Christopher Healy

I’d always been somewhat pleased that the cartoon character my daughter latched onto was the intelligent, intrepid Dora. For four seasons on Nickelodeon (and then its sister station Noggin, and then CBS), this school-age Latina role model eschewed nearly every girly-girl gender stereotype, the pink T-shirt that hangs loosely over her realistically rounded 8-year-old belly being the only token element of her nascent femininity. Dora’s brain is touted as her main asset (she’s bilingual; she solves jungle-based brainteasers), but she’s also ruggedly athletic (she’s the star of both her baseball and soccer teams; she never blinks before shimmying up a banyan tree or scaling a volcano). Dora’s esteem-building, multiculti adventures are the polar opposite of the glitter-spewing, cutesy-fests — think Rainbow Brite and My Little Pony — that women of my own generation grew up with.

Then last month came “Dora’s Fairytale Adventure,” a feature-length Nickelodeon special (now on DVD) in which our heroine visits Fairytale Land and goes on a quest to become a “True Princess.” By the end, her tomboy bob has been magically transformed into flowing Rapunzel-length locks and she’s suddenly clad in a shimmery, puffed-out yellow ball gown. Dora is showered with “oohs” and “ahhs” from her talking animal friends who proclaim things like, “Look at Dora’s shoes –they’re so sparkly!” Then she flies off on a unicorn with a rainbow-striped mane. Seriously. It was at this point in the program that my daughter — who I don’t believe had any prior concept of royalty — placed a pink shoe-box crown on her head and started twirling around, saying, “I’m a princess!”

The princess has been ubiquitous in pop culture in recent years. Not that she’d ever gone away. The archetype is one of the longest-lived in all of literary history, and a spate of films (“The Prince & Me,” “A Cinderella Story,” the entire Anne Hathaway oeuvre, coupled with some classic toys that have undergone heavily marketed princess makeovers, such as Barbie as the Princess and the Pauper, the Cabbage Patch Princess, the aforementioned Dora) have left young girls in a world where they can’t turn their heads without having to shield their eyes from the glare of a tiara.

Leading the charge in this princess revolution is Disney — no surprise, really, as this is the company that has had bustled skirts and puffy sleeves at the core of its business for well over half a century. The idea for a Disney Princess brand was born four years ago, when Disney Consumer Products president Andy Mooney went to see one of the company’s famous ice shows and spotted a number of young female audience members dressed like little doppelgängers of their favorite characters. The Princess brand, which groups together eight of the studio’s animated film heroines — Belle (“Beauty and the Beast”), Ariel (“The Little Mermaid”), Jasmine (“Aladdin”), Pocahontas, Mulan, Cinderella, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty — into one big tea party posse, was an instant success. It started with some dress-up costumes sold at the Disney Store, and after those initial test products vanished from the shelves faster than Cinderella’s coach at midnight, Disney knew it had a major hit on its satin-gloved hands. Sales of the Princess line were an astounding $2.5 billion last year, up from $300 million in 2001.

“We’ve gone beyond the dress-up and toys, and begun to look at the brand as a lifestyle, filling out all the other things girls need in life,” says Mary Beech, director of franchise management for Disney Consumer Products. Indeed. In addition to the official Disney Princess merchandise for the home — beds, comforters, cereal, toothbrushes, dolls, castle tents, storybooks, TVs, DVD players — parents can throw their daughters an official Hallmark Disney Princess party complete with a cake that has a few regal beauties waltzing on top; they can take them for breakfast with the princesses at Disney World in Florida; And they can enroll them in a princess class at the recently opened World of Disney store in New York. There Cinderella’s beautiful friend, Lady Seraphina, will educate starry-eyed youngsters in the four Princess Principles — intelligence, grace, thoughtfulness and honesty — through lessons involving everything from “teamwork, table manners, and truthfulness to courtesy, compassion, curtseys and kindness.”

The ease and rapidity with which a princess obsession can take hold of a young girl’s psyche is mind-blowing. Josh Levine, a Brooklyn, N.Y., writer/photographer, says he and his wife made a decisive effort to keep their daughter, Sasha, away from anything Disney. But when she was a little over 2 she watched a video of “Sleeping Beauty” at a friend’s house and was immediately hooked. Soon the accoutrements of princess-hood started to fill the Levine home and Sasha began to insist upon wearing ball gowns as her everyday wardrobe. While decked out in her full Snow White regalia in early October, a woman on the street asked the 3-year-old if she was going to dress as a princess for Halloween, to which Sasha responded, “No, I am a princess.” “I became more and more conscious of the fact that she was always in character,” says Levine. “It’s like dating an actress.”

But he also realized that, as the parent of a princess, he was not alone. The widespread nature of the princess phenomenon made itself known to Levine one day at a local playground. “There was my daughter, traipsing through the park dressed like a princess, when I looked around and I started noticing others,” he explains. “I assumed their parents were undoubtedly tripping out like I was.” In an experimental attempt to bring these royal families together, Levine decided to throw a princess party — for anyone who wanted to come. He posted a sign announcing that the very next day would be the First Annual Prospect Park Princess Picnic. And with less than 24 hours’ notice, 25 little girls — each in full costume — showed up for a party. “People always talk about ‘the magic of Disney,’” Levine says. “Well, that’s the magic of Disney: It’s addictive. It’s like crack for 5-year-olds.”

So, why are young girls so enthralled by princesses? “Transformation is at the core of all the princess fairy tales,” says Maria Tatar, Harvard folklorist and editor of “The Annotated Brothers Grimm.” “Young women, often poor, sometimes even almost animal-like, end up with all the power in the end. Little kids, even very young ones, can understand who has the power, and that has always been part of the attraction.”

In a world where women struggle for power, isn’t anything that gives my daughter a sense of strength a good thing, even if it leaves a trail of glitter on the carpet? For Tatar, the answer is, “Not necessarily.” Disney, she believes, “capitalizes on the worst parts of the fairy tales.” By celebrating the ugly duckling scenario of overnight transformation, she says, most of Disney’s princess tales reinforce the idea of achieving power through fabulous clothing and great wealth. The problem as she sums it up: “They don’t work for it.”

