Just Pretend

In her early years, my daughter loved ponies. We spent hours in her bedroom, galloping the little creatures back and forth from one magical adventure to the next.  We moved, later, to Disney Princesses.  Barbie came next, along with those frightening Monster High creatures, which actually brings me to the more focused point of today’s column, which is that I think my daughter might be in a cult. 

Like many very young ladies, she seems to be a devoted member of the “Cult of the Teenage Girl,” the weird, spooky little society running rampant in our culture that worships a fictionalized version of the adolescent female.

Now, as a high school English teacher, I am treading on loose gravel with this topic, so, to clarify, the “Cult of the Teenage Girl,” ultimately, is a marketing ploy designed to get my money.  If you don’t have a little girl in your home, let me explain.  A tremendous amount of the toys supposedly designed for little girls are actually miniature adolescents.

While my son gets to imagine he is a super hero in New York saving the planet, my daughter often pretends she is a sophomore in high school saving text messages.   As a teacher of sophomores, this hardly seems fair.

In fact, I’m going to go ahead and call this odd trend the sophomorization of little girl toys.  For example, those My Little Ponies I was talking about earlier?  They’re still around, prancing around on all fours and being precious, but there is also an alternate storyline where a few ponies end up going through some weird dimension portal into a world where they are walking around on their back hooves like human beings.  They exist in a high school, no less, and spend part of their time worried about boy ponies and getting a date for the dance.

The D.C. super heroes, too, have jumped into the mix.  Just a couple weeks ago we watched a very short cartoon in which a bunch of the female D.C. heroes, such as Wonder Woman, end up hanging out amiably with D.C. villainesses like Cat Woman, Poison Ivy, and even Joker’s significant other, Harley Quinn.  Again, they’ve all been inexplicably morphed into teenagers.  Why?  Because I guess being in high school is cool. 

The most peculiar sophomorization came from the Disney Princesses themselves.  About two years ago I was in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart and witnessed Ariel dolls and Cinderella dolls, all decked out with “adolescent” trinkets.  They had been glammed up, I suppose, to make them look more like teenagers. But here’s the thing: Cinderella already IS a teenage girl!  So is Ariel!  Just ask Sebastian the Crab.  Why the impulse to turn characters that are already adolescent more, well, adolescent?

The answer lies not in the age of the character herself.  Peter Parker, after all, starts out as a high school nerd.  But boys aren’t pretending to be Peter Parker.  They’re pretending to be Spider Man.  What our society expects our boys to emulate is much different, and, to a large extent, more admirable.

This brings us to perhaps the most annoying aspect of the whole deal.  Many of these fictional “heroes” my daughter has learned to imitate are often petty, loud, superficial and dumb.  These are hardly qualities I want her celebrating in her final years as an actual child.  To add insult to injury, these companies are selling toys on the mostly false pretense that being a high schooler is totally fun and little girls should pretend to be one in their spare time.

I teach in a real high school and spend about eight hours a day with real, not pretend adolescents. Most of them are well adjusted and pretty pleasant to be around, but they very rarely seem to be having the kind of super fun that would justify turning Wonder Woman into Wonder Girl.  Granted, they are at school, busy with school work, so my analysis is not exactly scientific.

The larger point though, is that with many “boy toys”—and we’ll go ahead and use super heroes again as an example—there is a clear distinction between reality and fantasy.  My son loves Iron Man, for example, but somewhere, deep within his Kindergarten mind, he probably knows that he is not really ever going to be Iron Man.  It’s pretend.  Iron Man is not real.  As he matures, the obviously fictional element behind all the Avengers will fall away from him slowly, gradually, and he will grow into adolescence with the satisfaction that many super hero characteristics, such as bravery, loyalty, the guarantee of a sequel, can translate into reasonably adult behavior without the spandex and laser cannons.

But my daughter is pretending to be a high school girl.  Since she will be a real high school girl much sooner than I want, it’s kind of a big deal to me that what she is emulating is grounded in some kind of authenticity.  Unfortunately, many of the “pretend” high school girls she is supposed to imagine herself as are grotesquely superficial.  They are often portrayed as unrealistically thin, hypersensitive about their social status, and enamored with material objects, like cell phones and high heels.

Does this describe some real sophomores in a real high school?  Sure, but very few of us would pretend as though that’s a good thing.  Very few sophomores, for that matter, would consider those ideals worth celebrating, either.

Thus, my wife and I went out on a limb recently and removed some of the snarkier programming from our satellite package; some of the Disney and Nickelodeon programs that often portray teenagers as loud, vapid, and tyrannical in their own homes.  This decision was met with anger from our daughter and a decrease in our monthly bill; two sure fire indicators that we were on the right track.

It’s a small gesture, I suppose, but in a world where “throwing like a girl” is still often shouted as in insult, every little bit helps.