CINDERELLA ATE MY DAUGHTER
Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
By Peggy Orenstein
244 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.
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Book Review - Cinderella Ate My Daughter - By Peggy Orenstein - NYTimes.com.
CINDERELLA ATE MY DAUGHTER
Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture
By Peggy Orenstein
244 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.99.
Excerpt: ‘Cinderella Ate My Daughter’ (harpercollins.com)
Yet the princess phase, at least in its current hyper-feminine and highly commercial form, is anything but natural, or so Peggy Orenstein argues in “Cinderella Ate My Daughter.” As she tells the story, in 2000 a Disney executive named Andy Mooney went to check out a “Disney on Ice” show and found himself “surrounded by little girls in princess costumes. Princess costumes that were — horrors! — homemade. How had such a massive branding opportunity been overlooked? The very next day he called together his team and they began working on what would become known in-house as ‘Princess.’ ” Mooney’s revelation yielded a bonanza for the company. There are now more than 26,000 Disney Princess items on the market; in 2009, Princess products generated sales of $4 billion.
Disney didn’t have the tiara market to itself for long. Orenstein takes us on a tour of the princess industrial complex, its practices as coolly calculating as its products are soft and fluffy. She describes a toy fair, held at the Javits
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Posted by WPWI on 12/14/2010 at 05:39 AM in ANNOUNCEMENTS, BOOK RECOMMENDATION, COMMENTARY, GLOBAL ISSUES | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Forward Motion
Forward Motion
I had an early-early flight, so I booked a hotel near the airport and took the train out the night before. Problem was, I'm so used to going to the airport that I forgot to get off at the hotel stop and instead rode all the way to PDX.
Then I stepped off the train and thought: Whoops. Wrong stop.
It wasn't a big mistake -- I had only gone about fifteen minutes out of my way. But when I got back on the train to return, I realized I had a choice: take a stop that was further away from my hotel, and walk the half-mile in the cold, or wait on the train an extra ten minutes for the more logical stop.
It was a no-brainer: I took the first stop and walked. Reaching the hotel, I was frozen solid, but victorious.
I made this choice and felt victorious (though frozen) because of a lesson I've learned: always keep moving. When given a choice between forward motion and remaining in the same place -- choose forward motion.
***
This protocol serves well in both travel and life. When traveling, I hate backtracking. I happily ride in African bush taxis for six hours at a time -- but only going one direction. If I have to turn around and go back the other way, I brace myself for an attitude correction. This is probably why I like Round-the-World trips -- once I leave home, the only way to get back is to keep moving in the same direction.
In life, moving forward is not always the best choice, but that's not the point. The point is we don't always have complete information about the choices available to us. (If we did, there would be little indecision.) Because we don't have all the information, we need to make the best possible decision, and I think moving forward improves the odds.
Oh, and if forward motion fails you sometimes? That's OK -- just find a different way forward, and don't make the same mistake. Keep a list of everything you want to do, and work on it every day. MOVE FORWARD.
As Wayne Gretsky said, "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." You might miss some shots when choosing forward motion over waiting it out. But if you don't take action, you'll never know.
When in doubt... choose forward motion.
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A Brief Guide to World Domination
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Why You Should Quit Your Job and Travel Around the World
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