Cinderella Ate My Daughter (14 page)

Wizards
is, all things considered, a pretty entertaining show. Gomez has the best comic timing of any Disney girl to date: at the very least, her repertoire of reactions extends beyond eye-bugging. The character she plays is strong, smart, and, aside from the hocus-pocus, surprisingly real: she does not seem to be all about being pretty, nor does she always make the right choices. It goes without saying that Gomez herself comes off as down to earth and adorable. That is her job. A
Wall Street Journal
profile gushed that her every-teen dressing room was decorated “with a bright floral rug, a shag blanket thrown across a sofa and a few scattered bookshelves.” A quick Google search of news items generated right around the time of her album’s release portrays her as a UNICEF ambassador to Ghana, a dog lover, and someone who “gives back to her community” (bestowing a thousand dollars’ worth of supplies on her elementary school alma mater courtesy of OfficeMax). Although she is actually a year older than Miley, she looks younger, and she assured the
Journal
reporter that she is “in no rush to be twenty-five.” Sound familiar?

Historical memory for pop culture tends to be short, especially where children’s idols are concerned. The parents of today’s six-year-olds have only a hazy recall of Hilary Duff’s or Britney Spears’s or even Lindsay Lohan’s stints as “good-girl” icons. So it is easy to convince them that
this
girl is unlike those others, that
this
time it honestly will be different. I want to believe it myself—I like Selena. But I wonder: her virginity has already been made a selling point—like Miley before her, she wears a “true love waits” ring, meaning she has vowed to remain “pure” until marriage, presumably to a Justin Bieber clone on a white horse. I suspect that you cannot commodify a girl’s virginity without, eventually, commodifying what comes after. Regardless, how realistic—how
desirable
—is that Disney version of girls’ sexuality, either for Selena or for her fans?

Let me be clear here: I object—strenuously—to the sexualization of girls but not necessarily to girls having sex. I expect and want my daughter to have a healthy, joyous erotic life before marriage. Long, long,
long
before marriage. I do, however, want her to understand why
she’s doing it: not for someone else’s enjoyment, not to keep a boyfriend from leaving, not because everyone else is. I want her to do it for herself. I want her to explore and understand her body’s responses, her own pleasure, her own desire. I want her to be able to express her needs in relationship, to say no when she needs to, to value reciprocity, and to experience true intimacy. The virgin/whore cycle of the pop princesses, like so much of the girlie-girl culture, pushes in the opposite direction, encouraging girls to view self-objectification as a feminine rite of passage.

The debate over whether Miley’s (or Britney’s or Vanessa’s or someday, mark my words, Selena’s) photo spreads are “too seductive” or “too suggestive” for her age is beside the point. Of course they are. They have to be. What other choice do these girls have? What choices are they given? I would like to see the
Hannah Montana
episode in which Miley Stewart confronts the real truth about what it means to be a girl growing up in the privilege and the confines of the spotlight’s glare. What would that look like? A lot, I would bet, like Miley Cyrus’s actual microscopically dissected life. Ultimately, it was not the
Vanity Fair
shoot or the stripper stunt or the hooker heels that crossed the line: it was the fetishizing of Miley’s wholesomeness, the inevitable trajectory from accidentally to accidentally-on-purpose to simply on-purpose sexy. Why isn’t it until that final leap, when a girl actively acknowledges and participates in what is happening, that parents of young fans cry foul?

Back at the Oracle Arena, Miley paced the runway; flipped her mane; got jiggy with the boys in the band; lay down on her back, legs tucked under, jamming on an air guitar. She donned a harness and went airborne while performing her hit “Fly on the Wall.” She soared again on a candy apple red Harley during a cover of Joan Jett’s classic “I Love Rock and Roll.” During the entire ninety-minute set, however, she sang only two
Hannah Montana
songs (one of which was conspicuously steamed up), and through multiple costume changes she never went near a blond wig. This was emphatically a
Miley
show, but many of the grade school fans there that night, not to mention their moms, had failed to get that memo—and they were not happy about it. The little girl sitting next to me, who, judging by her missing teeth, was about seven, watched the spectacle, her ponytail bobbing with the rhythm of each song. But eventually she seemed to grow impatient, possibly overwhelmed by the thumping bass.

