But guess what? That line was crossed long ago. Target sells Hello Kitty eyeshadow. Barbie offers a slew of branded cosmetics, including the Fab Fashion 32-piece Makeup Set, which comes in a hot-pink case adorned with black spike heels, and the Lighted Vanity Case, a big mirror surrounded by pink hearts and drawers to hold eyeshadow brushes and spackling tools. If a child requires a Bieber-y soundtrack while putting on her face and prefers a Bratzier color palette, there’s the black and purple Totally Me! Deluxe Cosmetic Case with Light-Up Mirror and MP3 Speakers. “Everything you need to get glammed up while listening to your favorite tunes!” the promo copy gushes. “Nail polishes, lip glosses, body glitter, body glitter gels, lipsticks, eyeshadow powders, cream blushers, blush powders—Totally Me! lets you be totally YOU!” (That is, if “you” are a painted whore of Babylon with an iPod.) Even Crayola, a brand associated with preschoolers, sells fingernail decals.

And this is hardly Walmart’s first time at the tween makeup rodeo. geoGirl takes over the shelf space vacated by mary-kateandashley, a cosmetics line branded by the Olsen twins, who are now focused on designing high-end adult fashions. In addition to geoGirl, Walmart sells beauty products by Disney Princesses, Lip Smackers, Lotta Luv, and FAB. Unlike those lines, though, geoGirl is promoted as full of antioxidants, which fight wrinkles. Which is awesome. Because what 9-year-old isn’t troubled by those troublesome fine lines from smoking? Now we moms can put off our daughters’ Botox for another few months.

In these tough economic times, the only age group that’s increased its beauty spending has been tweens. Their average monthly beauty expenditure rose to $9.20 from $8.50, and marketers say tweens now spend $24 million a year on cosmetics. A study conducted in 2009 found that 55 percent of 6- to 9-year-old girls use lipgloss or lipstick, up from 49 percent in 2003.

At this point, I figure half my readers are raging about little girls turned into Lohans lite by spineless parents with bad values, while the other half are rolling their eyes and saying “Cut the Debbie Downer doominess—makeup can be fun.”

And to both sides I say, you’re right. I see nuance and ambiguity here. My daughter Maxine, 6, has Disney Princess lip balm; my daughter Josie, 9, wore purple lipstick and black eyeliner on Halloween. For us, visiting the corner nail salon is a delicious splurge; both girls go with me for occasional mani-pedis. (Or, as Maxie calls them, “meggie-peggies.”) Adornment and sparkle can be fun.

But when we tell girls that all they are is adornment and sparkle, we have a problem. In her new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, Peggy Orenstein details the relentlessness with which princess culture is pimped to America’s youngest consumers. The problem is in the onslaught, and in the tacit messages in toys and media that push prettiness (and makeup) above all else. “Imposing any developmental task on children before they are ready can cause irreparable, long-term harm,” Orenstein writes, summarizing the psychologist Stephen Hinshaw.

So, Orenstein argues that putting kids in sparkly blush and Suri Cruise heels is as problematic as putting them in a high-pressure academic kindergarten. “That inappropriately early pressure seems to destroy the interest and joy in learning that would naturally develop a few years later,” Orenstein writes of those super-accelerated early childhood programs. “And girls pushed to be sexy too soon can’t really understand what they’re doing. They do not—and may never—learn to connect their performance to erotic feelings or intimacy. They learn how to act desirable but not how to desire, undermining rather than promoting healthy sexuality.”

Even if we say no to makeup, we can’t escape the gendered messages of the culture we live in. Orenstein was shocked to see a banner depicting a little girl in a tiara and glittery earrings hanging above the door to her daughter’s synagogue preschool. Everywhere she went, she saw the rigidly gendered nature of most children’s toys. And her daughter Daisy, despite being raised in crunchiest Berkeley, Calif., clamored for princess everything. “When I was growing up,” Orenstein reflects, “the last thing you wanted to be called was a ‘princess’: it conjured up images of a spoiled, self-centered brat with a freshly bobbed nose who runs to ‘Daddy’ at the least provocation. The Jewish American Princess was the repository for my community’s self-hatred, its ambivalence over assimilation—it was Jews turning against their girls as a way to turn against themselves.”

