True-or-False Survey: What's Your Take On This Statement From 'Chatelaine'?

"Is Cinderella bad for our daughters' future self-esteem?"

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http://www.chatelaine.com/

http://lifestyle.ca.msn.com/family-parenting/ages-...

The plight of boys has been making headlines for the past five years: They're bombing school! Addicted to video games! Failing to launch! So girls are home free, right?

No way, say the psychologists and researchers whose ability to make mortgage payments depends on detecting girl crises.

According to Cinderella Ate My Daughter, released in January, the toys girls play with may have serious negative effects, not only on their self-esteem but, later, on their sexual behaviour. Hairs standing up on the back of your neck yet? Yes, it's a girl crisis all right! Although American journalist Peggy Orenstein's tone is different - wry and memoir-ish rather than grimly urgent - her exploration of pop culture's impact on the lives and psyches of girls starts with the standard assertion of all girl-crisis lit: Our daughters have it both easier and harder than ever before.

Also see:

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Do gender stereotypes really hold true?

Boys vs. girls: Why each gender rocks

As one gender barrier after another has fallen, experts have insisted that the more equal the playing field becomes, the more dangers girls face. In the '60s and '70s, some conservatives warned that equality of opportunity and sexual permissiveness threatened the minds and bodies of girls. In the 1980s and 1990s, many feminists declared that girls were, increasingly, victims: of date rape, of the beauty myth, of a backlash against feminism, of academic discrimination and of what bestselling author Mary Pipher called "a girl-poisoning culture" that renders girls "much more oppressed" than ever before. Today's crisis concerns girls' sexuality: they've morphed (in the media, anyway) from cowering victims to hussies who dress like hookers and service boys they barely know - brainwashed, so the argument goes, by highly sexualized media images.

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Now, there's some truth to every girl crisis, which is one reason they resonate with mothers, who are all too familiar with the overwhelming pressure to look good and be good - at everything: sports, relationships, work. And, weirdly, there's something comforting about a girl crisis because it presents a cosmology, a complete system for understanding this brave new world that's so different from the one in which we grew up.

Lifestyle TV: Q&A with 'Cinderella Ate My Daughter' author

But actually all girl crises are rooted in an old-fashioned stereotype: Girls are passive creatures to whom bad things happen. Nothing is ever girls' fault; rather, blame is pinned on male privilege or "the culture" (a problematic concept in this day and age, when two girls may live next door to each other yet be immersed in entirely different stews of values and practices). Yes, societal factors are also cited as causes of boys' troubles, but there is a strong sense in most boys-are-failing literature that boys themselves - and, in some cases, absent fathers (for once, mothers aren't blamed) - are to some extent responsible for their fate. They're lazy, we're told. If only they could be as disciplined about their homework as they are about downloading porn!

It's interesting to consider why the better girls do, the more emphatically experts stress the obstacles to and internal costs of their success - and why, as parents, we want to believe girls have it worse than boys. It's as though we don't quite accept our daughters' actual achievements. Females now make up the majority of the student population on campus as well as the majority in almost all professional programs, such as law and medicine. In today's economy, with manufacturing jobs going the way of the woolly mammoth, higher education is key, and girls appear poised to rule the world.

This didn't happen overnight. It began a quarter century ago but went largely unnoticed because of the hullabaloo over the girl crisis of the day. Remember that American Association of University Women (AAUW) study in 1991 claiming girls are "silenced" in the classroom? It felt entirely plausible. But in reality, by 1991, girls had surpassed boys on many significant academic measures; they were already, for instance, in the majority on American campuses. (Perhaps that explains the "silence": they were busy studying.)