Thank Heaven
If you have daughters of a certain age, you’ve probably heard of American Girl--a lot. American Girl is, first of all, a brand: The Mattel-owned direct-marketing company sells dolls, little doll outfits, charming novelettes about the dolls in Nancy Drew-like adventures, and an array of doll accessories so vast as to founder the cargo ships upon which it all arrives from China.
American Girl is also a place, an “experiential” retail environment (read mind-numbing monster store), the latest of which recently opened in the Grove shopping mall in Los Angeles. With its own sugarplum cafe, theater, photo studio, doll hospital and doll hair salon, American Girl Place is to doll-obsessed preteens what bars near the airport are to alcoholics, a place to indulge their addictions to bathyspheric depths.
My plan at the grand opening was simply to stand outside and observe the families coming and going, to watch the little girls and--well, you see the problem. Such is the beleaguered state of innocence that no man’s motives can be taken for granted, and it wasn’t long before, under the sidelong glare of suspicious parents, I began to feel distinctly like a creep.
I introduced myself to a group of 10 parents and children gathered outside, knee-deep in the store’s carnation-red bags. To celebrate Paige Mathias’ ninth birthday, her friends from school and her Brownie troop made the trip from Corona in two minivans. “We had our reservation for the cafe in January,” says Paige’s mother, plainly an enthusiast. Paige was wearing an old-fashioned lavender party dress--an American Girl design, of course--and white patent leather shoes, and she was holding, boneless and limp in the crook of her elbow, her new Samantha doll, part of a haul worth $250.
As a commercial phenomenon, American Girl is as charming as it is appalling. With annual sales growth of 15%, the company racked up $436 million in revenue last year, with an estimated $100 million profit. For all its retro rag-doll simplicity, American Girl is mega-commerce, exploiting children’s most primal hoarding instincts--the sort of collect-them-all mania that has provided Barbie with an income comparable to the GNP of oil-producing nations. American Girl is yet another gateway drug to the addiction of mass consumerism.
So said my cynical self. But then at some point walking around the store, I fell in love.
There is much to commend in the American Girl universe. The company’s mainline products are his-torically themed dolls, such as Molly, a little girl growing up during World War II; Kit, who endures the hardships of the Great Depression and eventually becomes a cub reporter (she’s my favorite); Addy, an escaped slave who makes her way north on the Underground Railroad; and Kaya, a horse-loving little girl of the Nez Perce tribe growing up in 1764 (not a particularly auspicious time for Native Americans).
It’s not simply that these dolls are educational, civics lessons in Cabbage Patch drag. It’s that these dolls’ personal narratives take place at some time other than the present--the oppressive and hyper-sexualized, relentlessly trendy, precociously cynical reality that most children and their toys have to contend with. Forget Barbie and her late-model Corvette. Have you ever seen Bratz dolls? I give you the Bratz Wicked Twiins Ciara and Diona, raccoon-eyed, gothy tweens in platform boots looking like--in the beautiful phrase from “Sex in the City”--baby prostitutes.
I think that children, especially girls, are railroaded into their sexual awakening, a kind of premature psychic menarche that robs them of some fraction of their childhood. As a result, even the most progressive-minded fathers can be driven by the princess-making impulse, the desire to keep their girls naive, if only for another day. Such fathers would be only too grateful to pull out their platinum cards at the American Girl counter. Plenty of mothers would too.
“When you consider all the awful things that are out there, I don’t have any worries about this,” says Paige’s mom, Ann Rita Mathias, gesturing to the collection of store bags, and the recreational shopping binges they imply. “At least this is wholesome.”
The store’s other big-selling items are the “Just Like You” dolls, which are a series of 23 figurines of varying ethnic phenotypes, from dark African-featured dolls to blue-eyed Swedes. And, like Paige, girls can purchase adorable outfits matching their dolls’ clothes. Consequently, you see a lot of little girls clutching tiny, cloth-skinned versions of themselves.
This seems important. At some point, before or at adolescence, girls must become aware that they have a target on their backs. Perhaps the intuition comes even earlier. As I watched the little girls wandering among the Grove’s crowd of bored hipsters in mirror shades and coeds in jailbait couture, I couldn’t help thinking that these dolls might serve as some sort of talisman, ever wide-eyed and vigilant, accompanying them on their long and scary walk among strangers.