As any parent who has sat through endless viewings of these various princesses’ films can tell you, there’s some truth to that. While Jasmine, Pocahontas and even Belle showed literal girl power by standing toe-to-toe with their cartoon foes, Sleeping Beauty is a victim, and as far as I can tell, Snow White’s greatest feat of courage was dusting. And the No. 1 seller in the Princess line — Cinderella — shows a rebellious spirit by disobeying her wicked stepfamily, but essentially gains all her power through the good will of a magical floating Angela Lansbury look-alike.

Disney Princess chief Mary Beech agrees completely with the transformation and power theories, insisting that there’s more to these heroines than “just the dress.” “Princesses can get their way: They can manage unruly boys, they can banish the family dog — and it makes girls feel good about themselves,” she says. “The princesses are good-hearted, happy, positive characters. But,” she concedes, “you do have to get used to a lot of pink.”

Pink I can deal with. (Bryn has been inexorably drawn to the color seemingly since birth.) I think my concern about my daughter’s first experimentations with crown-and-scepter culture had to do with the fact that it was a phase that seemed entirely focused on telling her how beautiful she is. Belle may be well-read and Mulan can ace archery, but they only find true happiness once they’re married off with royal expense accounts.

“Culturally, these stories impress upon girls the importance of beautiful dress and gorgeous good looks,” says Tatar. “But in many of the original versions of these classic fairy tales, the girls are feisty and cunning; they use their intelligence and work very hard to liberate themselves.” Just like Dora the Explorer.

Which suddenly got me thinking about Dora’s Fairytale Adventure again, the epic that was the catalyst for Bryn’s current princess obsession. While, yes, Dora winds up looking like someone who should be in the audience at a joust, waving a silky kerchief to cheer on her chosen knight, she actually does achieve that magical transformation through quick thinking and resourcefulness. To gain the mystical items that will eventually earn her a tall pointy hat, she braves a smoke-snorting dragon, tames a cranky giant and outwits a witch, among other daunting tasks.

So for a parent like myself, who can sometimes admittedly be overly sensitive, is it even worth fighting the Disney princess paradigm? Josh Levine says no. “Being a princess makes Sasha so incredibly happy,” he says. “At least it’s not Barney.”

As I pondered it all, staring into a Toys “R” Us catalog at the lavender-turreted Disney Princess kitchen that my daughter opted to put on her Christmas list in lieu of a much more pleasantly hued Little Tikes one, Bryn wandered into the room, looking absolutely adorable in her favorite oversize “gown” (a velvety red dress that belonged to my wife once upon a time) and “tiara” (part of my wife’s bridal headgear from our wedding). I was struck with a moment of not-so-regretful resignation: Maybe the princess phase is simply an inevitable part of raising a daughter and soon it will be my job to steer her out of it. That’s when Bryn removed her tiara, reached up and squeezed it, somewhat painfully, onto my head, and said, “You’re the princess, Daddy. I’m the queen. Dance with me.” I got up and twirled her around, of course.

“We’re always looking for chances to share our faith,” says Mark Brown, vice president of marketing for the country’s oldest tract publisher, the American Tract Society. “This is the only time of the year you can do this legally.” While it has been done for years among Evangelicals, the number of folks who answer the door with gospel tracts as well as M&Ms and bite-size Milky Ways seems to be steadily increasing.

“Our tract sales have grown by leaps and bounds,” Brown says, noting that ATS sold 3.5 million tracts this year, a 10 percent increase since last Halloween. “For a long time, Christians have tried to ignore the holiday or go to an alternative event, like a carnival. Now we’ll see them passing out tracts at the carnival or sitting on their porch with the light on and a stack of tracts. They’re choosing to be visible. And the beauty of Halloween being on a weekend this year — more people are home, so there’ll be way more participation.”

The tracts themselves are designed to speak directly to kids, filled with brightly colored cartoon illustrations and written with the lively colloquial tone of a Saturday morning PSA. (“Costumes are cool, but Heaven is awesome!” reads one ATS tract. Another, which calls Jesus “the ultimate superhero,” tells kids to “Look at His birthday on the calendar. It’s Christmas!”) Good News makes ample use of puzzles and word games (“If there are activities, kids are much more engaged,” Dennis says). And ATS has its finger on the pulse of kid culture, featuring popular characters like Spider-Man and Harry Potter on its tracts. (The “Finding Nemo” tract retells the story of the hit Disney film through a Christian lens: “God loves you just as Marlin loved Nemo [but] Nemo’s sin separated him from his father.”) The biggest and most recent innovation has been the direct packaging of tracts with candy, stickers or sometimes small toys, à la Happy Meals.

Publishers agree that retaining the treat is important to the tract’s acceptance by children. “Kids are out there looking for candy,” Brown explains. “If you hand them a tract and nothing else, they’ll have a negative feeling toward you and toward the tract. So you want to give a really good piece of candy; don’t gyp the kid out. Then when they dump the bag, their eyes just pop out, and they associate this with the candy.”

Both companies tout the success of their approach, claiming thousands of positive responses each year by phone, letter and e-mail. And both are careful about encouraging a responsible use of their tracts. ATS even posts lists of dos and don’ts on its Web site, including tips like “Don’t force tracts on people,” and “[Do not use one] if the tract could be interpreted as a personal attack” or “when it may needlessly offend someone.” Still, the pairing of the word of God and the word of Hershey does not sit well with everyone. The Rev. Astrid Storm, an Episcopal priest at Grace Church in New York, who calls the practice “back-door evangelism” says, “I loathe making a connection between Christianity and getting goodies. It’s not the best connection to make at the outset of one’s faith, since it hardly equips one to deal with the many disappointments and setbacks that are an inevitable — and important — part of the Christian life.”

For the Rev. Winnie Varghese, a chaplain at Columbia University, it’s the bigger picture that matters. “If it’s OK for Muslim families to put tracts proclaiming the tenets of Islam into trick-or-treat bags or for more liberal denominations to pass out literature saying that you can be gay and still be a good Christian, then [the Evangelical Halloween tracts] are fine, too,” she says, “but I suspect it wouldn’t be OK in those cases. We always give a certain amount of space to Evangelicals that we don’t give to other denominations.”