“Where’s Hannah?” she asked her mother. The older woman glanced at the stage where Miley was getting busy, grinding her pelvis against a backup guitarist with lank hair and an untucked plaid shirt. Then she turned back to her child.

“I don’t know, honey,” she said, shaking her head. “I guess she’s not here.”

Chapter Eight
-
It’s All About the Cape

O
ne of Daisy’s classmates, Ava, is five years old. She is five years old, and she is fat. She was a fat infant. She was a fat toddler. It is pretty clear that she’ll stay a fat little girl and she’ll likely be a fat teenager. Fat—that is to say, having a body mass index above what is considered medically healthy—is her natural state, the way she is built. She is a big girl with a big appetite. And that, her mother, Holly, knows, could make Ava’s life difficult. Holly worries that her daughter will spend her girlhood locked in a losing battle against her size, sinking into self-loathing when she fails. She wonders daily how she can help her daughter to eat healthfully, be more physically active, but also feel good about the body she’s got. She and her husband work with Ava’s pediatrician on portion control, on how to distract their perpetually hungry daughter from reaching for seconds or thirds. Sometimes, though, Holly admitted, she fights the urge to just snatch the food right out of the child’s mouth. The weight would be an issue if Ava were a boy, too, but for a girl, one who is already enamored of Hannah and Selena and all things teenagerly, Holly said she feels as if “there is a train heading straight for us.

“It must be so nice not having to worry about this,” she sighed as we sat in her kitchen, our two girls upstairs in Ava’s room playing Calico Critters. I shook my head, told Holly she was mistaken: rare is the mother—whether her girl is thin, fat, or somewhere in between—who does not worry about her daughter’s body image. The standards of female beauty are so punishing that even should a girl miraculously fit them, she may still believe she falls short. As mothers, we may not want our daughters to feel compelled to conform to that ideal, but what to do with a child who, either physically or temperamentally, cannot—or does not want to? What is the alternative to thin, pretty, and hot (regardless of other qualities) as the source of feminine power and identity?

Holly herself is tall and slim. She has never had to work at that, which is not to say she doesn’t have her own issues about weight and food. Growing up, she would walk away from friends when the topic turned to pounds, and she refused to step on a scale. “It was so important to me
not
to think about it,” she said, “which means, of course, that it did have a hold on me. But I lived in my head. The truth is, I hardly had a perception of myself as having a body. Ava is a really embodied person.”

Ava also happens to be a little ray of sunshine, one of the most delightful, happy, intuitive children I have ever met. But lately, the occasional cloud has skittered across her bright eyes. She is beginning to recognize that there is something about her that is different from other children, and whatever that something is, it matters. Take the boy on the school playground who taunted her for being “fat.” Ava marched home and wrote him a note saying she had not appreciated the comment. She presented him with it the next morning. “I was so impressed,” Holly said. “I thought, ‘Oh, please, hold on to that ability for your whole life. Because you probably
will
need it.’ ”

There have been other incidents, too, and so far, Ava has stood her ground. I marveled that these kindergartners already knew that being fat was
shameful
, not a characteristic so much as a matter of character. I mean, of course they did, right? I had read the studies that said nearly half of girls in first through third grades want to be thinner; that 81 percent of ten-year-old girls were afraid of getting fat; that half of nine-year-old girls surveyed were already dieting; and that by seven Canadian girls of normal weight believed they were too heavy. I had even heard glimmers of fatphobia from my own daughter, while playing Old Maid (a politically incorrect game in any event): Daisy did not so much as twitch an eyebrow when she picked the twinkling-eyed spinster with the blue sunbonnet—my girl has a poker face that would rival the gambler Annie Duke’s—but she groaned whenever she drew the Fat Lady. When I asked her why, she rolled her eyes and whispered, “Mom, she’s
fat
.”

