Tune in today as Dr. Debra Condren chats with the acclaimed author and journalist Peggy Orenstein who, as a new mother, was blindsided by the persistent ultra-feminine messages being sent to a new generation of little girls—from endless permutations of pink to pressures to be “a hot tot” and a “spoiled brat princess.” When Orenstein published an essay in The New York Times Magazine about the “princess-mania” that has overtaken a new generation of little girls, she was not prepared for a firestorm. But “What’s Wrong with Cinderella?” swiftly shot to the top of the Times’ website’s “most emailed” list and elicited hundreds of reader responses. Orenstein, who had garnered a reputation as an expert on girls’ development, thought she was simply musing about her own observations and reactions to her young daughter’s obsession with Disney princesses and predilection for the color pink. Clearly, though, she had touched a cultural nerve. Today’s show reveals the dark side of pink and pretty in this wake-up call to parents: the rise of the girlie girl is not that innocent. What does it do to girls’ ambition to grow up in a culture that pressures them, from a very young age, to define their sense of self according to a junk culture’s ideals and from the outside in, rather than from the inside? Nothing less than our daughters’ identities and their futures is on the line as we explore how Cinderella Ate My Daughter.