“Still,” Varghese adds, “we understand the Evangelical impulse that they must lead as many people as possible to Christ. In that belief, they are ethically bound to do so.”

And that sums up the mission of the tract publishers exactly. “Halloween is typically affiliated with ghouls and demons and witches, kind of the dark side,” Dennis says. “And Christians are commanded to be light in darkness.”

Dennis, whose grandparents founded Good News in 1938 with the belief that “the Gospel message deserves an excellent package,” distributes tracts from his own home in Wheaton, Ill., on Halloween and admits that he has occasionally been met with a less-than-positive response. “On occasion, there’s somebody who’ll get upset that we’re propagating the Bible’s message to people who may not want their kids to hear it,” he says. “And, you know, the great thing is, we live in a country that allows for that freedom.” (Though neither the American Civil Liberties Union nor Americans United for the Separation of Church and State gave official comment on the topic, both organizations responded to Salon’s inquiry by acknowledging the legal right of people to hand out religious literature from their own homes.) “In addition,” Dennis adds, “we’d encourage parents to look through the contents of any child’s candy bag and remove anything they don’t want.”

Dennis also points out that writing and designing a truly successful tract means maintaining a difficult balance between the Christian message and Halloween imagery that is often in opposition to church teachings. “We have to keep two audiences in mind,” he says. “Our goal is to provide a tract that is palatable to both the Christians who buy them and the end user it is intended for. A tract that has a ghoul on the cover might really speak to a kid who’s been dabbling in those kinds of things, but we may not be able to sell that to the Christians. We stay away from the occult stuff and tend to use more innocuous costumes, like pirates.”

Another publisher, perhaps the most controversial producer of gospel tracts, is not as concerned with making such distinctions. Chick Publications, founded in the 1960s by Christian cartoonist Jack Chick, does not shy away from horror imagery in the slightest, instead churning out hundreds of comic strips replete with good old fire-and-brimstone evangelism. One tract, “Devil’s Night,” in which a young girl’s teacher berates her for not wearing a monster costume to school on Halloween, illustrates the pagan origins of the holiday with images of the Celtic lord of the dead calling souls to him. Another — titled “Boo!” — features a chainsaw-wielding Satan chasing campers through a forest and again tells the origins of Halloween, this time with an image of hooded Druids about to sacrifice a kidnapped virgin.

“Some of our tracts may be more in your face than others,” says Chick representative Karen Rockney, “but that’s why we have a large variety of tracts. All tracts are not for everybody. And we get plenty of letters from people who say, ‘I never would have been saved, never gotten the message’ if we hadn’t been in your face.”

Groups like ATS are quick to point out the less-graphic nature of their own tracts. “Nobody likes to be told they’re going to hell in a handbasket,” says ATS’s Brown. “They appreciate images they can relate to, that can express the simple message of the Gospel.”

“We want to be careful not to use scare tactics, not to use fear as a motivator, to focus on a very positive message,” says Dennis of Good News. “Having said that, God can use anything to draw people to Himself.”

Halloween is an evolving holiday, and it’s being pulled in two directions. Some people are flocking to their houses of worship to enjoy extravagant Bible-friendly festivals complete with games, prizes and rides. Some are still embracing the classic fright-fest, decked out with buckets of sweets, orange lights and animatronic Frankensteins. Both groups have contributed to the $3.12 billion that will make this coming Sunday the most lucrative Halloween ever for the holiday merchandise industry. “Yes, Halloween is changing,” says ATS’s Brown, “but we don’t want it to change too much. Then we won’t have people coming to the door anymore.”

Which brings us to a third, distinctly different point of view on the holiday. Daisy Casillas, a 30-year-old Web designer in Jacksonville, Fla., spent past Halloweens waiting for trick-or-treaters with candy and Chick tracts at the ready, something she’s decided to forgo this year. “I’ve decided not to even buy Halloween candy, because it gives manufacturers the message with my dollars that I celebrate it; and I don’t. I just won’t answer the door. Imagine if every so-called professing Christian in America did not answer the door. There would be no Halloween if it didn’t make money.”

Although it would probably have been more pleasing to the adult eye, I can’t imagine the younger me would have had the same fondness for a reversible embroidered silk Pottery Barn Kids quilt with matching sham. I try to keep this in mind now, when purchasing décor for my daughter’s room. It’s difficult, though; I know a Dora the Explorer light fixture would elicit endless squeals of delight, but would it go with the Picasso print hanging over her crib?

The bedrooms of today’s preschoolers have a decidedly different aesthetic than those of my Mattel-driven youth. Gone are the Willy Wonka-inspired candy murals, the Smurf-shaped beanbag chairs, the My Little Pony window treatments. In their stead we see braided chenille rugs, hand-painted boutique lampshades, and four-poster beds draped with mosquito netting. What happened to those hideous “Hey! I’m sleeping in a Ferrari!” racecar beds that sat in the rooms of every sitcom preteen between 1978 and 1985? Either children have far more sophisticated tastes than they did a few decades ago, or today’s parents, when they buy for their kids, are really buying for themselves.

Perhaps the answer lies more in marketing than pure selfishness. Sure, the current crop of new parents is a product of the “Me Decade,” but there’s more to it than that. Mine was the first generation of kids to have TV shows based on toys, instead of the other way around. And we were among the first guinea pigs to experience children’s advertising after the National Association of Broadcasters deregulated it in 1982. Now that we have purchasing power for our own children, a whole new army of adult brands is seeking to lay psychic claim to the cash we’ve earmarked for our offspring. That’s why we’re spending $70 on white cashmere Baby Gap sweaters for children we know will inevitably puke on them.

Grown-up stores marketing children’s items add to the misconception that kids are just like adults, only smaller. And the unfortunate side effect of that theory seems to be the burgeoning concept of parenting by art direction: The belief that one can mold his or her child’s personality by purchasing the appropriate accoutrements. (“But, sir, my daughter couldn’t possibly have been the one who started the fight; everything in her room belongs to the same Victorian teddy bear theme.”) We follow this line of thought in part because we are easily duped by catalog-induced fantasies.

