Orenstein is back! This time with a new vengeance on
children’s toys, the Grimm’s brothers, and Twilight…
First, Orenstein rants and raves about her personal dilemma about
whether or not to buy her daughter a toy gun. She waffles on how it’s not a
typical girl toy, but, oh, it might make her child violent. I say why not? It’s
just a toy! There is no reason to read into its meaning that much. I can assure
her that children do not think deeply into the meaning of their toys when they’re
playing with them. I surely didn’t. When I was younger, I didn’t think anything
of playing with lightsabers with my brother, or playing with my Barbie dolls
when my friend came over. It was just play. We would imagine different scenes
for our lightsaber and sword fights, make up new moves, and pretend our Barbie
dolls were doing different things, which leads me to Orenstein’s next concern. Orenstein
was concerned that buying specific toys would limit her child’s creativity, forcing
her to only play with them in certain ways. But really, every toy you buy, no
matter what it is, has a “purpose” unless you’re buying your child a plank of
wood. A doll could be an inanimate friend for dress-up, a tea set for tea
parties, a truck to go vroom-vroom with… So Orenstein, just buy your daughter
the darn toy gun already. It matches her cowgirl hat anyway.
Orenstein also comments on Grimm’s versions of the fairy
tales Disney remade. She again worries that the goriness of the Brothers’ stories
will have a negative impact on her daughter. She says she would rather read
Disney stories to her children, saying, “Maybe I had been hasty in dismissing
fairy tales as a bastion of passive heroines and Prince Charming hype.” Here,
she finally admits the paradox of her motherhood — she wants her daughter to
“do and be whatever she dreams of as an adult, but [she also hopes] she will
find her Prince (or Princess) Charming and make [her, Orenstein] a grandma.”
Well isn’t that so contradictory to all of her previous complaints about
princess culture? If she feels this way, why is she so appalled at the Disney
Princesses? I think, Orenstein is finally realizing that her ideas
about feminism do not match with what she actually feels as a mother. In Chapter 5, she gave an anecdote about an incident at Target, where she vehemently opposed to buying the fairy doll that her daughter wanted, but upon seeing the sad and confused look on her daughter's face, caved in and bought the toy anyway. Maybe her
lapse into feeling this way is because she is so ingrained with traditional
gender stereotypes from her childhood…or maybe it’s because princesses are not actually
all that bad. Children need fantasy in their lives because their imaginations
are so much more active than adults, and they need something to feed them. They
need to play and pretend to be princesses and monsters because it’s a natural
part of childhood. Nobody can take that away.
In my opinion, Orenstein takes her opposition to Disney princesses
a little too far. Sometimes, you just have to let a child’s imagination run
wild.
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