From the issue dated July 5, 2002
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Are Girls Really as Mean as Books Say They Are?By CAROL TAVRISMan, it is so hard to live down that sugar-and-spice rep. We women try, Lord
If you have been under your bed since 9/11, you will have missed the current flurry of books and media stories about just how much like people women are. Journalists, academics, and psychologists alike have all been offering their observations on the "discovery" of female aggression and meanness. The freelance writer Margaret Talbot's report in a February issue of The New York Times Magazine, "Girls Just Want to be Mean," kicked things off. Rachel Simmons, an independent scholar and national trainer for the Ophelia Project, which aims to create safe and nurturing environments for girls, weighed in with Odd Girl Out, on the "hidden" culture of girls' aggression. It quickly became a New York Times best seller. Rosalind Wiseman, who cofounded the Empower Program for teenagers, contributed Queen Bees and Wannabes, which offers parents advice on how to help their teenage daughters "survive cliques, gossip, boyfriends, and other realities of adolescence." Sharon Lamb, a clinical psychologist and professor at Saint Michael's College, wrote The Secret Lives of Girls (which I endorsed last fall before I realized it was going to be one of a crowd), exposing the undeniable fact that girls have sexual feelings, get angry, and can behave aggressively. Emily White, a freelance writer, focused on Fast Girls, and how the "slut" is selected, slandered, and then cruelly ostracized by the adolescent in-groups that fear and envy her. Apparently grown women just want to be mean, too: The women's-studies scholar and psychologist Phyllis Chesler reminded us last year that man's malevolence toward man isn't a patch on Woman's Inhumanity to Woman. Naturally, the media have been salivating. Oprah, Dateline, Ted Koppel, and countless magazines have duly reported the news about all this hidden and formerly secret female aggressiveness -- though none of it seems to be terribly hidden or secret to women, or for that matter to men. To be fair, Newsweek balanced its report on the epidemic of mean girls with another cover story on the prevalence of non-mean girls. Of course, gender differences are eternally fascinating, a source of amusement, anger, and exasperation; trying to understand one's own and the "other sex" is America's second-favorite indoor sport. (And it's part of the job description if you're female.) So books about gender always have a ready -- and vulnerable -- market. But why aren't particular gender topics, like female aggressiveness, evenly distributed, like raisins in a cake? Why do they bunch up, like buses on Fifth Avenue? You wait forever, and suddenly there's a cluster of them. One reason is that trade publishers crave "news"; you must have something different to say, at least semi-shocking, to warrant publication. In the world of gender books, therefore, old news about female inequality won't do, such as those pesky world problems of discrimination, poverty, illiteracy, genital mutilation, rape, and lack of birth control. Old news about female superiority won't do, either. The feel-good genre of the 1980s and 1990s -- with its notion that women are kinder, better at friendship, and more moral, compassionate, earth-loving, and nurturant than men -- is toast. And so the time and economy were just right for the "new," not-new news that girls aren't sweeter than boys, but just as bad, sexual, and aggressive -- maybe even meaner, given the ruthless and sneaky ways they control each other's sexuality, reputations, and impulses toward independence. "Which sex is in trouble?" books have another economic function: They drive public attention to social problems and help determine what resources will be thrown at them. That is why the national conversation is so often framed in terms of who is worse off. Who is having more trouble in schools: girls, more likely to be overlooked, or boys, who have more learning disabilities? Who has the greater self-esteem problem: girls, who feel insecure and fall silent, or boys, who feel insecure and brag? Who has the greater bullying problem: girls, who do it verbally, or boys, who do it physically? Who has the eating and body-image disorders: white middle-class girls, with their familiar problems of anorexia and bulimia, or teenage boys, many of whom are taking dangerous amounts of steroids and pumping themselves up to meet a cultural ideal no less damaging than gauntness is for girls? How about African-American and Hispanic teenagers, of either sex, among whom rates of being overweight and obese are reaching epidemic levels? Unquestionably, many aspects of our culture foster aggression, competition, and selfishness, and girls and women are hardly immune from those influences. Readers of Woman's Inhumanity to Woman will nod their heads and say, Chesler is so right. Many women do brutally control other women's sexuality by, for example, slandering, shaming, and excluding those who have "illicit" sex, and by perpetrating such brutal practices as female genital mutilation in Africa. Many women do envy other women's success at work, with men, or at motherhood. Many mothers are cold or neglectful; belittle their daughters if they are not pretty or thin enough; and try to ensure their conformity. Although Chesler brings in studies and clinical material to support her case, her bitter tone and the personal experiences she reveals make one think her title could have been Woman's Inhumanity to Me. But readers of Shelley E. Taylor's The Tending Instinct will also nod their heads, saying that Taylor, a research psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, is right, too. Women's caretaking -- of their families, friends, parents, neighbors -- makes social life possible. Throughout their lives, women love and rely on their friends. "Women and children have literally stayed alive over the centuries because women form