Flipping through the Pottery Barn Kids 2003 Christmas catalog, one is amazed by the apparent fact that most grade-schoolers are not only very tidy, but organized to the point of OCD. Checked-off to-do lists serve as centerpieces for several rooms, and every vintage toy and logo-less crayon is stowed away in its appropriately labeled wicker basket. Children are also seemingly much more well-behaved than films like “Mr. Mom,” or “Daddy Day Care,” or, say, most people’s home movies, would have us believe. Children study diligently at their antiqued white desks, they cut out paper dolls, they brush their teeth, they use flash cards, and on Christmas, they sit in their individual monogrammed armchairs and stare at the tree. (In keeping with the season, the current catalog also offers monogrammed stocking, monogrammed ornaments, monogrammed wooden sleds, monogrammed turkey aprons, and, of course, monogrammed Santa hats.) The pages of this catalog feature no fewer than 26 children who are either reading, writing or engaged in some kind of non-messy craft project. You can almost sense an eerie silence in the photos, as if the only thing a foley artist would need to do to score this catalog would be to leave his microphone in an empty cathedral.

We can only jump to one conclusion: Stylish, trendy, modern but old-looking furniture creates perfect children. But take a closer look and you may start to question for whom these rooms are actually designed. How many 7-year-old boys do you know who are obsessed with 1940s-era floppy leather football helmets? Yet we see an entire room devoted to that very motif. In fact, a common trend among Pottery Barn Kids is a fondness for things that were popular 40 years before they were born. As evidence, I present the brothers who own several jars of marbles, the boy with the Adam West-era Batman comic, and the young man whose favorite movie, based on the poster hanging over his bed, is the 1965 Dale Robertson western “The Man from Button Willow.”

It’s a common belief that the way we decorate our homes is an expression of who we really are. And we’ve now begun twisting that concept in terms of our children, believing that the way we decorate their rooms is an expression of who they will be. Pottery Barn offers hope of orderly, intellectual, very urbane children, the kind that most orderly, intellectual, urbane adults want. They’re the kids who will grow up to attend the subdued yet jazzy cocktail parties that are the intended destination of everything the adult version of Pottery Barn sells.

The Ikea catalog, in contrast, promises a completely different kind of child. The Swedish manufacturer’s lower price points naturally lend themselves to a more bohemian philosophy from that of Pottery Barn. Ikea kids don’t just sit quietly and do their homework, they boldly climb all over the furniture; they hang from the ceilings; they devour ice cream cones and let the melting soft-serve drip all over their faces, because they know how to enjoy life, dammit! On the pages of this catalog you will find children who are creative, free-thinking, and liberally inclusive — each Ikea household appears to be overrun by a multi-ethnic brood of dreamers.

The 2004 catalog, narrated from the kids’ point of view, labels its rooms with sobriquets like “City in the Clouds” and “The Good Smell Factory.” It encourages wild and wacky creativity, like donning flippers in the bathtub or wearing a tiara while watching your flat screen TV. It celebrates the curious nature of kids who snoop through their parents’ drawers, like the little girl on Page 13, who says, “The City in the Clouds has lots of hidden treasures. Including some things your parents thought you didn’t know about.” Ikea kids don’t let anything hold them back, not even an inability to pronounce umlauts. They want their toys stored in suspended overhead nets; they want shredded shower curtains; they want to have their courage challenged nightly by a stuffed bee the size of a Macy’s float hovering in the corner of their room. The parent who chooses Ikea is proudly shouting to the world, “It’s OK if my child becomes a starving artist! And I’m going to show him that by making sure no two objects in his room are the same color!”

An Ikea child would feel stifled and confused in the home of a Pottery Barn kid. Except for the wicker baskets. They both have wicker baskets.

So the question is, which kind of kid do you want: Pottery Barn or Ikea? Or Bloomingdale’s? Or Target? My apartment is currently half-Pottery Barn, half-Ikea, so you can imagine the state of confusion I’m in. There’s suddenly a brand new worry for parents: anxiety over buying for the right subculture. Thankfully, we can all look back upon our own youths to find an easy solution to this dilemma — just buy whatever your friends buy. But this strategy leads to peer pressure. Parents can be made to feel horribly inadequate when they take their preschooler to a friend’s house for a lunchtime play date and watch the other child climb into his hand-crafted Italian booster seat, or upon realizing that the Crate & Barrel entertainment unit in their friends’ family room is stocked with the entire line of Baby Einstein videos while they know their own daughter is back home engrossed in her 17th viewing of “Lilo & Stitch.”

A curious segregation sprouts up between parents who opt for different accessory styles, and it can be just as dramatic as the rift between the cry-it-out crowd and the attachment parents. Roll a hulking Graco stroller down the streets of Manhattan and you’ll be greeted with xenophobic stares from all the Maclaren pushers. But this is not just urban elitism; it goes both ways. Take one of those lightweight Maclarens with you while visiting relatives out in SUV country and you’ll have incredulous neighbors asking you where the baby’s cupholder and clip-on toy rack are.

Still, all of these well-thought-out purchasing decisions are just wishful thinking on our parts. It’s not abnormal for parents to want their kids to be like them. But what seems oddly pathological about the current obsession with childhood accoutrements is that we apparently want our children to be like our current selves, not like we were when we were their age. How else can we explain toddler products being retailed by Starbucks? (Yes, the ubiquitous coffee house chain once offered the short-lived “Bearista” sippy cup which was eventually recalled after being deemed a choking hazard.) We need to come to grips with the fact that they’re simply going to be who they’re going to be, despite our best attempts to pigeonhole them while they’re young. There’s a part of me that knows that no matter how many Shakespearean pop-up books I ply her with, my daughter will still end up captain of her high school’s co-ed lacrosse team.

I honestly don’t know if my parents had any kind of future vision for me when I was growing up. I’d like to imagine that, with some kind of pop culture foresight, they knew that I’d be able to pull that Star Wars blanket out of retirement when I was in college and score major kitsch value points with my dorm mates. But they probably just got it for me because I liked it. The one thing I know for sure is that the only marketing and peer pressure that contributed to the purchase of that particular movie tie-in was directed solely at me, the child.

