Girls, Unpowered

Say you're a parent. What wouldn't you do to protect your children? If you're a parent like Maurice Clarett, you load your car with a semi-automatic, various other guns, a hatchet, a bulletproof vest, and a bottle of Grey Goose, and call up a bunch of sportswriters to tell them about how you're going to defend your baby daughter. But that's a whole different tragedy.

If you're a parent like me, however, it's more a matter of deleting the Sesame Street season pass from the Tivo. (The Grey Goose comes later.) Okay, maybe I'm overreacting, but I'm having a hard time getting past the initial nails-on-a-chalkboard level disgust I feel at the triumphant introduction of a new Sesame Street character: Abby Cadabby. According to various news releases, including a New York Times report, executive producer Liz Nealon explains the need felt for more of a "girly-girl" character.

We have our wacky, and we have our gentle,” Ms. Nealon said in a recent interview. “But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl.

In the rest of the article, it's explained that, in addition to her modeling makeup and glitter-wearing behavior, having Abby be a fairy will help thematize immigrant issues without actually having a character from "Indonesia or India," (because, you know, a brown-skinned puppet would totally clash with Elmo.) Implicit to this entire endeavor is a feeling of competition with a certain big-headed, monkey-befriending girl who has a talking backpack and lives in a computer (that's Dora the Explorer, for those of you who are toddler-deprived). I'm not going to hold up Dora as a model of self-possessed feminism, but you know, she does go on an awful lot of adventures all by herself. And as a catch-phrase, I'll take "Vamanos" over "That's so magic!" any day.

Edited to add: It has been revealed that Elmo is a brother. That doesn't make me any happier about Abby.