The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Daring Girls, Derivative Toys

More frivolously occupied than Dahlia or Emily have been, I spent a bit of my weekend flipping through The Daring Book for Girls. I picked it up after my daughter had written about it for her high-school newspaper—and after The New York Times had mocked it as yet more helicopter parenting for our technology-dependent indoor kids, not a manifesto in favor of daredeviltry at all. My daughter's take was different. She pointed out that the book, billed as "the no-boys-allowed guide to adventure," is actually boy-based and imitative at its core (tips for building scooters, etc), with girl frills around the edges. And it's not very new, she noted: Tomboyishness has always been derivative, taking cues from the guys.

I buy both views of the book, which looks old-fashioned but taps right into the current micromanagement of youth culture. Once upon a time—or so I recall—the tomboy impulse was also defiant, a girl's way of flouting peer and parental expectations. But when adults get into the act, packaging boy stuff specially for girls, the result all too often gets cloyingly tame, to nobody's obvious benefit-except the manufacturer's (or publisher's). An article in today's Times reports on another example. Trading cards, a boy craze for decades, are suddenly being marketed to heretofore generally uninterested girls. The new girl-targeted card game, called Bella Sara, sounds tedious as well as sexist. Featuring pastel-colored ponies, unicorns, and "caring" messages ("use your love to bring peace to the world"), Bella Sara evidently skirts the competition and trading that define boy card games like Magic; it's about cleaning and feeding horses (on a special website, using secret codes on the cards). And it's about buying ever more cards (because the codes can only be used once). Here's where The Daring Book perhaps has advice the whole family could find liberating: "Forget asking your parents for a horse; ask for a ping-pong table instead."