A few weeks ago, the respected Journal of Marriage and Family published a study by Straus and his colleague Carolyn Field that reports that “psychological aggression” toward children is “so prevalent as to be just about universal.” This is the result of a telephone survey of 991 parents, 98 percent of whom admitted to using “psychological aggression” against their child by age 7. While the researchers’ definition of “psychological aggression” includes such inarguably objectionable acts as calling your children obscene names and threatening to throw them out of the house, it also includes actions that most parents regard as a normal part of raising kids — shouting and yelling. In fact, the 2 percent who came off completely clean in the study probably either lied or have nannies who do the hollering for them.

The tone of Straus and Field’s report is unrelenting. They do not distinguish between different forms of communication — harmful invective like “I wish you had never been born!” as opposed to “Do your homework now!” pleas. In their view, it also doesn’t seem to make a difference if parents scream at their children constantly, or just get loud once in a while. They say, “We believe it should be never.” While admitting that even the best of parents can sometimes lose their temper and get a bit snappish, they are sure to add, “This provides an explanation for some psychological aggression, not a justification.”

Upon first reading the study, I was incredulous; could the authors truly believe that occasional yelling would damage my child? I contacted Straus in Belgium, where he is currently teaching, in hopes of getting some clarification. “Any yelling or screaming is bad parenting,” he said, quite clearly. “It is not, in my opinion, a humane mode of family relationship.” So now not only was I “psychologically aggressive” toward my daughter, but I was also “inhumane” — a term I’d always associated with POW camps and cockfights.

I kept searching for some kind of caveat to Straus’ all-out ban on shouting but never found one. Not even motivation seems to matter. Couldn’t you get a free pass for yelling at your children out of frustration or concern as opposed to assaulting them with a malicious verbal attack that is intended to berate and belittle? “Because it is the lesser of two evils,” Straus told me, “does not make it not an evil.”

And yet, resolute as he is in his thesis, he admits there is still research to be done. “There is no empirical evidence,” he told me, “to support either my hypothesis or the view of critics.” But we’re still supposed to feel guilty about it.

In the study itself, the researchers admit their reluctance to label psychological aggression as “abuse” — mostly because there are legal definitions of abuse that some psychological aggression would not fit into — but Straus didn’t shy away from that word in the accompanying press release or in his interview with me. He also told me he “would not see any downsides” to future laws against psychological aggression. Such forms of discipline are tolerated right now, he says, because they are society’s norm (and certainly anything done by 98 percent of the population qualifies as a “norm”). “The expansion of humanitarian rights that has occurred in respect to other areas of childhood, such as child labor,” he said, “suggests that it is possible that the norms will change.”

And there you have it. Shouting “How many times have we told you to stop eating Mommy’s lipstick?” is on a par with manacling your kindergartner to a rusty antique Singer in the basement of a factory and forcing her to stitch up knockoff D&G handbags for 18 hours a day.

While Straus and Field certainly didn’t create the blame-the-parents-first atmosphere that has begun to blanket our country, with this study they’ve supplied a diaper’s load of fodder for all those people suffering from concerned-neighbor syndrome, the ones who seem to believe that the nation’s children should be raised by an army of omnipotent Stepford parents, and who are ready to call in a SWAT team if they spot a mother who hasn’t wiped her son’s runny nose quickly enough.

There’s not much a parent can do these days that doesn’t bring on an onslaught of societal guilt. Letting kids cry is neglectful, letting them glimpse even a nanosecond of television is irresponsible, and putting them in day care is so awful the Brothers Grimm wouldn’t use it as a plot device. You would think there’s enough genuine abuse in the world that we could cut some slack to a father who accidentally lets his vocabulary lapse into PG-13 as the stroller rolls over his toe, but apparently not.

I can’t count the number of times my wife was reprimanded, while our daughter was still in utero, for not exhibiting the mental tranquility of a Zen monk. “Stress can do horrible things to your baby,” was the constant refrain — one backed up by hordes of obstetricians across the nation. That, of course, only led her to become stressed out about becoming stressed out. When caring, responsible, attentive mothers can be made to feel like lousy parents before their children are even born, things have gone too far. It’s as if the best caregivers would have to be unfeeling, unemotional automatons. Mr. Spock has replaced Dr. Spock, and an impossible standard is being set.

Raising a child is pressure enough without having to suddenly worry about your decibel level as your 2-year-old decides that the keyboard of your iMac might like a drink of milk. You don’t need to curse at her, or berate her, or threaten to kick her out of the house (which would be a pretty nasty thing to do to a toddler). You may even admire her compassion with regard to your computer’s thirst. But you also might shout at her — intentionally or not — to get her attention, to make sure she stops, and to underscore the message that mixing dairy products and expensive technology is a no-no. And even if the tone of your voice temporarily upsets her, chances are she’ll get over it rather quickly. You don’t need to start worrying that you’ve just crossed the line into Joan Crawford territory. And if anyone tells you that you should, well, I think that’s psychological aggression.

Incidentally, after I yelled at my daughter that first time, she flashed me a big smile and giggled as if I had just put on an Elmo costume and done a headstand. Then she handed me back the Legos.

Take Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit organization that provides teens with accurate and informative sex education. In 18 years as a federal grantee, it has never been subjected to a government financial audit. That is, until it was suddenly hit with three in less than a year (one by the Centers for Disease Control back in October 2002, a second by the General Accounting Office in early 2003, and the third just two months ago, by a different arm of the CDC). The organization is crying conspiracy — saying that it’s being unfairly targeted because of its negative views toward the administration’s abstinence-only education policies — and the claims appear to be more than just paranoia.

In July 2001 the Washington Post published a leaked memo from the Department of Health and Human Services in which Advocates for Youth was described as “ardent critics of the Bush administration.” This charge apparently came as the result of several Advocates for Youth press releases that railed against the president’s backing of the “global gag rule” that prohibited any funding to foreign agencies that performed or facilitated abortions. In the leaked memo, it was also suggested that the Advocates for Youth programs did not go over well with the HHS because “the secretary [Tommy Thompson] is a devout Roman Catholic.”

