"Princesses"

According to “How Many of Me.com” there are 793,723 people in the United States with the name Sarah. The origin of Sarah is Hebrew and means “princess.” I do not know if the meaning of the name was addressed every time a person named there child, but I do find this ironic because Sarah is one of the most widely used names in the world. I do not know if you can link it to family heritage or the bible. I am just making a correlation with the topic we addressed in class. I feel that some individuals do look at the meaning behind the name before they give it to their child. In this case, many parents want their little girls to be princesses.

I guess I never really thought about the effect culture has on the color stereotype for girls and boys. Because of our discussion in our pop culture class, I see societal norms differently. This evening I went to Wal-mart to shop for my residents program because I am a resident assistant. I was looking at some crafts and saw some letters (the stick on kind) that were in a package but did not have glitter. I thought to myself I have to get the glitter kind or my girls won't like it. Wait, this is exactly what we were talking about in class! I had an "aha" moment as Oprah would say. So I was with my friend and once we were done picking out the letters I thought it would be fun to go look at the Christmas stuff since the season is almost upon us. As soon as I got to the stocking section the only stocking for little girls was bright pink and purple and had huge Princess text written straight on it. For the boys they had green camouflage stockings to choose from. I looked over at my friend and said this is exactly what we learned about today in my pop culture class.

Another topic I wanted to address is toddlers in tiaras. I had never watched the show until a couple of days ago. I found the show to be outrageous and crazy. The episode that I watched featured three moms. The one mom decided that because she did not have girls she was going to dress up her boys to appear in pageants just like the girls. Then there was another mom who looked like a Barbie doll and so did her daughter. This show was almost hard to watch because I felt so bad for the little girls and boys because they were doing what their parents wanted them to do and not what they wanted to do. The stereotypes and gender roles set by society are played out in this show. It is hard to believe how far our society has gone to play up these “princess and superhero” roles.