The princesses have abducted Dora.
While thumbing through a Target insert this past Sunday, I spotted a Dora the Explorer doll, only it wasn't really Dora. This chick had Dora's face, but she also had a teeny waist, longer hair and was decked out in a pink tutu unsuitable for exploring much of anything beyond the plastic barre that Dora apparently has traded for her backpack.
Oh, the shame. Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against ballet. I spent 10 years of my youth dancing. It was a period in my life that also saw me learn to ride a bicycle, and a time when I also was likely to be climbing trees in Mr. Hatley's apple orchard or poking around it the creek near the junior high school. Just because I went to ballet class once a week and donned a puffy tulle skirt a few times a year didn't sap my sense of adventure or yearning to get dirty.
It also was a time when you could actually buy a toy that wasn't attached to a movie or television show. Certainly, toys were still marketed heavily and branded in certain ways. And some were attached to the movies and shows of my youth (I recall insisting on my mother buying me a dress sported by Buffy on the television show "Family Affair"). But I saw about a third of the television advertisements and shows in those days as children are exposed to now. I wasn't innundated with brands in five different types of media. We only had a couple to deal with.
So whennadventurous Dora the Explorer becomes a Dora who opts instead to stay inside where she and her pink tutu won't get mussed, it likely will have an effect on how little girls view the whole getting outside and exploring thing.
In this age of the media princess army, it doesn't take much to turn little girls away from worms and mud and tree-climbing to get a better view of a bird nest -- curiosities and activities that help build scientists and problem-solvers. I have seen many young girls who, by the time they are in fourth grade, worry more about getting their shoes dirty and hair messed up than they do about getting something cool out of the soil to put under the microscope. It is depressing.
A female coworker and I noticed earlier this year that we had both developed a habit of dressing nicer -- sometimes in "girl clothes" complete with skirts and cute socks with our trail shoes or boots -- when we taught groups of children in third or fourth grade or higher. Younger children just see us as the grownups who tell them waht to do. But these older girls are watching. And we want to show them that girls can still look like girls while they are bumping around outside getting a little dirty and exploring nature. It works. The girls who come on field trips wearing sparkly ballet flats warm up to us when we at least look as if we understand them.
But Dora has tossed in a new wrinkle. I just don't know that either my coworker or I could pull off the pink tutu gig while plucking tadpoles from the pond.
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