Q: My five-year-old daughter has fallen for the girly pink thing. When she was younger, she practically only ever wore Queen Elsa’s dress from the Disney film Frozen, which was pretty embarrassing for me socially. Now she loves all that glitters: make-up, earrings, nail polish. Disturbingly, she talks about these things as being a way to make people ‘like her’ because they make her ‘look beautiful’. If it were up to me (a feminist and tomboy child of the 1980s), I’d dress her in gender-neutral dungarees and stripy tops. Should I let her pursue glamour? Or should I refuse to be complicit in the sexist power structures which aggressively market this notion of femininity to young girls? She has, by the way, a wild sense of fun and is fixated on the television trailer for RuPul’s Drg Rce...
A: There is a universal conflict in the life of children under late capitalism. On the one hand, there is the child’s radical imagination – their straightforward questions about life that make you rethink the world, the logical illogic of their jokes. Then there is the immense weight of the culture industry they’re made to love, which prises open their minds and fills them with tat. Your daughter’s love of Queen Elsa’s dress from Frozen irked, perhaps, because it was a reminder that your status as your child’s source of life and succour is in constant competition with the influence of the Walt Disney Corporation.