While Advocates for Youth may be near the top of Tommy Thompson’s Most Wanted list, it is certainly not alone. After a group of activists booed Thompson at an international AIDS conference in Barcelona last year, a cadre of congressional Republicans called for investigations of the hecklers’ various organizations. The CDC has conducted three reviews in the past 10 months of San Francisco’s STOP AIDS program in an effort to make sure that none of its federal grant dollars have gone toward funding workshops that may promote sexual activity. And the New York-based Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) has been audited twice this year (its first audits ever, despite a decade of receiving federal grants), evidently because it created No New Money for Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs, a Web site designed to educate the public about the possible dangers of abstinence-only education and to call for grassroots campaigns against the continued funding of these programs.

So far, Advocates for Youth, STOP AIDS and SIECUS have come through all of their audits with flying colors. But last year, as it turns out, a number of federal grantees were found guilty of misusing their government money. They were faith-based organizations.

In Louisiana, a number of sex-education programs funded by Gov. Mike Foster’s Program on Abstinence were found guilty in a federal court of openly violating the constitutional tenet of separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the governor’s program after discovering numerous violations, including the use of grant money to teach abstinence through scripture, to perform skits with Christ as a character, to purchase Bibles, and to fund prayer vigils at abortion clinics. Though those Louisiana nonprofits are now required to turn in regular reports to the governor about their activities, none, to date, have been put before an HHS audit.

“Our complaint is not with getting audited,” says Advocates’ president James Wagoner. “Our complaint is with the selective and political nature of these audits. Ideology is invading — if not subverting — science within the Department of Health and Human Services [which houses the CDC], and we ended up on the audit table because we are one of the organizations pointing that out.”

Advocates for Youth has continually stood behind its time-tested, research-backed policy of comprehensive sex education and HIV prevention, as opposed to adopting the Bush-backed method of abstinence-only education. Through its varied and numerous programs — ranging from peer counseling and educator training to the creation of lesson plans and instructional videos — Advocates for Youth has worked nationally and internationally to, as their mission statement reads, “help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive health.” This includes providing them with information about contraceptives as well as abstinence and brings with it a sensitivity toward all forms of sexuality.

Comprehensive sex education has, for years, had the backing of the scientific community as an excellent preventive measure against teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Its proponents — the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics among them — will point to studies in publications such as the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Adolescent Health and the Journal of School Health, to back up their claims.

Support for the other side comes mostly from non-science sources, like Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In a much quoted April 2002 diatribe against comprehensive sex education, Rector cited a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association to back up his claims that abstinence-only programs work. He pointed out that the results of this study showed that teens who take “virginity pledges” exhibited a delay in their initiation of sexual activity. He failed to include, however, information from that same study that also reported that virginity pledges did not work for children under 14 or over 17; that they didn’t work in communities where more than 30 percent of the teens took the pledge; and that teens who broke their pledges were far less likely to use contraception.

There is a clear lack of scientific data to back up the efficacy of abstinence-only programs, yet they have the full and complete support of the federal government. Hence James Wagoner’s fears about ideology interfering with public health.

Wagoner is not the first one to charge the CDC with manipulating science for ideological purposes. In 1999, the CDC posted a page on its Web site listing sex-education “Programs That Work” from around the country that had curricula proven to be effective. All of the cited programs were comprehensive and included information about both abstinence and contraception; none were abstinence-only programs. Despite repeated outcries from proponents of abstinence-only, the list remained intact. That is, until George W. Bush came into office.

That Web page has vanished from the CDC’s site, as have positive statements about condom use. Research results showing that abortions have no definitive link to breast cancer were taken off the National Cancer Institute’s Web site, which is part of HHS. And now with these suspiciously motivated audits, it appears that HHS has graduated from simply hiding scientific information that offends the religious right, to retaliating against groups that disseminate that information.

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There are three streams of revenue from which the federal government has chosen to award grant money to abstinence-only education programs: the Adolescent Family Life Act, started by President Reagan in 1981; the Welfare Reform Act of 1996; and the newly developed Special Programs of Regional and National Significance, which puts federal money directly into the hands of community-based organizations. All of these initiatives share a strictly delineated eight-point definition of “abstinence-only” that any program must meet to receive funding. Basically, this amounts to teens being taught that the only way to avoid pregnancy or STDs is to abstain from any and all sexual activity until marriage. For a program to comply with the eight-point definition, it must teach students that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity.” Teachers in these programs are not allowed to endorse the use of condoms or other forms of contraception. However, they are apparently allowed to use instructional texts containing lines such as, “Is it fair to make a baby die because of a bad decision his or her parents made?” and “What if a girl came to school in a crop top, just barely covering her bra, and shorts starting three inches below her navel? What ‘game’ would she be playing?”

The abstinence-only drive was labeled a priority for HHS almost immediately after George W. Bush stepped into office. Starting in 2002, Congress has granted more than $100 million each year to organizations that sponsor abstinence-only programs; the average spending on these programs during the Clinton administration was about $60 million a year. Currently the only avenue through which organizations supporting comprehensive sex education can acquire federal grants is the Department of Adolescent Sexual Health, a division of the CDC that offers money strictly for HIV/AIDS prevention and gives out approximately $10 million a year divided among more than 40 organizations.

SIECUS’ No New Money Web site urges people to contact their representatives and demand that funding to abstinence-only programs be stopped. That call to arms is what provided all the fodder the right wing needed to begin its retribution.

Only a few weeks after No New Money went live last August, 24 House Republicans, led by Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., jotted off a letter to HHS Secretary Thompson asking that both SIECUS and Advocates for Youth (which was listed on the site along with more than a hundred other “supporting organizations”) be investigated. The letter pointed out that current law forbids the use of grant money for lobbying and explained that this group of congressional representatives just wanted to be absolutely sure no government dollars had gone into the construction or maintenance of No New Money. “I requested the audit of Advocates for Youth because I was concerned that the group was using taxpayer money to engage in political activities, not to help people,” Pitts said in an e-mail to Salon. “And I intend to continue keeping an eye on how taxpayer money is spent, both here in Washington and by private groups.”

Pitts has eagerly taken on a crusade against what he has called the “waste of taxpayer money.” In a statement last month on his official Web site, he even called for an investigation into the spending practices of the NIH, suggesting that funding should perhaps be pulled from the venerable institution if it could not “provide a clear accounting and explanation for how it spends taxpayer money.” He voiced his fears about “government agencies engaged in clearly useless activities” and illustrated this with examples from the NIH, such as research on female sexual arousal, gays and lesbians in the Native American community, and methods for better promotion of the morning-after pill. He insists that he is “not criticizing the objectives of these studies” but is “questioning the wisdom of using taxpayer resources to engage in research that has, at best, spurious benefits to our nation.”