Where did that come from? I never,
ever
comment on my own body size in front of her and certainly don’t mention hers. Did she learn it from her classmates? Absorb it from the movies and books that routinely portray fat people as stupid, greedy, or sinister (when was the last time you saw a chubby Disney Princess, animated or human)? Could revulsion toward overweight people be natural? After all, the Bible warns against gluttony, and the ancient Greeks preached (though did not always follow) a doctrine of moderation. Or, as with the assumption that girls are born loving pink, have we so thoroughly internalized our response to fat that we’ve forgotten it was not always thus? Plump women may today be portrayed as unattractive and loved only by their cats, but pinups of mid-nineteenth-century stage stars show bosomy ladies with bodacious thighs and ham-hock arms. In that era, it was slender women who were considered suspect—desiccated and asexual—especially once they had hit middle age. Those not blessed with embonpoint would mask their deficiency under layers of bustles and ruffles. Children were considered sickly unless they were stuffed like Thanksgiving turkeys. Ava would have been held up as the model daughter and Holly as the perfect mother.

According to the historian Peter Stearns’s book
Fat History
, public sentiment began shifting toward the svelte in the 1890s, when overweight was first linked to chronic disease. Fat did not take on a moral dimension, however, until the cause was taken up by Christian ministers, who railed against the increasing sedentariness of the postindustrial middle class. The timing of that trend was fortuitous: their previous target—rising materialism—was proving unpopular. Weight, Stearns writes, was a perfect substitute, not only replacing conspicuous consumption but legitimizing it: as long as you exercised restraint over eating, you could freely indulge your appetite for luxury. Initially, fat was equally demonized in both sexes, but by the 1920s, the focus had narrowed primarily to women and girls. Since then, one could argue, the more extreme our consumer culture has become, the more hostile we have grown toward even slight overweight in women. Not just concerned, not just disapproving, but
repelled
. And all the while, our own scales tip ever heavier.

“Maybe in ten years, by the time Ava is a teenager, the pendulum will have swung,” Holly said, hopefully. “Then again, you have Kate Moss going around saying ‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’ ”

Now, this is where I should step in to give advice to Holly, to you, to
myself
about how to combat the outrageous expectations foisted onto our daughters, to ensure, whether they are thin, fat, or anywhere in between, that they grow up with a positive and healthy body image: how to insulate them from eating disorders or simply garden-variety hatred of their butts. And believe me, after twenty years of writing and talking about girls, I know what to say: I have delivered the script hundreds of times at colleges and high schools, in churches and temples, to parent groups, teachers, Girl Scout leaders. So, for the record, here is what you are Officially Supposed To Do: stress what your daughter’s body can
do
over how it is decorated. Praise her for her accomplishments over her looks. Make sure Dad is on board—a father’s loving regard and interest in a girl, as the first man in her life, is crucial. Involve her in team sports: a flotilla of research shows that participation lowers teen pregnancy rates, raises self-esteem, improves grades, probably cures the common cold. Volunteerism can give girls greater perspective and purpose, reducing body obsession. Media literacy can raise consciousness about marketers’ manipulations.

I would have rattled off those solutions with the greatest confidence and authority—before I had a daughter of my own. Because the truth is, regardless of what we say, from the get-go everything else, everyone else, in our culture tells girls that their weight and looks matter—a lot. Though appearance
shouldn’t
dictate how they are treated by others—let alone their self-worth—it does. Talent? Effort? Intelligence? All are wonderful, yet by middle school, how a girl feels about her appearance—particularly whether she is thin enough, pretty enough, and hot enough—has become the single most important determinant of her self-esteem (which, by the way, makes self-esteem itself a trickier concept than most people realize; it is not an inherent good but must be derived from appropriate sources). If Princesses, Moxies, and Mileys are not responsible for that, exactly, Lord knows they reinforce it. Even as I wish it were otherwise—even as I
fight
for it to be otherwise—I, too, know in my heart that how girls look does make a difference in how the world perceives them, and the more progress they make in other areas, the more that seems to be true.

