I took my one year old little girl to Toys R Us the other day to pick up some crayons and vowed not to take her back. The "girls" section is pink pink PINK and filled with vacuum cleaners and baby carriages (also pink!) on the one side and Bratz dolls and Barbies on the other. I'm sure I won't be able to shield her from the Princess Industrial Complex or the pink brigade, but I sure can refuse to promote it. Sad that toy designers are so needlessly dedicated to reinforcing gender roles.

It is a toy that will be loved and played with for a time and then set aside. At least it is something that can foster some imagination and not a video game or robotic nonsense that will play for your child.

Never would have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out, but now that you mention it... yeah, why lilies? At least it's not Promise Ring Palace.

This thing bothers me, but mainly because I know I would have hated it as a child. I don't mind selling princess fantasies; I'm fond of castles myself, and one of the biggest disappointments of my adult life was learning that real princesses generally look like someone smacked them upside the head with an ugly stick (unless they're from Norway.)

But why pink? Why for the love of God pink? Real castles are not usually pink. Here in Memphis we have a Pink Palace but it was built in 1920 by a supermarket magnate and it's only very slightly pink because marble IS NOT PINK! Why can't little girls play with things that look like the things they're supposed to be? Little boys don't dress up in aqua/maroon fireman outfits. Sometimes the hideous child conglomerate will pretend that "wood colored" means yellow, but for the most part, boy toys look like smaller counterparts of whatever they're supposed to be.

I know I hated the pink shit enough to convince my poor longsuffering grandma to try painting some of my doll furniture white. White is a classy color and sometimes furnishings in real life are white. Unfortunately I was born about 30 years before the invention of Krylon Fusion paint, so what I ended up with was sadly peeling leprous princess furniture.

Don't knock the sconces. Life would be more fun if more people had bronze scones shaped like beautiful women's arms that lit up as you walked by like a Cocteau movie. The sconces are not the problem. The problem is that sconces should never, never be pink.

On a related note, I thought this article was going to be about a different pink crappy castle. One of my pet peeves comes from Lego. I can't find it online so maybe it has blessedly passed into history, but a few years ago I was looking at the toddler section and found that there were two big buckets full of "little kid safe" building blocks... normal ones for boys which could be used to build anything, and pink ones for girls which could only be used to build a pre-designed castle. It's not the princess theme that annoys me, but the idea that little girls aren't interested in anything but princesses. When we were kids, my best friend and I pretended to be princesses, but we also pretended to be guerrilla warriors, starship captains, train robbers, Broadway chorus girls, and pirates.

I am extremely doubtful that the marketing team's intent in picking the "Lily" part of the name to invoke a mythological symbol of virginity while simultaneously having a "phallic pistil for Prince Charming." The lily is a popular name and a popular flower. People, including myself, find it pretty. Get over it.

Most MBAs wouldn't recognize historical symbolism, religious or otherwise, if it bit them on the ass. They picked a flower name because ... hell, it's a flower, and chicks like that flower thing, right? Seriously, I think that's the extent of their reasoning.

We have a 5 year old who was for a time gaga for princesses. We initially resisted. Ultimately we decided that as long as we were reading the books, we could interject our values into the stories. At our house, Cinderella has always ended with "And after Cinderella went to medical school, she and the Prince lived happily ever after." When she asked why a princess needed a job, we told her being a princess was mostly a "night gig."

We also refuse to get into the doll "accessories." She uses laundry baskets for her doll beds and dresses her dolls in her baby clothes. If you want children to have an imagination, you have to set the stage for them to use it.

We have also encouraged her interest in books that have active and smart female protagonists-the Ramona books, Pipi Longstocking, the American Girl books etc.

Marketing to kids is sophisticated and seductive. We limit her exposure to advertising by limiting TV to PBS kids shows and DVD movies, and by saying "no" frequently and repeatedly. The reality though is that you can't control everything. One of her classmates introduced her to the HSM franchise. But, as long as you watch stuff with them, you can shape the experience by emphasizing the prosocial messages (being smart is cool, be true to yourself, if a boy doesn't treat you right-kick him to the curb). Ultimately, that is what parenting is all about-not keeping your kid away from the world, but helping them to be in it in a healthy way.

I'm sorry...I'm full of plenty of at-the-ready feminist outrage at the way young girls are viewed and treated and marketed (to) in this country, but I can't see the big deal about this castle.

I like the name Lily. It is the basis of my name and the flower for the month of my birthday and the name of a favorite character in fiction (Lily Bart) about whose book (The House of Mirth) I wrote a feminist paper at the height of my collegiate feminist ire -- and I have to say I never ever knew that lilies had anything to do with virginity. It makes sense now, I guess that is why they are popular at weddings.

It looks like a playhouse. I loved playhouses as a child - the color wasn't really important, but pink isn't such a bad color. I think this may be a case of overthinking. I don't get it - and I'm typically pretty sensitive to this stuff (as I mentioned above).

I'm much more concerned about the popular and whorish looking Bratz dolls, the way that perfectly normal looking men will check out my 12 year old niece without regard to the fact that she both looks 12 and I am standing RIGHT NEXT TO HER, GLARING AT THEM, and her and her friends' interest in all things marketed to them by Disney.

Sometimes a castle is just a castle...