It isn’t difficult to find a pattern in the type of programs that Pitts has targeted for possible defunding: The two specific Advocates for Youth programs that are funded by federal grant money — and that are therefore at risk of being shut down by the findings of these audits — are HIV prevention for young women of color and HIV prevention for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.

Pitts happens to be an ardent supporter of providing federal funding to faith-based charities. (“Rather than preempt these organizations with a government program that would never be as effective, we want to partner with them,” he said in a September press release.) It shouldn’t be too hard to see why groups like Advocates are feeling singled out.

The letter about No New Money that Pitts and his colleagues sent to HHS was cited to both Advocates for Youth and SIECUS as the impetus for all of their audits thus far. Strangely, CDC itself seems somewhat confused about exactly what they’ve been doing to these nonprofits, both of which were given the disclaimer that the investigations they went through in September were not audits. “In this case, CDC does not have official audit authority,” explained CDC spokesperson Kathryn Harben. “So what we’re doing is referred to as a ‘business and financial review evaluation.’”

However, Enrique Tessada, president of Tessada & Associates, the independent firm contracted by the CDC to perform its most recent “business and financial reviews,” wrote in his company’s Spring 2003 newsletter that his staff was “auditing community-based organizations… [that] receive grants to conduct HIV/AIDS prevention and training nationwide.”

Semantics aside, no one can disguise the fact that, regardless of results, these audits can have a punitive effect on nonprofits. “Each one of these rounds costs our organization enormous amounts of time and money,” says Wagoner. “In many ways it can grind you to a halt if you have to go back through every book, pull every piece of paper, and so on.”

When asked why Advocates and SIECUS were being subjected to so many reviews in such a short period of time, Harben said she thinks “it was really more poor planning [on the government's part] than anything else.” When asked if every grantee organization was equally subject to CDC review, Harben said that “the history of that is probably not consistent.” She also indicated that the reviews “could take anywhere from a couple of days to four or five days,” but the groups under investigation report a lengthier time commitment. Preparation included, Advocates for Youth says it lost almost four weeks to its last audit, and SIECUS about two weeks.

“If they can’t bury our heads in the sand about abstinence-only,” says Wagoner, “they’re going to try to bury our organization in audits.”

Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., fearing an abuse of federal audit power, has emerged as Advocates for Youth’s greatest defender in this struggle. He and a contingent of 11 other congressional Democrats have voiced their concerns about the motivation behind these audits in letters to Tommy Thompson. In those letters they ask that HHS provide information about its auditing criteria in order “to determine whether there is sound scientific foundation for HHS’ actions.” Waxman’s first letter received a response that was both delayed and abbreviated and left most of his questions unanswered. His follow-up letter, sent on Aug. 14 and requesting answers by Aug. 29, has yet to receive any response.

While attempting to get a response out of Tommy Thompson has become a Sisyphean task for Henry Waxman, it appears that all Joseph Pitts needs to do is mutter something under his breath and HHS will jump into action. On October 2nd, Pitts and some of his Republican colleagues presented the House Energy and Commerce Committee a list of 10 scientists whose work is funded by NIH grants, including some of those whose projects he questioned on his web site. The NIH has already made calls to these researchers, along with over 100 others, whose names turned up on a longer list  one which apparently originated with the Traditional Values Coalition , an ultra-conservative organization dedicated to fighting the “evils of abortion” and the “homosexual agenda.” So far, no action has been taken against any of these NIH grantees and they have only been notified of their inclusion on what Waxman has referred to as the “hit list,” but several have contacted the California Democrat to tell him that they now fear the loss of their funding. On Monday, Waxman picked up his pen once again, demanding that Thompson take a stand and denounce this “scientific McCarthyism.”

The true danger is, as Waxman says, “that some organizations will stop offering comprehensive education programs as a result of these audits, causing public health to suffer.”

That is also the biggest fear of Advocates for Youth. “This is not about the left vs. the right,” says Deb Mauser, Advocates’ vice president. “It’s about what works at keeping young people safe and healthy. It’s a human right to have effective science-based strategies available to young people who are facing an [AIDS] epidemic. Ultimately, Advocates [which receives only a third of its total funding from government grants] will survive. Whether young people will get the service they deserve is questionable.”

“On one level, we feel vindicated by the audit process,” says Wagoner, “but on another, we can not deny the impact of this kind of tool being used on nonprofits, and not just the intimidation on a group like ours — we’re going to wake up in the morning, come to the office, do the work we’re always going to do — but there’s the residual intimidation of other organizations in this field. There are lots of them that get government money, that don’t have diversified funds. And they may look at Advocates and say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I. And if it’s because Advocates is raising concerns about the subverting of science and research, if it’s because they’re raising their heads up a little too high, well, that tells us we’d better keep ours down real low.’

“You cannot convince me that this campaign isn’t aimed at making an example out of us for the rest of this field,” he continues. “My only hope is that it backfires, that those who have committed their lives to this field and to young people or to any other group that needs good quality public health — we will not take it lying down. We will go back to work. We will do what’s right.”

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

The show’s makeover artists, or the “Fab Five” as they call themselves, are performing an invaluable service to heterosexual America. I, unfortunately, will never be one of their straight-to-great success stories; too many people assume I’m gay already. I own shiny shirts; I cry at chick flicks; I have a favorite kind of goat cheese. Besides, the number of Kiehl’s products in my bathroom cabinet would disqualify me immediately.

My mother, however, a bona fide gay woman, is in serious need of some lesbian lessons, because she’s just not doing it right. Her remember-the-’80s hair, so-long-they-look-fake fingernails, and puppy-appliqué sweatshirts are all wrong. The Fab Five may be inspiring legions of straight folks to new heights of fabulousness, but what about a woman who’s already “one of them” and doesn’t seem to get it at all? Where is the show for her? Where is “Dykes for Dummies”? She needs some kind of help, because in just about every possible way, despite my attraction to the opposite sex, I’m far more gay than she is.