But that was then; this is now. I’ve previously mentioned a 2007 American Psychological Association report on the increasing sexualization of girls. Sexualization, said the APA, is viewing a girl as “a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.” It’s linked to depression, eating disorders, and low self-esteem. But we feminist parents also don’t want our daughters feeling shame about their curves or their burgeoning sexual desires. We don’t want the kind of tznius, or modesty, that views girls’ bodies only as temptations for men.

The drumbeat emphasis on looks, looks, looks reminds me that we’re approaching Purim, when we tell the story of Queen Esther. Parents may try to shift the narrative’s emphasis to Esther’s bravery, but the takeaway for little girls is always that she won a beauty pageant. (A pageant run by Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who surely would have received his own Bravo TV show if cable had existed in the time of Xerxes I.) Esther wouldn’t have even had the opportunity to be brave if she hadn’t been a babe. Little girls get that. And seeing a shul full of tots painted and styled to emulate Esther can be disturbing, a synagogue full of JonBenéts.

We may tell our girls to be strong, faithful, brave, and smart, but the overarching message they get is that beauty trumps all else. There’s a midrash about Pharaoh’s decree that Hebrew boy babies be thrown into the Nile: Men stopped sleeping with their wives so as not to risk procreation, but Rashi says the women melted their jewelry into mirrors so they could beautify themselves into irresistibility, thus insuring the survival of the Jewish people. See how important it is to be ultra-foxy? Without babeitude, we would not exist today.

So, one geoGirl “SWAK lip treatment” cannot crush a little girl’s soul. The problem is that girls marinate in a stew of imagery ordering them to be pretty and sassy. “It would be disingenuous to claim that Disney Princess diapers or Ty Girlz or Hannah Montana or Twilight or the latest Shakira video or a Facebook account are inherently harmful,” Orenstein writes. “Each is, however, a cog in the 24/7, all-pervasive media machine aimed at our daughters—and at us—from womb to tomb; one that, again and again, presents femininity as performance, sexuality as performance, identity as performance, and each of those traits as available for a price. It tells girls that how you look is more important than how you feel. More than that, it tells them that how you look is how you feel, as well as who you are.”

That’s the problem. Not nail polish.

The article—by Abby Wisse Schachter, an editor at the New York Post—employs the common Commentary tactic of labeling a non-traditional idea “trendy,” then further using it as an example of something Wrong With Society Today. The “trend” that’s been spotted this month is the practice of seeing Vashti, the queen of Persia who is deposed at the beginning of the Purim story for refusing to dance naked for her husband, King Ahasuerus, as the true heroine of the holiday tale. In this reading, Queen Esther—Vashti’s replacement, and the traditional one worthy of praise (the scroll that tells the story is named after her)—is a lesser figure: she lacks her predecessor’s admirable chutzpah, relying instead on a more old-fashioned brand of feminine wiles to get what she wants (that is, to save the Jews of the kingdom).

These trendsetters—mostly veterans of the original 1960s/70s women’s movement—are launching a “feminist war on Purim,” Schachter contends. She is justified in her scorn for some of the more inane Purim revisions: surely it is simplistic (not to mention self-parodic) to extol Hillary Clinton as a modern-day Vashti figure, right?

But these extreme, erroneous interpretations may just be the price we pay for the ability to update our readings of ancient stories in light of contemporary values. And it is a price worth paying: the only alternatives to such reinterpretation are to adopt religious fundamentalism or to reject the tales’ teachings altogether.

In fact, that’s what’s happened recently with the Hanukkah story, which a number of readers—and not raging liberals, either—have argued is deeply jingoistic, and bears a moral that extols fanaticism. Rereading the Purim story, which ends with the Jews killing 75,000 Persians, is what allows us not to throw the whole thing out.

