My daughter got a make-your-own messenger bag for her 7th birthday. It was like a cheap messenger bag kind of thing, and then iron-on transfers to put on it, and the iron-on transfers were like pink and purple and orange hearts and stars and flowers and whatever, and your name, and things like that with letters. But then it said, one of them was ‘pampered princess’ and one of them was ‘spoiled’ and one of them was ‘brat.’
And my daughter looked at those and said, ‘Mom, why do they want me to put that on my purse?’ And I said, ‘Gosh, I don’t know.’
And all over the box and all over the instructions it said, ‘It’s all about me.’ And that is a really powerful message that girls get in these products: ‘It’s all about me,’ ‘It’s all about you,’ ‘Be true, be you,’ – that’s the Moxie Girlz slogan.
And so there’s this weird way that the ideas that were being put forth in the girl power slogans of the 1990s, which were about self-actualization and self-determination, and being valued for what you do and not how you look, have been distorted so that it’s its own opposite, so that girl power means being valued for how you look instead of what you do. And that being confident is expressed by being spoiled, pampered, bratty, narcisistic.
-Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter. Read full interview here!