Princess Culture and its Role in Gender Identity

Because just this weekend, I bought 15 yards of yellow tulle to make myself a Princess Belle costume for Halloween and had a Disney Princess key made for our new house, I feel like this topic is very relevant to me.

            I have always been a sucker for the classic Disney fairytale and, consequently, the mounds of merchandise that accompanies it. I feel like it is a right of passage for little girls and is a phase everyone goes through.

            With this said, I agree with Annie Murphy Paul, author of “Is Pink Necessary?” when she says that all of this pink and fluff helps lock in a girl’s gendered identity from an early age. This relationship is indirect because the girls do not purposely seek this result but it happens all the same. Glitter and pink and princess is what is expected of the gender role of that age. It is what the market offers them and, not surprisingly, it is the role many young girls assume.

            On the other hand, the next article, “Princess culture turning girls into overspending narcissists,” jumps to rash conclusions that I cannot support. Joanne Laucius’s article claims that the princess culture that girls embrace in their childhood leads to them growing up “to be insufferable adolescents and adults who demand constant adulation and access to a bottomless pot of money.” She makes this assumption on the claim that one of the three elements of being a princess “is being in charge.”

            I disagree with this concept entirely. First, I think that although children love the merchandise that accompanies the “princess culture,” they don’t always realize the money involved. As a child matures, their understanding of dollar matures. A girl who was raised to love the princess culture is not doomed to narcissism. A girl that is raised with a lavish lifestyle in which she gets whatever she wants is another story. Lifestyle in general determines results like that, not a childhood love of all things princesses.