The Problem with Purim [Commentary]

Truth be told, we’re puzzled. Sure, Palin and Prejean were beauty queens, as was Esther, but beyond that, the parallels start to break down. Let’s start with politics. In the presidential campaign, the McCain-Palin ticket was against dialogue with autocratic regimes. Esther, on the other hand, wasn’t just in favor of engagement with a Persian despot—she married one! And while Palin and Prejean are proud of their outsiderness, convinced they’re being persecuted by elites, Esther was the product of a prominent political family. Her uncle Mordechai was a royal adviser—an inside-the-Beltway figure if there ever was one, the Rahm Emanuel of his day. And talk about family values! Esther’s Persia was about as louche a place as they come. When the whole megillah starts, the king, entertaining some friends, summons Esther’s predecessor, Vashti, to come join the party wearing the royal crown—the crown and nothing else, commentators say.

And so maybe the Christian conservatives should cut it out with the Esther comparisons and leave the name to a worthier heiress, someone who embodies the queen’s spirit in all its worldliness and complexity.

Palin Joins Miss California in the Queen Esther Pageant [USA Today]

Quite a daunting mandate, particularly for such high camp. It transported me straight back to The Ten Commandments. Regrettably, there’s no Anne Baxter-like vixen to thrice coo Ahasuerus. On the brighter side, there is an imposing royal eunuch who looks for all the world like a tunic-wearing pirate who’s lost his hat on palace grounds and suffers from a speech impediment, poor lad.

Beyond the inconsistent accents, inane dialogue, and absurd production values—the entire thing appears to have been filmed on a bare set with blurry backdrops added in during post-production—the movie troubled me for other reasons. On its own, the Esther story is pretty high drama. It’s got vengeance, sex, violence, fear—everything you need to keep the action moving. But the filmmakers, producers Matthew and Laurie Crouch and director Michael Sajbel, it seems, found the source material wanting and amped it up for contemporary viewers. So we have backstories galore, including one in which a young Esther receives from her parents a necklace with a prism on it, which, in certain lights, refracts images of stars of David on the walls. We learn in a flashback that her folks were killed in an anti-Jewish riot, but orphanhood doesn’t get her down, no sir! She’s got Uncle Mordechai, played by John Rhys-Davies, with his comforting, Welsh brogue. There’s also a stab at modern reference, with a Bachelor-esque scene, in which the king’s competing prospective brides twitter in glee at the jewels they’re allowed to choose from for their night-time auditions with hunky Ahasuerus, played by Luke Goss. Doth the true text need such adornment?

More unfortunate, though, are the interpretations of Esther’s story that this particular movie gins up. While I don’t question Esther’s star power, with her ambivalent heroism, I’ve always been a fan too of Vashti, Ahasuerus’s first queen. She refuses, according to the original text, to parade herself before the king and his court. She will not serve as her husband’s arm candy. I’d guess that feminism is a tricky biz when it comes to the Christian right. And, in this film, when Vashti (Jyoti Dogra) adamantly refuses to go to the king’s feast it’s not because she takes issue with being sexually objectified, it’s because she’s protesting a war Ahasuerus is waging to avenge his father’s death, anti-war feeling being, apparently, a less divisive force among the faithful.

While the actual book of Esther is a story of palace intrigue, the filmmakers flipped the script and made it all about romance. “Is not love the greatest commandment, no matter what God one serves?” asketh the pixie-ish Esther (Tiffany DuPont). From what I know, the only commandment to do with love that a gal like Esther might have known is love of God. But she’s a romantic, that one, and in 2006 what female viewer doesn’t want romance? (I submit, again, The Bachelor.) In any case, the film, it turns out, is based not on the actual Book of Esther, but on a “novelization” of it—which I guess means a dose of Harlequin, minus heavy breathing.

Most troubling, but least surprising, is the spectre of Jesus throughout this wild venture. Characters speak of the “glory of God” and what an honor it is to search that out. Late in the film, Esther prays to a deity (God himself is famously absent in the original text) and uses the word “father” in seeking guidance about how to obey Mordechai’s instructions to out Haman as a mortal danger to the Jews. True, Jewish liturgy makes references to “our father,” but given the engine behind this production, such invocations here feel decidedly Christian. So do the messianic overtones which utterly pervert the story at hand. For those who need a moral, it is a story of hope, that a handful of people can change history. But never from the original have I inferred, as this movie suggests, that the outcome is due to divine intervention or some supernatural destiny. That, along with the film’s extensive narrative liberties, is a distortion of epic proportion. Certainly there are family-friendly lessons everyone can learn from Esther, but such perversion ought not be among them.