What does this opening of an online-only article from The Nation make you think of?
Contrary to the rumors I have been trying to spread for some time, Disney Princess products are not contaminated with lead. More careful analysis shows that the entire product line--books, DVDs, ball gowns, necklaces, toy cell phones, toothbrush holders, T-shirts, lunch boxes, backpacks, wallpaper, sheets, stickers etc.--is saturated with a particularly potent time-release form of the date rape drug.
If you said "Why, I thought of those crazy Australian craft toys that were laced with GHB," then you're exactly like us. In which case, we'll save you a bit of disappointment and say that Disney Princess products are NOT in fact laced with any actual chemicals or drugs. They are simply, in the eyes of Nation contributor and normally less hyperbolic author Barbara Ehrenreich, pure fucking little girl evil.
Seen from the witchy end of the female life cycle, the Princesses exert their pull through a dark and undeniable eroticism. They're sexy little wenches, for one thing. Snow White has gotten slimmer and bustier over the years; Ariel wears nothing but a bikini top (though, admittedly, she is half fish.) In faithful imitation, the 3-year-old in my life flounces around with her tiara askew and her Princess gown sliding off her shoulder, looking for all the world like a London socialite after a hard night of cocaine and booze. Then she demands a poison apple and falls to the floor in a beautiful swoon. Pass the Rohypnol-laced margarita, please.
Ugh.
We, too, find Disney to be pretty insidious. And we get that Ehrenreich is being tongue in cheek when she rails against this admittedly scary franchise. (She ends the piece with a call to pitchforks, fer crying out loud.) But... jokes about date rape in an article about kids toys? Really?
To be perfectly clear about this: we're pretty sure we agree, in basic principle, with Ehrenreich. We just really hate this piece. And we could probably go on about the many ways in which we're baffled by it, but suffice it say that even if Ehrenreich had traded in her press pass for a pair of pajamas and a LiveJournal account, we'd still find this weird screed to be schizophrenic, unfunny, overreaching, and way too revealing. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but if anyone's 3-year-old actually looks like Peaches Geldof at the scratchy end of a weekend, shouldn't the accusatory glares first go to the mirror, mirror on the wall?)
Plus, as a complaint about Disney, isn't this, like, ten years too late? Or are we the only ones who called it "Pocahooters" when it came out?