friendships," writes Taylor. Take that, you Selfish Gene, you macho Men in Groups! It's unattached males -- packs of adolescent primates or lonely single adults -- who get into trouble and cause trouble, and whose health plummets without the loving ministrations of a nurturing female. Taylor's optimistic, cheerful tone makes one think her title could have been My Marvelous Female Friends. All this yinning and yanging about which sex is better or worse, which sex has the more pressing problems, would be funny if it were not so depressing for anyone who has studied or lived through enough swings of the pendulum. Menstruation makes women crazy and irrational? No, it makes women closer to the rhythms of the earth. Wait, no, it gives them PMS, which makes them crazy and irrational. Women are manipulative and cunning, competing with each other for men? No, they are the souls of peace and cooperative sisterhood. Wait, no, they are just as warlike as men. For me, what is interesting about the latest cluster of books on girls and women is not just what they say, but how they say it, what they omit, and why they omit it. Good old-fashioned American historical amnesia makes the eternal dilemmas of gender seem fresh in every incarnation. What makes us what we are: nature, nurture, culture? Are the sexes inherently different, and if so, in what ways, with what consequences? Yet it is also true that each generation confronts problems specific to its era. Mean-girl books have struck pay dirt because they hit a nerve in the national parental psyche and because the solutions they offer fit the country's conservative political mood. They speak to a current cultural hysteria about protecting children, and to our interminable, restless uncertainties about the roles and "nature" of women and men. Middle-class parents have become obsessed by the need to micromanage every aspect of their children's lives, starting with the pattern chosen for an infant's crib bumper to stimulate the baby's visual system "correctly." But it's one thing to try to control a baby's synapses, and quite another to try to control a teenager's. Many adults today are frightened for their teenagers, worrying about the real and imagined dangers of sex, STD's, the Internet, drugs, and violence; but also frightened of their teenagers -- of their moodiness, unpredictability, potential for aggression. Still, as Emily White observes in Fast Girls, "People have been afraid of teenagers for a long time." Teenagers disrupt the home, the order of things. They are awakening to sex, evoking worry and envy in their parents. Unencumbered as they are by the obligations of adulthood, they have an unquenchable longing for the rush of danger and risk. Some parental worries are, therefore, appropriate. But in today's anxious times worry is easily blown out of proportion by media scare stories. It's not enough to be frightened of teenage males, those troubled, violent "teenage time bombs" that Time warned us about; now we must fear girls, too -- and protect them not only from themselves, but from each other. In fact, however, the worry is way out of proportion to reality. The rate of violent crimes committed by adolescents has been plummeting steadily in the last decade, according to reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and studies of representative samples of adolescents find that only a small minority are seriously troubled, angry, or unhappy. Many do suffer from peer pressure and exclusion, but extreme turmoil and unhappiness are the exception, not the rule. What problems are more common during adolescence? Conflict with parents, mood swings and depression, the familiar pain of peer rejection and comparison, and higher rates of reckless, rule-breaking, and risky behavior. Not newsy enough for Oprah. Neither is it news that males and females, being human, share in equal measure all the attributes of humanity, its graces and furies. Neither sex, in adolescence or any other time of life, has the corner on misery. Both are equally likely to be empathic, kind, altruistic, and friendly and to be mean, hostile, aggressive, petty, conformist, and prejudiced. Both sexes can be competitive or cooperative, selfish or nurturant, loving parents or indifferent ones -- and reveal all of those qualities on different occasions. But books about gender similarities do not sell. Taylor told me that The Tending Instinct was originally called Vital Ties, and it was meant to be about the biology and social psychology of the human need for relationships, with some attention to gender differences but by no means the whole focus. Her publisher prevailed upon her to highlight the differences and to give the book its current title, although she is well aware, as she notes in the preface, that "'instinct' is a loaded word" (as in "maternal instinct") that has been discredited. Of course the sexes often do differ, on the average, in the forms such traits take, and those are the differences that cause all the mischief and command our attention. For example, Taylor shows how nurturing is often expressed differently in men and women: Men are more likely to be heroic and altruistic by leaping into frozen rivers and burning buildings to rescue strangers; women, by sacrificing their own needs and time to care for aged parents and others in need of routine help. Both kinds of acts are selfless; both ensure the survival of individuals and communities. A "tending society" makes sure that both are encouraged and rewarded -- whichever sex is doing them. Today, therefore, most books on gender are themselves gendered: not only directed to women, but also written in the feminized, personal, and elusive language of popular psychology. Whether the authors are academics or journalists, many of the books tend to share a similar level, tone, and formula that is a combination of references to studies, informal interviews, lots and lots of anecdotes, and advice. There is nothing inherently wrong with this formula; the resulting book can still be interesting and useful. Lamb