Women’s world
Peggy Orenstein’s new essay collection, “Don’t Call Me Princess: Essays on Girls, Women, Sex, and Life,” may sound like a sassy girl power anthem, but the title is a bit misleading. Orenstein does passionately advocate for girls and can indeed be sassy, but this collection is less rallying cry, more retrospective of the intrepid feminist journalist’s career. The pieces in “Don’t Call Me Princess” span from 1989 to 2016 and range in subject from celebrity to miscarriage to the “Mommy Wars” to raising girls in a culture that all too often undermines their well-being.
Orenstein, most recently the author of “Girls & Sex,” has long woven trenchant feminist analysis of social issues with honest, often moving, self-interrogation, and this collection is at its best when she delves into both self and world, as in her groundbreaking 2013 essay, “The Problem With Pink,” which explores the more troublesome aspects of the pink ribbon industry surrounding breast cancer, a disease she herself has survived. “The Problem With Pink” could have been a more apt title for this book, come to think of it; it fits the way Orenstein regularly unpacks how gender stereotypes — and the market forces that help create and perpetuate them — hurt American girls and women.
Given the strength of her deep-dive investigative essays, it seems a less than ideal choice to open this book with a section containing profiles of “Starlets, Scientists, Artists, Activists & Other Noteworthy Women.” While the women Orenstein spotlights — including graphic novelist Phoebe Gloeckner, scientist Elizabeth Blackburn, and the women behind Ms. Magazine — are indeed noteworthy and fascinating and Orenstein peppers her profiles with great insight, these haphazard pieces don’t feel like the best entree into Orenstein’s work, especially for readers who may be new to her oeuvre.
Also problematic: Orenstein features only one woman of color — the late Japanese writer and iconoclast Atsuko Chiba — in the seven profiles that comprise this section of the book. In her introduction to the collection, Orenstein writes: “telling our stories is more important than ever. Not the endless churn of ‘content’ featuring trumped-up princesses and pop stars and famous-for-being-famous social media creations, but real stories about real women, including women of color, queer women, immigrants, the poor, the very old, and the very young.”
Focusing on successful white cis women shortly after this sentence feels jarring; the profiles are similar in makeup to Orenstein’s breast cancer support group — “We were ... with one exception, white, and all of us were college educated,” she writes, “a reflection both of who is most likely to get breast cancer and who’s most comfortable seeking group support.” A reflection, too, perhaps, of the target audience for this collection. Orenstein does touch upon race in a couple of essays later in the book — a 1994 essay in which she follows two 13-year-old girls, one black, one white, and the different, yet intersecting, challenges they each faced at the time, and a 2007 essay in which she discusses raising her biracial daughter — but a broader representation of race, along with more acknowledgment of the gender spectrum (trans and genderqueer people are noticeably missing from these essays), would have enriched the collection.
One of Orenstein’s greatest strengths is in breaking personal and cultural silences around living in a female body. Many of the issues she writes about — cancer, miscarriage, female pleasure — are ones that were kept hush-hush for far too long, ones she is committed to keeping out of the shadows now. In her 2007 essay, “Your Gamete, Myself,” Orenstein writes about women deciding whether to share the fact that they used donor eggs to conceive their children (something Orenstein had tried in her own struggles with infertility before she spontaneously conceived her daughter). “The idea that disclosure could be a viable, even preferable, option is relatively new,” she writes. In encouraging such disclosure on a variety of fronts, Orenstein is shattering stigma, helping release shame.
The final, and most recent, essay in the book, “How to Be a Man in the Age of Trump,” was written just before the 2016 presidential election, when Trump was still expected to lose — a time that feels almost prelapsarian now, although Orenstein’s collection reminds us we have always faced great challenges. Here, Orenstein turns her focus to boys and young men’s attitudes toward sex and masculinity, the subject of Orenstein’s next book, a project that, like the author’s work on girls and women, will surely break more silences, shed more necessary light.