Peggy Orenstein on the marketing of pink

From her home in north Berkeley where she lives with her filmmaker husband Steven Okazaki and seven year old daughter Daisy, Peggy Orenstein has been opining for years about the world of girls and feminism for the New York Times magazine. Last week, her latest book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter, was published and it is getting big play in both legacy and on-line media. It is both an expose of and meditation about the corporate push to market princesses and pink and early sexuality to young girls.

Orenstein just escaped the snows of Chicago (she got on the last plane leaving O’Hare on Tuesday) and is about to embark on the West Coast portion of her book tour. (She will be speaking Feb. 7 at St. John’s Church in Berkeley and Feb. 17 at A Great Good Place for Books in Oakland) Ghost Word caught up with her to ask a few questions.

Do you wear pink?

Of course I wear pink. I’m not a crazy person. But it’s such a tiny slice of the rainbow and although in one way it seems to celebrate girlhood, it also repeatedly and firmly fuses girls’ identity to appearance then it presents that connection not only as innocent but as evidence of innocence. And that innocent pink pretty quickly turns into something else, a kind of diva, self-absorbed pink and ultimately a sexualized pink.

What is Daisy’s position on the color now?

Truthfully, she was actually never that into pink, which is part of why I became so aware of it.  It was never her favorite color, but people were constantly pressing it on her. I remember being in a drug store and the very nice clerk offered her a balloon, then asked what color she wanted and before she could answer, (I think she was going to say purple) said, “I bet I know,” and handed her the pink one. Daisy looked at me kind of confused, like she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to say thank you or no thank you. And I thought, really? When did THIS happen? I think last time I asked her, her favorite color was “rainbow.” That’s all right by me.

What’s the big deal about little girls being obsessed with princesses? Hasn’t that always been the case?

Comparing the way girls do Princess today to the way we played is like comparing a five-channel TV to a satellite dish. There are 26,000 Disney Princess products alone—considering they can’t slap them on cars, liquor, cigarettes anti-depressants or tampons, that means they’re on EVERYTHING. And it becomes this mandate, the only game in town. I remember going to Daisy’s preschool and they were doing a project where they were making a book, each one filling in the sentence “if I were a [blank] I’d [blank] to the store.” So if I were a ball I’d roll to the store. And the boys had filled the sentence in all kinds of ways. Yes, some said Lightening McQueen but they said puppies, bugs, raisins, all sorts of things. The girls said exactly four things: Princess, Ballerina, Butterfly and Fairy. One especially ambitious girl said “Princess, butterfly fairy Ballerina.” It’s too narrow. The teacher was really surprised—she’d been around a long time and this was really when the princess juggernaut was truly taking off. She had tried to get the girls to broaden their imaginations but said they just wouldn’t.

No question it’s cute. And it can feel empowering because you think, well, girls are freer to express their femininity and their sexuality and we're not tamping that down or denying it anymore. But it’s part of this flume ride that defines girlhood as makeovers and spa birthday parties and princesses and Bratz dolls and being the fairest and ultimately the hottest of them all, that encourages them to define themselves from the outside in instead of from the inside out.  It pretty quickly slides from playing pretty, to playing “sassy” to playing sexy, which does the opposite of what people might think in terms of girls’ emotional and psychological health. Being objectified—judging yourself by the way you think others see you--actually disconnects them from their sexuality and makes for decreased sexual health as they get older. One of the most sobering conversations I had was with Deborah Tolman, who does research on girls and desire. She told me that by the time girls are teenagers, when she asks them questions about how arousal or desire felt they respond by how they think they looked. She has to tell them looking good is not a feeling. As parents of daughters—and for those of us who are women ourselves—I think we understand that potential, that vulnerability, and it’s the last thing we want for our girls. So it’s the magnitude, the dominance and what, in the commercial culture, it’s channeling girls into that’s disturbing.

Claremont Book Group -- 90 years old and still going strong

The Claremont Book Club must certainly be one of the oldest book groups in the nation: it has been in continuous existence for 90 years.

Every month, women who live within the gates of the Claremont residential section of Berkeley -- once the most exclusive area in the East Bay -- gather to hear authors talk or to exchange books. Over the years the Claremont Book Group has heard from some of the nation’s most distinguished authors and artists.

The group today holds on to some vestiges of its once-elite roots, but with a Berkeley twist. To be a member, you must live within a 10-block area that is enclosed by brick pillars. The area, adjacent to the Claremont Hotel, was developed in 1905 by the real estate group Mason McDuffie and is home to houses designed by Julia Morgan, John Hudson Thomas and other established architects. These are grand and stately mansions with beveled glass, stucco fronts and price tags topping $2 million.

The 44 members and 20 associates of the Claremont Book Group drink tea and coffee poured from sterling silver tea sets and eat heart healthy salads and lunch dishes, much like their forebears. But the house where I attended Thursday’s luncheon had an Obama sign prominently displayed on its front lawn, just like many of its neighboring homes. So while members of the book club may live in elegant houses reminiscent of another era, many of them are resolutely liberal.

I have heard about the Claremont Book Group for years, but since I don’t live within the gates of the Claremont I am not eligible to be a member. I was invited as a guest on Oct. 16 to hear two authors, Peggy Orenstein, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine and the author of the memoir Waiting for Daisy, and Sylvia Brownrigg, a novelist with two books coming out in 2008 – The Delivery Room and Morality Tale, set in the nearby Elmwood neighborhood of Berkeley. It was fun to listen to these engaging authors talk about their lives and work while sitting in an elegant living room sipping tea out of a china cup. (And no one seemed to mind when I knocked over a glass of ice water on the Oriental carpet.)

Orenstein and Brownrigg met years ago at a writing group and are now close friends. In a bizarre twist, they and other members of the group found they were writing about similar themes – maternal loss and grief. Orenstein joined the group after suffering numerous miscarriages and round after round of in vitro fertilization treatments. Brownrigg’s second child had been born prematurely and only lived an hour. Another member of the writing group was dealing with the loss of a child to SIDS. “We were all contending with age and grieving and changes of life,” Orenstein explained. “We wanted to break silences and address things people don’t talk about.”

Orenstein had been a successful journalist for years and had published two books before she began working on Waiting for Daisy. But she never felt like a true writer, she said, until she began writing in the first person about her own personal tragedies. She was in Japan on a fellowship when she discovered she was pregnant. Her husband, the filmmaker Steven Okazaki, was back in Berkeley. Joy quickly turned to grief when Orenstein miscarried. Since she was so far from home and couldn’t communicate well in Japanese, Orenstein dealt with her sorrow by writing. She found the writing cathartic, as it helped her cope and make sense of the chaos she felt inside. Years later, Orenstein turned her jottings into a book.

Brownrigg, who is married to Sedge Thomson, the host of the radio show West Coast Live, grew up in Los Altos but lived in London for many years. The Delivery Room is about a therapist and her patients, one of whom is dealing with maternal loss. Morality Tale is set near the area of the Claremont Book Group – but outside its gates – and is a lighter, more humorous book about marriage. Brownrigg will be reading at Mrs. Dalloway’s bookstore on College Avenue in Berkeley at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday Nov. 13^th.