Why’d They Have To Mess With Dora?
There is one hero in my daughter’s eyes. It isn’t Mommy or Daddy. It isn’t Willow or Rory, the cats. It isn’t even the much loved Rae Rae, the bunny. Right now, the person who is the most asked for, the most adored, and the most I must see her or I’ll give you an Oscar quality tantrum is Dora, as in Dora the Explorer.
From the moment we set foot in the house, she starts in with the entreaties of “Dorla?!” She’ll hand me whatever remote control she can find. Often it’s the one for the family room blinds. It doesn’t matter. She will do anything and everything to see Dorla and Boots.
She’s even slick about it. If she asks for Dorla and I say no, she’ll come back in a few seconds and say, “Boots?” Yeah, baby, that’s a good one. No you can’t see Dora, but I’ll let you see Boots. Riiight!!
I’ll then give her a “no Boots!” reply. She’ll walk away and return in 15 seconds with another gambit, “Monkey?”
Oh she is just too slick. Yeah, Mommy is too stupid to know that Boots is a monkey. But I’ve got to give it to the girl for her attempts at problem solving.
Yet when you do start up one of the episodes from the DVR, you see the expression of pure rapture come over her face. Daddy and I cease to exist. It’s all about Dora for the next 20-something minutes.
The mom part of me loves it for many reasons. First, I can take Dora a lot easier than Elmo, whose high pitched voice and speaking in the third person, drove me a bit batty after a long day at work. Second, Dora seems to engage her so much and makes her so happy. When she yells out, “the map!” in answer to Dora and Boots’ question, she has an expression of such pride on her face, it’s as if she has solved a complicated quadratic equation all by herself. Third, it gives Mommy and Daddy a minute to chat about our day. Good things all.
And the really cool thing about Dora for this mom who loathes gender role stereotypes is that Dora is out there doing her thing. She’s not afraid. She’s an explorer! She’s solving problems, rescuing friends, and using her head. She isn’t waiting for someone with a penis to come and rescue her like all the stupid princesses and typical female characters that lies in wait for my munchkin as she ages. I want to spare my kind from that madness as long as is humanely possible.
Yet yesterday I learned the bad news. The Powers That Be Had to go and mess with a good thing. Dora is going to grow up. Mattel is creating a tweenaged Dora doll (and I’m sure a TV show won’t be far behind). Gone will be her shorts, t-shirt and backpack (and did you know that Backpack is female?). Also gone will be Boots. Dora’s moving to the city, attending middle school and is growing into a girly-girl.
“As tweenage Dora, our heroine has moved to the big city, attends middle school and has a whole new fashionable look,” Mattel says in a press release.
Ah yes. Dora the problem-solving adventurer grows into Dora the Fashionista. Of course! That’s exactly what little Dora would become. NOT!
Yes, I realize that all we have is a silhouette, but somehow with the flowing locks and short skirt, I’m not feeling the Dorla we’ve come to know and love in our household. Couldn’t she still be Dora, a bit older, with a Harriet the Spy, mystery investigation thing going on? Do all tween girls have to have flowing locks, short skirts and be fashionable?
I wasn’t. I never got the whole let’s talk about our hair, nails and clothes obsession that some girls had. Give me crafts, a good novel or the coolness of working out a geometry problem. I hung out with the boys more often in elementary and middle school because the girls just didn’t make sense to me. Their interests were just not in line with mine. (And for those of you who want to bring up my shoe fetishism, that didn’t start until I was much, much, older.)
So come on Mattel and Nickelodeon! Let’s stop painting young girls into this fashion-conscious, math is hard, brainless Barbie mentality. Why don’t we give girls a different image than the slutty Bratz? Can’t we do better than this in 2009?
In the meanwhile, my munchkin will continue with young Dorla: solving problems with Boots, Map and Backpack. We’ll keep the girly, sex role stereotypic crap at bay as long as we can.
The psychologist authors of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes 
have begun a petition against this Dora makeover. If you want to sign this petition to Mattel and Nickelodeon against this change in Dora, please visit here: Let’s Go. No Makeover for Dora.
More from the Packaging Girlhood blog.
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It’s times like this I don’t feel badly that Lena’s moved away from Dora and Diego. Nope, don’t feel bad about it at all. Even if she’s traded Dora for Hannah bloody Montana.
I hate hate hate that they are doing this. Since when did growing older mean a girl has to look like a slut? They claim the new Dora is geared towards the older kids but have you ever seen what happens when they have two similar products, one for younger kids and one for older kids? The younger kids want what the older kids have!
They were discussing this on the news this morning and one of the reporters mentioned that she had told her 8 year old that they were changing her look to appear to her and her response was “why?”. Tweens have outgrown her. That’s what’s supposed to happen. You don’t have the same interests at 2,3 and 4 that you have when you are 8,9 and 10.
You have your hands full making sure Z knows that real girls/women don’t dress and behave this way contrary to what the media says. I have to teach Dylan that this is not how girls behave/act/dress and he should respect them contrary to what the media says.
I sent this to my sister, who has a 5 year-old. Her response:
Yeah, I heard about it. I agree: smutty characters should start out smutty (like Barbie!) instead of the old bait-and-switch.
[...] shit has hit le fan in mommyblogs. Grumps about sexualization and what-not–all of which I tend to agree with–plus a petition to Mattel and [...]
I heard about this a few months ago and I was dismayed. I have a 7 year old daughter. For all the reasons you listed, we enjoyed Dora in this household. I’m so tired of companies that are only thinking of the bottom line, MONEY, dictating the messages that our girls are getting during such formative years.
I have struggled to help my daughter learn the pitfalls of advertising and the hidden messages behind what the ads are saying. This is such a betrayal to me, because they COULD have given us an older Dora that is a middle school chemistry genius or something. Perhaps they will, but that silhouette doesn’t look like it to me. I will miss that poochy little belly she had, with her belly button hanging out of her shirt, saying “It’s okay to have a body that doesn’t look like Barbie!”
It’s a disappointment all the way around and as an almost-tween household, we won’t be giving Mattel one dime of our money. As someone else mentioned, I have enough on my hands trying to explain why Hannah Montana isn’t the perfect role model either. (Although I must admit it’s not as bad as I thought it would be, once I sat down and watched a few shows….I kept HM away from my dd until she was almost 7, years longer than my next door neighbor, whose three year old was enamored of her for years, and now at age 7 is focused on make-up, clothes and boys.)
Hola!
I discovered your blog two nights ago and have become hooked! Imagine my utter surprise when I came across this piece of news re: Dora Makeover –> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090316/ap_en_ot/dora_for_tweens
This is surprising to me because, having no children, I didn’t even know “who” Dora is (it’s only after I read your post that I realised that the shoes I bought for my adorable niece in Durban are Dora shoes!) and now I’m surrounded with Dora news.
Have a great week!
My middle daughter was always into Dora, but my son who is only a few months old has claimed “little Einsteins” as his love. strange how even when so small these cleverly designed programs seem to attract yet unformed minds
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