The staff here at Parents for Ethical Marketing is thrilled that Michelle Obama is pissed off at Ty, makers of Ty Girlz Dolls, after the introduction of their newest products Marvelous Malia and Sweet Sasha:

“We feel it is inappropriate to use young, private citizens for marketing purposes,” Obama’s press secretary, Katie McCormick Lelyveld, said in a statement yesterday.

We feel it’s inappropriate to change the likeness of a seven-year-old girl into a teen-like doll with breasts.

Ms. Obama, give us a call. We’ll talk.

I was struck by President Bush’s kind words to the Obama family in his farewell address:

And I join all Americans in offering best wishes to President-elect Obama, his wife Michelle, and their two beautiful girls. 

It was the “beautiful girls” that threw me. Unfortunately, I can’t make a direct comparison to the most popular descriptions of young sons who have moved into the White House — there haven’t been any in recent history — but I’m going to venture to guess that they wouldn’t have been described as handsome. Or cute. Or with any termingology that described their physical appearance.

So this is where we are. On Tuesday we’ll be witnessing an historic inauguration and on Wednesday, it will be back to business as usual for American girls: Corporate-created media images and messages telling them that their value lies only in how they look and what they buy.

No example is more appropriate than this dissection* of the premiere lifestyle brand, American Girl:

Some might argue that American Girl is not as bad as other materials on the market, or as offensive as Barbie or Bratz dolls. This argument misses the key features of what makes this phenomenon so insidious: how corporations play on the feminist and /or educative aspirations of parents, teachers, girls, and young women and turn these toward consumption. American Girl is less about strong girls, diversity or history than about marketing girlhood, about hooking girls, their parents and grandparents into buying the American Girl products and experience.

Meant to be lessons in history featuring girls, their books fail, too:

. . . any potential “girl-power” lessons are short-circuited in these books through the use of historical fiction to deliver traditional lessons about what girls can and should do. While the stories take place in key historical moments, such as the Civil War, and World War II, the girls rarely participate in historical events in any substantial way. Meet Molly is set in WWII and her father, a doctor, serves in the U.S. military. Molly’s concerns center on what to be for Halloween and how to deal with a bothersome brother. The historical fictions encourage a limited independence and emphasize conventional “good girl” behaviors. Girls might go on an adventure or two, but these are usually within the bounds of family relationships (e.g., playing tricks on brothers) rather than as social actors in a larger world.

As for those “good girl” behaviors, we look to Harvard historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich who said, “well-behaved women seldom make history.” 

My hope is that we take the inspiration of electing our first black President and continue the momentum until we elect our first woman president. And until half our senators and representatives are women. And until women receive equal pay for equal work.

And it all begins with girls. Smart girls. Strong girls. Capable girls. Energetic girls. Creative girls. Hopeful girls.

More on hope:

New Moon Girls: Advertising-free social networking site for girls 8 to 12, plus the classic magazine. This week they are welcoming Sasha and Malia Obama to the White House and calling on girls to report on inaugural activities. Citizen journalism!

TVbyGirls: In the Twin Cities, TVbyGirls teaches the skills needed for girls to learn how to create their own media to expand expanding “the vitality of images about girls and women.” Watch their videos and if you’re local, get a girl you know involved.

The Girl Revolution: For grown-ups who love girls, “The Girl Revolution’s only aim is to heal the soul of the world by raising powerful girls. . . . We’re going to protect them from media consumption and dissolve every single barrier that exists between girls and gender and economic equality.”

*H/T to our friends at the Institute for Humane Education.

Originally posted May 19, 2008.

Susan Linn, Director of the Campaign for a Commerical-Free Childhood, and Joan Almon from the Alliance for Childhood conducted a workshop on creative play at the CCFC Summit in April.

Linn began the workshop with a simple exercise: she held up three puppets, one at a time, and asked us to write down a) what it was, b) what its name was, and c) something it might say.

The first puppet was really just a white sock over her hand with two eyes attached. The second was similar but also had ears and a mouth. The third was a blue, furry monster we all recognized as Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster.

As you may have guessed, the first puppet elicited a variety of identifications, names, and statements from the participants. The second puppet drew a more limited response. Cookie Monster, of course, was a cookie monster and didn’t say too much beyond “Me want cookie.�

This exercise blew me away in its simplicity and its significance, as does Linn’s new book, The Case for Make Believe: Saving Play in a Commercialized World.

Linn is a ventriloquist, among other things. She started as a child, performed on the street corners of Boston and eventually moved on to the Smithsonian and even Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. She eventually used her skills and education to become a puppet therapist at Boston Children’s Hospital.

In addition to being the cofounder and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, Linn is the Associate Director of the Media Center at Judge Baker Children’s Center and Instructor in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School.

In The Case for Make Believe, Linn does just as she promises: makes a case for childhood play by helping us to understand why it so important for childhood development and making us realize how far away from play we’ve gone:

Play is so fundamental to children’s health and well-being — and so endangered — that the United Nations lists it as a guaranteed right in its Convention of the Rights of the Child. . . . In the United States and other industrialized nations, seduction, not conscription, lures children away from creative play.

Lovable media characters, cutting-edge technology, brightly colored packaging, and well-funded, psychologically savvy marketing strategies combine in coordinated campaigns to capture the hearts, minds and imaginations of children — teaching them to value that which can be bought over their own make believe creations.

Reading the book, I was really struck by the fact that our society does not value creative play. Linn talks about how play has almost been eliminated in schools in favor of government-backed policies that “promote rote learning.”

I asked her, in an email interview, if we should return play to the classroom and how we could do that.
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Minnesota’s governor and some legislators have a plan to help Minnesota school districts:

Minnesota school districts and charter schools would be required to pool their purchasing power under a plan unveiled Wednesday at the State Capitol.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty and several legislators say public schools could save money on information technology, food services, supplies, equipment, transportation and other services by working cooperatively.

The money saved, according to legislators, would go directly back into the schools and not into the state budget. If approved, the state could end up giving school districts more than expected then, since K-12 education was spared from the first round of state budget cuts. 

Uh-huh. 

I’m all for efficiency and saving money by not duplicating services when we don’t need to. But reading this editorial in support of the legislation made my heart skip a beat:

It’s the sensible Costco concept applied to school budgets . . . . Under the proposal, the state’s Department of Education would create and maintain a list of preferred vendors for services, including school materials, supplies, tools, equipment, technology, food services and transportation.

Watch out: How many of those preferred vendors for school supplies will be able to bid low because their products will double as advertisements?

How can we say no to advertising on school buses if it puts more money into the classroom?

How can we say no to ads on student exams if it means teachers don’t have to pay for the copies out of their pockets?

How can we say no to chain restaurants in the lunchroom if they offer us the best deal?

And how do we say no to free classroom materials — even if they provide misleading information — if the alternative is no materials at all?

Years of inadequate federal and state funding have us backed us into a corner: We must offer up our children to corporate interests, hand over their malleabe minds so they can become brand-loyal consumers, and in exchange, we’ll get pencils and textbooks and writing paper.

I hope I’m wrong. But if I’m not — how can we say no?