Aurelius Founder and editor of the Social Memo



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Writing for AlterNet, Toni Nagy, who also writes for the Huffington Post and Salon, has written an article detailing her disappointment when she found out that her daughter likes the color pink and envisions herself as a princess.Her article, titled “ What’s a Feminist Mom to Do With a Disney Princess-Loving Daughter? ” reads, “When I was pregnant, my prevailing philosophy was that gender was a construct created by social convention, and I was convinced my child would transcend the imposed definitions of femininity or masculinity.”Ms. Nagy further “limited her screen time and tried to introduce a variety of stimuli that avoided all platforms of stereotypes.” Despite her best efforts, however, her “daughter still got into everything pink, and everything princess.”She laments, “I tried. Oh god, did I try. But unless I was going to move to an intentional community and live in a geodesic dome off the grid, chances were my kid would at some point be exposed to American culture at large.“I made a true effort to avoid indoctrinating her with conventional feminine interests, yet despite my insistence that girls could play with trucks, my daughter formed her own preferences to everything Disney Princess,” she continues.Her friends, who Nagy jokingly refers to as people “who eat only biodynamic berries harvested in the moonlight,” could not escape “big business stimulus” and now “their kids are still captivated by the corporate cacophony of commercialism.”When she asked children what it meant to be a princess, they responded that it meant to be nice and to be royalty. “Even though the girls genuinely care about the emotional qualities of their heroines,” Nagy argues however, “their vision is consequently manipulated by the aesthetic they are presented with.”She thus states, “The princess personality isn’t the problem as much as the beauty standard she represents.”Nagy concludes, “If we want to raise women who believe their significance extends beyond their beauty, we can’t pump little girls with the message that goodness = extravagant dresses and a perfect physique.”