Dratz
Zoey: (Staring intently at a Bratz valentine) Who is this?
Me: I don't know.
Zoey: Say it!
Me: I don't know, sweetie.
Zoey: (more insistent) Say it! Who is this?
Me: (sighs) I think they're called Bratz.
Zoey: (With a touch of awe in her voice) Bratz. Bratz.
She continues to stare intently at the two slutty-looking characters on the card. One has long, thick brown hair, brown skin and those trademark ginormous cat eyes and botox lips. She's wearing a pair of tight jeans with knee-hi red leather stilleto boots. The other is blond, but with her tan skin, one might suspect a bottle was involved. She too has the large cat eyes and pouty lips. Her eye shadow is a pale lavender. She's got a micro denim skirt with a chain belt, and ballet flats.
Zoey: They're beautiful. They're cool.
Me (in my head): Oh shit.
I sense danger up ahead. I do not like these dolls. She got a Groovy Girl for Christmas, Natalya, whom she loves, and I love that she loves this doll. Natalya has thick black yarn for hair that's wild and barely contained by a ponytail. She wears a hip, vintage-y looking outfit, and she's soft and squishy. Really, she seems like such a nice young girl. Can you imagine a six-year-old Zoey going about in cool, vingage outfits. That would rule! I'm afraid the Bratz dolls would inspire her to want to wear short hoochie skirts and belly-button revealing, tight shirts.
(Okay, mea culpa, a lot of her shirts already reveal her belly, but that's only because they're too small for her. She just grows so dang fast. Sometimes you don't realize something is too small for her until after she's had it on for a couple of hours. Seriously.)
Oh well. We shall see what happens. Right now, she's walking around the house pretending she's Dora, singing the adventure song. Right now, Dora Rules.
Oh, and really, I hate dora too.
(Sigh.)
Me: I don't know.
Zoey: Say it!
Me: I don't know, sweetie.
Zoey: (more insistent) Say it! Who is this?
Me: (sighs) I think they're called Bratz.
Zoey: (With a touch of awe in her voice) Bratz. Bratz.
She continues to stare intently at the two slutty-looking characters on the card. One has long, thick brown hair, brown skin and those trademark ginormous cat eyes and botox lips. She's wearing a pair of tight jeans with knee-hi red leather stilleto boots. The other is blond, but with her tan skin, one might suspect a bottle was involved. She too has the large cat eyes and pouty lips. Her eye shadow is a pale lavender. She's got a micro denim skirt with a chain belt, and ballet flats.
Zoey: They're beautiful. They're cool.
Me (in my head): Oh shit.
I sense danger up ahead. I do not like these dolls. She got a Groovy Girl for Christmas, Natalya, whom she loves, and I love that she loves this doll. Natalya has thick black yarn for hair that's wild and barely contained by a ponytail. She wears a hip, vintage-y looking outfit, and she's soft and squishy. Really, she seems like such a nice young girl. Can you imagine a six-year-old Zoey going about in cool, vingage outfits. That would rule! I'm afraid the Bratz dolls would inspire her to want to wear short hoochie skirts and belly-button revealing, tight shirts.
(Okay, mea culpa, a lot of her shirts already reveal her belly, but that's only because they're too small for her. She just grows so dang fast. Sometimes you don't realize something is too small for her until after she's had it on for a couple of hours. Seriously.)
Oh well. We shall see what happens. Right now, she's walking around the house pretending she's Dora, singing the adventure song. Right now, Dora Rules.
Oh, and really, I hate dora too.
(Sigh.)
7 Comments:
Your dialog reminded me of the second part of this article about Bratz from the December NYorker. It's a fun read, might make you feel better or worse but at least makes it more interesting.
You could try to get her into American Girl dolls but that's expensive but if you did you could eat at the American Girl restaurant in Chicago. They encourage girls to bring their dolls and they serve them tea. There's even an American Girl doll from our neighborhood but she moved ot the suburbs.
I read and enjoyed that article; it's one of the reasons she got a groovy girl doll for christmas. It also cemented my dislike for Bratz dolls, though I do appreciate that they aren't your blond, blue-eyed plastic perfection dolls. I like that they're not white. But they're just too hoochie, and I thought this well before I read the article. As for the american girl dolls, well, I just can't spend that much money on a doll.
I am glad that article is online now--I had to hunt down my mom's New Yorker specifically to read it. I highly recommend the article to any girl mama's out there (Bethany!).
And thanks for the link to the article about little Marisol. It makes me want to avoid american girl dolls even more.
Oh, and this evening, Zoey wanted me to paint her lips purple. ack.
That is, purple like the picture of the beautiful blond bratz doll's lips.
When I read that article back in December I figured any young mom (thinking of you) is already up on this stuff out of actual experience but it was fun to step into the world. I remember a co-worker being exasperated because her grand-daughter wanted to shop at Wet Seal.
When my cousins were young it was so weird to be in the car with them and my aunt and uncle who had great musical tastes when I was a kid, listening to Jonathan Richmond, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie...but were forced to suffer through their kids' commercial culture affected tastes. But they were good sports about it. My aunt would even sing along to all that hoochy stuff. Of course Arlo and Pete were THE THING in New York when my aunt was growing up so it wasn't like she wasn't affected too, it was just a different time.
I learned to believe that her nonchalant disposition about that stuff actually helped take the "affect" out of it. You know, she was teaching by example...just by being a good person, and demonstrating that all the hoochy commercial stuff is fluff. I mean, I got chills at some of the stuff those girls were in to and I'll bet my aunt did too but she let them be to a large extent but made damn sure they did their homework, you know they had fairly strict house rules and all that and when she had control of the conversation it was about college and stuff. Anyway they're good kids. Got into good colleges, doing good things, still totally want their breasts to be bigger though. They're gonna be affected by peer pressure but a good example at home means a whole lot more even if the outward signs the kids are giving off are like completely invisible. That's what I learned watching my cousins grow up. And I was a huge prudish skeptic about it.
I think I agree with your aunt's way of dealing with it, that is, you can't really fight it because that will just make it more appealing. Z does know that I don't like Bratz dolls, and I'm sure I'll rather passive-aggressively discourage her, but, you know, if she gloms onto them it'll be worse if I make them forbidden.
I will, I'm sure, make snide remarks about how lame I think they are. :)
yeah it's funny...I don't know how I'd be as a father. I've got another aunt who wouldn't have let her kids near those things and her kids (all four of them) grew up to be super overachievers - patent attorney, corporate officer and doctors. So it's all a matter of how you want to spend your retirement =)
Of course she died at the young age of 62, so...
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