Caroline Langston takes her little girl to a “Mommy and Me” ballet event, which was a riot of pink, and glitter, and sparkles, and intense girliness. Yes, all this princess stuff can be a little much, but, says Langston, there’s a reason it appeals to something deep inside little girls — and their mommies. Excerpt:

Chief among these is an innate desire to feel and embrace an innate, distinctly female nobility—that each young girl, and woman, expresses an outward bearing of an internal grace.

How important this is in an era in which women have made such important educational and socioeconomic gains, but who increasingly find themselves beleaguered, abused, or alone. Where once they might have been infantilized (it’s almost the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique and its “problem that has no name”), they are now required to be the shoulderers of responsibility, the single mothers, ever-ready and receptive “servicers” of desire in an increasingly pornographic culture.

But maybe they just want to be treated as precious.

Read the whole thing.