It actually did make a difference to my DD in preschool. She had not been exposed to any Disney anything, and the pack of girls her age played Disney princesses every single day.
Wow, this thread is really twigging my feminist soapbox today.
This is a case of the tail wagging the dog. Little girls don't universally have an innate drive to imagine themselves as princesses--sure, maybe they favour interpersonal narratives as a gender, but that tendency alone can't explain the ubiquity of princess products. The aggregate trend of princessification is a manifestation of long-term marketing strategy in female-targeted products that create a subconscious, narcissistic drive in mothers to morph their daughters into princesses. The girls are being conditioned to attach self-worth to the consumption of high margin products that reinforce a mainstream corporate feminine ideal. The merchandisers and media producers are creating a prisoner's dilemma for parents, establshing a perverse situation where the culture becomes self-reinforcing and demands its own consumption.
For an interesting documentary on media driving culture, check out
"Merchants of Cool". Having consulted for F100 corporations, I can assure you that these strategies are insidious and very effective at turning consumers into sheeple. My bottom-line recommendation for building social currency: don't consume something simply because it's culturally popular, only consume it because it has intrinsic positive value to you. I think it sends a positive message to children about their self-worth to support them in pursuing non-mainstream interests when the norm is irrelevant or uninteresting to them.
I love polarbear's post on finding common ground through social education.
