to reach their full emotional and intellectual potential.

This is a really really important issue as these malevolent influences seem to be helping to shape the minds -and behaviours- of the current generation of girls. What a terrible waste of human potential it would be if some of this demeaning and sexist marketing and genderisation of toys led even a few girls to lower their career or scholastic expectations.

Depressing stuff. I will be encouraging a rigorous questioning of and scepticism about all gender stereotypes and norms in all my nieces and nephews, in an effort to ameliorate the deteriorating culture of childhood in countries like Australia.

Thanks for this article - lets have more like it please! - March 12, 2011, 10:59AM
As the mother of a daughter, I am very saddened by this trend.
I am trying to be a positive role model by being active & taking an interest in learning,
I focus on a healthy diet and exercise, rather than the number on the scales.

And when someone (who I thought knew me better) gave my daughter a t-shirt with 'Princess' across the front, it was quietly slipped into the bag for the charity shop.

GetReal | Melbourne - March 12, 2011, 11:10AM
Why is every single bit of gender related commentary on this site from a female / feminist view point.

The nature of boys toys and clothes could just as easily be painted as stereotypical, and harmful to their balanced upbringing. But here's the thing, boys and boys and girls are girls, if you had not noticed.

Every day there is a feminist viewpoint thrown in our face, without so much as consideration from the other viewpoint. It gets so tiresome.

Bryce | Melb - March 12, 2011, 11:13AM
I think the desire for Barbies and similar girly products is about identity. Girls want to be beautiful and admired, it is like being loved. The cues they are getting are not only from girly marketing but from advertising and the mass media, the culture of the super model.
Advertising doesn't care that it is promoting shallow and narcisistic values, it only cares that it works. The desire to be admired and loved is a strong one, it is a fundamental part of our make up. The super model is not only admired but desired and this gives her power. It is a seductive message for girls.
Girly products and marketing reflect the values of the broader media
and society. It's not pretty.

Andrew | Reservoir - March 12, 2011, 11:24AM
Feminism has done its job to a certain extent but ladies there is a long way to go because there is a concerted effort now to drag women down using the physical and image and well what they look like. It is all about de-powering. Of course totally scary thing is the way they are starting in on kids. It's a form of child abuse actually. Corporate pediphilia. And really scary? The amount of parents who buy into it. Literally! Wake up to yourselves you mongs.

Anntoinette | Sydney - March 12, 2011, 11:34AM
Bryce.... don't you realise you have to be in the loop to get any recognition? To do this you have to spout the same kind of meaningless cant that the rest of the "significant females" .... who get onto postage stamps (thank goodness they have self adhesive) and those who control the agenda in the ABC,newspapers and chattering classes (social nazis) demand.
Anntoinette...... "kind of child abuse..... Corporate pediphilia?" really...... why don't you just get a restraining order for domestic intellectual violence taken out against them..... I'm sure you could make some argument up to justify that?
I assume women have had some input into the design and marketing concept of these toys of "mass oppression"?
De-powering of women is about growing up without a sense of who you are, lacking a presonalily, lacking will power etc.
And as the principal care provider and educator of children... and that includes girls..... don't you think you should show how empowered you are ..... and by example and skillful management of children.....lead your child along the "right path" to adulthood.......... or is it all too hard... and you do are oppressed by the male dominated universe?......... yawn.

costa parki mik | melbourne - March 12, 2011, 11:56AM
Oooooooh, here it comes, the great ugly ooze of misogyny has started.

Thanks, @ costa caravan park mik, I had a good chuckle. Do you and your ilk realise (actually probably not) that your comments prove my point so perfectly?

Anntoinette | Sydney - March 12, 2011, 12:26PM
''expressing yourself'' through shopping, make-up and clothes is not something to criticise so harshly. Self-expression can take many forms and I really think a complete life includes how you present yourself to the world. It's a reflection of the things you represent, the music you like, the places you go, the people you admire. Media articles are confusing on this issue, if women dress up they are superficial, if they don't they have 'let themselves go'. As for WildScience, I know that as a teacher myself, the way you get children interested in a topic (and science is an extremely valid topic) is to press their buttons. Boys buttons are pressed all the time - lured in with science kits that blow things up and shoot rockets, yet this doesn't rate a mention in the negative stereotype situation? I have two boys. I haven't steered them in a particular direction as far as favourite colours and toys but since they could get up on their legs sticks have been magically transformed into guns and pink is shunned like the devil. Some kids just fit their gender roles neatly. They know the options, they have so much information available to them and they are not stupid as this article is nudging negatively toward. Yes adults are responsible for guidance but ultimately with the plethora of options youngsters have today we can't be blaming toy companies for our girls' bad decisions. So as the ancient sayings go 'boys will be boys' and conversely girls will be girls. Kids have choices.

melodypop | Melbourne - March 12, 2011, 12:58PM
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