Throughout my life, people have been secretly — or in some cases, not so secretly — expecting me to come out. I think even my Roman Catholic grandparents were a bit surprised when I actually married a woman. And it’s not just the uninitiated who’ll make the mistake; I can’t walk down the street in Chelsea without setting off gaydar left and right. Sometimes I wonder if my wife gets tired of the sympathetic head shake she gets from male couples who see us at restaurants, the one that always comes with the unspoken intonation of “oh, that poor deluded woman.” After we first met, it actually took my wife herself several weeks to come to the conclusion that I liked girls.

Is it all because I tucked in my shirts?

Whatever the reason, there’s no drama in having one of the “Queer Eye” makeover artists open my closet and say, “Wow, everything’s organized!” Or having their food and wine connoisseur say, “We need to spice up your menu,” and having me respond with, “OK, should we use my Thai basil marinade or my chipotle-lime salsa.”

My mother, however, would be a different story altogether. The “Queer Eye” crew would probably shudder at her obsession with reruns of “Home Improvement” and “Full House,” or her nonironic love for Dollywood. I have no idea where her status as a screaming, middle-aged Backstreet Boy fan fits in. (“Brian smiled at me!” she gushed after seeing the Boys in concert in 2000.) She doesn’t even worship the correct icons; to her, Marlene Dietrich is a gnat on the ass of the all-powerful god that is Fran Drescher.

Although, admittedly, my mother did run off to buy a Melissa Etheridge CD a week after coming out to me, sometimes I think she has the rainbow flag sticker on the bumper of her car just to remind herself that she’s gay.

Television has spelled out homosexuality pretty neatly for us. Basically, there are two types of gay men: the sassy, snappy, ultratrendy ones (Jack from “Will and Grace”) and the ones just like that, only a bit more repressed (Will from “Will and Grace”). And there are apparently three types of lesbians: the Bart Simpson-haired, the patchouli-scented, and the power-suited. Any of the above would have seemed a more natural fit for me, parentwise. Instead, I got Pinky from “Grease.”

There has always been an innate cultural difference between me and the rest of my family that made me feel like something of an outsider among them. And it started long before I majored in theater and spelled it “theatre.” My mom was a teenage parent from an old-school, red-sauce Italian family in Queens, N.Y. College wasn’t an option for her; only daytime TV and coffee klatches with the landlady. She wasn’t the one who seemed out of place in her environment, I was.

That’s why when my mom came out to me almost a decade ago, I secretly hoped she was going to suddenly change and become a bit more like me. Some naive part of me half-expected that after announcing her lesbianism, she would envelop herself in some sort of magical gay chrysalis, only to burst out a few days later with a pixie haircut and a bottle of Chilean merlot. Or at least a chain wallet and membership passes to Gold’s Gym.

But nearly 10 years later, she still drinks Natural Light beer, douses herself in off-brand body sprays, and limits her definition of “ethnic cuisine” to sweet and sour chicken. And she still often seems somewhat perplexed by her son who buys organic produce, regularly gets things dry-cleaned, and shows no fear in the face of subtitles. The only difference is that now she happens to live with another woman.

Somehow, being gay didn’t make my mother a different person — an outcome that I at first found not only disappointing, but perplexing as well. Even Rosie O’Donnell, immediately after coming out, showed up on magazine covers sporting Official Lesbian Haircut No. 8. Years went by and I eagerly waited for my gay mom to appear. I was ready to go on pride marches with her, to head off for weekends in Provincetown, Mass. Sadly, the gayest thing we’ve yet done together is watch an episode of “Frasier.”

My mother might have changed her sexual preference, but she wasn’t “gay” — at least not in the way I understood the word. Gay people didn’t serve Hamburger Helper unless they were hosting a theme party.

When all was said and done, I was still the odd man out in my family, still the “strange” one because I choose to grind my own coffee and alphabetize my CDs. My younger brother has found himself woven into our mother’s life to a far greater extent than I have. This is a man who braids his beard, wears profanity-laced T-shirts, and uses cross-country buses as his preferred mode of transportation. Our mother may not do those things herself, but she gets that, she can understand that. She cannot understand choosing an art-house documentary over anything starring David Spade.

So could the “Queer Eye” Fab Five turn her around? Could they burst into her rural Carolina mountain home, toss around a few mod lamps with silver-tipped light bulbs, layer her in designer pantsuits, and force-feed her fois gras, thereby transforming her into the kind of Proper Lesbian who could be seen dating Ross’s ex-wife on “Friends”? Or what if there really were some group of roving makeover lesbians? Could they stop by my mother’s house, hang up some Audre Lorde sayings, throw away her razors, and make her start baking macrobiotic blondies? When we’re talking about a woman whose idea of being label-conscious means looking for the “As Seen on TV” sticker, I doubt it.

In the end, though, it’s probably all for the better, because I’m sure I would end up horribly missing the mom who weeps over each new addition to her collection of Franklin Mint doggie figurines. Her earnestness is something I’ve always found incredibly endearing.

I’d never actually wanted a different mother; I’d just been excited about the fact that mine was entering into a subculture that I felt more comfortable in, regardless of my own straightness. Accepting my mother’s sexual preference was never a problem. The fact that the stubborn woman simply refused to conform to a media-driven stereotype was. I hoped that being gay could, for her, shed new light on who I am.

Not that I’m a perfect metrosexual by any means. I’m no stranger to the Gap and many a day goes by where, out of pure laziness, I don’t bother to shave. (“Queer Eye’s” resident grooming guru would have me flayed.) And during the premiere episode of “Queer Eye,” when one of the Fab Five sighed and commented about “straight boys and their games” after spotting their makeover subject’s PlayStation 2, I grew a little red-faced thinking about the fact that I had a PS2 sitting right below our TV. And an Xbox. And a GameCube.

But it’s important to me to be able to come home from a pleasant pan-Latino brunch and play a few rounds of Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball. So when it dawned on me that I was sitting there worrying about not being gay enough, I had to laugh. I picked up the phone and called my mother, who was predictably horrified when I informed her that our 18-month-old daughter absolutely loved paprika-dusted hummus and vanilla soy milk. Being as gay-centric as I am, I’m just catty enough to enjoy that.