The Princess Factory

In a terrific new book, "Cinderella Ate My Daughter," Peggy Orenstein documents her struggle to raise a daughter amid a warped culture in which little girls are falsely taught that beauty is as important as brains. Thanks to relentless mass marketing & media (and bad parenting), we put girls on a princess assembly line where they begin as gender-neutral (the innocent phase) then become Cinderella-obsessed (the pink, frilly phase) and then become Barbarella-obsessed (the stripper pole phase). I’m oversimplifying, but few girls will emerge from the American Princess Factory not being mixed up. "It's not that princesses can't expand girls' imaginations," Orenstein explained to the Daily Beast. "But in today's culture, princess starts to turn into something else. It's not just being the fairest of them all, it's being the hottest of them all, the most Paris Hilton of them all, the most Kim Kardashian of them all.” Yikes. A good buddy of mine and his wife have two of the sweetest, most precocious little girls you ever saw. I admire their mettle because raising two little princesses (and simultaneously staying sane) would be a bridge way too far for moi.