And then, gathering herself, she looked straight at the camera. She mounted the stage and with trembling fingers read names off a scrap of paper, thanking a battalion of friends, colleagues, relations. Very religious people say there’s no such thing as coincidence, so perhaps it was providence that led me to tune in to the Tony Awards show in June and to watch Lena Hall accept her prize for Best Actress in Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I didn’t even think to ask why my sophisticated tween was glued to a show based on a toy aimed at girls “ages 3 and up.” And she proselytized, begging me to watch, insisting that it would exceed my expectations, but I shrugged her off. She watched it all the time, this 22-minute toy ad, racing through her homework to catch an episode before bed. Our daughter thought of them as hers, but they were actually someone else’s first.Īnd so it barely registered when this same daughter, now nearly 11, mentioned that she was devoted to the My Little Pony TV show, a cartoon on Discovery Family, a channel formerly known as the Hub and partly owned by Hasbro. Perhaps I noted the irony that most of the My Little Pony toys that drifted into our house were in fact hand-me-downs from older girls. Assorted Little Ponies have found their way into the storage bins in our daughter’s room, and threads of mane hair have wound up in the bathtub drain, but it never occurred to me to wonder why the brushing of a bright-blue tail would be so compelling to a 2-year-old or why the marketing geniuses at Hasbro, which manufactures the toy, would have deployed that first-person possessive pronoun so deftly, giving the toy’s youngest users a built-in allegiance at the very developmental moment at which what’s “mine” is of the utmost importance. Like you, I suppose, I never gave My Little Pony very much thought, except to note it as a species of annoying plastic object that flows into our apartment with an invisible tide and then gets stuck there and never flows out.
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