And true for longer. Take an article I recently saw in
More
magazine: “Stars Who Make over 40 Look Fab.” The publication runs pieces like this all the time, and I can never decide whether they make me feel better or worse about my own (I’ll just say it) middle age. Though I applaud its rebel yell that women can remain attractive as we get o-l-d-e-r, I also feel a creeping despair—like, dang, now I
have
to be. I was secretly looking forward to letting it all go to hell at a certain point. But more than that, the mag did not even mention that every single one of the women they were holding up as role models had dyed away their gray; most had frozen time with Botox; others had moved on to a full complement of fillers, tucks, and lifts. Is that now so presumed, once princess ascends to queen, that it goes without saying? These were not great-looking older women. They were great-looking women who both can’t afford to get old and
can
afford not to. These days postforty women in the spotlight who go au naturel are considered courageous if not downright foolhardy. That perception is gradually trickling down to the rest of us. It is a nasty bind, as psychologists (and former models) Vivian Diller and Jill Muir-Sukenick write in
Face It
, a guide for women on coping with changing appearance: “Should women simply grow old naturally, since their looks don’t define them, or should they fight the signs of aging, since beauty and youth are their currency and power?” Whether we like it or not, whichever we choose is a statement, one that earlier generations were not forced to make. What’s more, in another twist on KGOY, women are asking that question at ever-younger ages. Most of the 9.3 million women who underwent cosmetic procedures in 2008 were between thirty-five and fifty; nearly another quarter were between nineteen and thirty-four. That trend has created a market for a new picture book,
My Beautiful Mommy
, in which a little girl does everything she can “to help Mommy achieve her beautiful results.”

And Mommy had best get ready to return the favor, because just as the imperative to look good has extended further up the age spectrum, it is also creeping further down. Nearly 43,000 children under age eighteen (mostly girls, of course) surgically altered their appearance in 2008—over twice as many as a decade earlier. That does not include the tens of thousands who scheduled chemical peels, dermabrasion, or laser hair removal. Or (and someone please explain
this
to me) the 12,000 injections of Botox administered in 2009 to children ages thirteen to nineteen, presumably to prevent rather than remove wrinkles. So—stick with me here—that means girls are now simultaneously getting older younger
and
staying younger older. It also explains why the identical midriff-baring crop top is sold to eight-year-olds, eighteen-year-olds, and forty-eight-year-olds. The phases of our lives have become strangely blurred, as girls try to look like adult women and adult women primp and preen and work out like crazy in order to look like girls. Once again we are in fairy-tale territory, but instead of the jealous queen, it is the MILF who is gazing in the Magic Mirror, competing with her daughter to be Fairest of Them All.

A century ago, female self-improvement did not presume a stint under the scalpel, hours at the gym, or even a trip to the cosmetics counter. In her indispensable book
The Body Project
, the historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg wrote that for girls growing up before World War I, becoming a better person meant being
less
self-involved: helping others, focusing on schoolwork, becoming better read, cultivating empathy. To bring home the point, she compared New Year’s resolutions of girls at the end of the nineteenth century with those at the end of the twentieth. Here’s what a young woman of yore wrote:

“Resolved: to think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversations and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

And the contemporary girl:

“I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can… . I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”

As in the American Girl books, it seems that though the nineteenth-century girl may have lived in a more repressive era—before women could vote, when girls’ sights were set solely on marriage and motherhood—her sense of self-worth was enviably internal, a matter of deed over dress. Whatever other constraints she felt, her femininity was not defined by the pursuit of physical perfection; it was about character. I wonder why we adult women, with all our economic, political, and personal freedoms, have let this happen to our daughters.

When I was reporting
Schoolgirls
, a book for which I followed students at two different middle schools through eighth grade, I noticed my own habit, after a few days’ absence, of greeting my young subjects by commenting on some aspect of their appearance: their earrings, a new shirt, their hairstyles. I decided, as an experiment, to stop cold turkey, to find another way to connect: asking how a play rehearsal was going or what they were reading in English class. Anything. It felt surprisingly forced: physical compliments grease the conversational wheels among women and girls. After the book’s publication, I would speak about that experience, encouraging my audience to give it a try themselves for a few days. They would nod their heads; then, after a beat, someone would ask uncomfortably, “You mean we shouldn’t say
anything
about their looks?” How about this, I would counter: try not commenting on your
own
looks—on the size of your thighs or the tightness of your jeans. At least not in front of your daughter. Girls receive enough messages every day reducing them to their appearance without women they love delivering them, too.