and Chesler offer plenty of compelling examples and studies to make their points. Indeed, I endorsed Lamb's book because, in an era when abstinence is the primary message of sex "education," and when so many adults are quite irrational about the sexual feelings of children and teenagers, I liked its spirited message that girls, too, are sexual beings -- as well as occasionally angry and aggressive beings who can learn to stand up for their rights. But the gender-genre books that are based largely on clinical intuition and popular psychology typically lack a basic skepticism toward received wisdom and the willingness to wrestle with an idea to see who wins. Thus I read the clinical psychologist Carol Gilligan's The Birth of Pleasure, and an hour later I was hungry for a good idea. I haven't the foggiest notion what that book is about, but thousands of women will adore its soft flatteries that remind them of how they, too, were once free-spirited preteens with "authentic" voices and bold ambitions before life, patriarchy, and mean mothers crushed them. "I was drawn by the sound of an unmediated voice, a voice that broke free," Gilligan writes. "As I came back to a knowing I had learned to distance myself from or discredit, I saw girls beginning not to know what they knew." But maybe girls are also beginning to know what they didn't know. Used to be called growing up. The typical gender-problem book starts like this: "As a girl (young woman/middle-aged woman/married woman/single woman/lesbian woman), I suffered horribly from X, Y, Z problem. I thought I was the only one. But then I talked to some other women and learned I wasn't alone! In fact, my problem was epidemic! That was so liberating!" Thus Simmons writes of her discovery that girls can be bullies: "It was exhilarating to discover we'd all been through the same ordeal. Like me, my friends had spent years believing they were the only ones." That is the ur-sentence of all female-discovery books. It doesn't matter what the "ordeal" is: They masturbated, were gay, had an eating problem, had recovered a memory of being a French princess in a previous life. The discovery, of course, must be about something heretofore hidden. "Silence," says Simmons, "is deeply woven into the fabric of the female experience." Pardon? Putting "silence" in the same sentence with "female experience" is like putting cheese in fudge. It doesn't go. Once the epiphany (and book contract) are attained, the writer sets out to find confirming cases of her hypothesis. She will usually cite supporting articles and throw around some numbers, but those don't mean much. As Simmons acknowledges, "this book is not the product of a formal research experiment. In it you will not find statistics or scientific conclusions about girls and aggression or information about boys." Or as Chesler describes her method: "Over the years, I have interviewed more than 500 women of all ages, classes, races, sexual persuasions, religions, and professions about this subject. I have also reviewed hundreds, possibly thousands of studies that bear on the subject." That kind of thing conveys an aura of reliability, but what does it mean? What kind of interviews -- systematic or informal? How many ages, classes, religions? Did the answers vary by religion or profession? "Hundreds, possibly thousands" of studies? Well, which? Were they all equally good? What is the point of this accretion of numbers? Again, a book does not have to be based on scientific evidence to be useful or enlightening. Scientific methods are crucial, however, if we want to know the actual prevalence of a problem, if we are willing to have our hypotheses disconfirmed, if we want to know whether and how the sexes differ, if we want to understand why a given social problem has arisen. Anecdote-driven accounts draw attention to a problem, but they fail to give us the big picture -- or an accurate one. Such books are dandelions: They look pretty and seem to cohere, but when you blow on them, they disappear. For example, Simmons starts right out with a claim, "There is a hidden culture of girls' aggression in which bullying is epidemic, distinctive, and destructive." She explains, "Our culture refuses girls access to open conflict, and it forces their aggression into nonphysical, indirect, and covert forms. Girls use backbiting, exclusion, rumors, namecalling, and manipulation to inflict psychological pain on targeted victims." Boys, in short, resort to physical aggression; girls to "relational" aggression. That is true, but it is not the full truth or even the most interesting truth. For one thing, although physical aggression among girls and women is not anywhere as common or as dangerous as male violence, it is far from rare or hidden; neither are direct expressions of anger (even as these authors' own interviewees often tell them). Conversely, suppressed or misdirected anger is common among boys and men, as Columbine showed all too tragically. As for the lack of male relational aggression, does Simmons think that boys do not resort to name-calling? Boys have always had an armamentarium of offensive names: racist slurs, homophobic aspersions, cruel names for boys who are fat, slow, or "too smart." Boys do not exclude other boys of different ethnicities, or who are not as "masculine," cool, straight, athletic? Boys and men do not humiliate or "inflict psychological pain" on their victims? Boys and men do not have cliques that exclude outsiders? Simmons needs to take an academic position for a year. In contrast, as a rare example of a book of astute insights with no pretense to science, White's Fast Girls leads the pack for its intelligent, original reportage. It would be a shame if it got lost in the crowd, because its observations are so refreshing -- free of cant, sentiment, soupy psychology, and hypocrisy about teenage sexuality. The book is a meditation about the "slut," the word and its victims, drawn from a mix of memories, interviews with students, and diverse, unusual readings from theology to sociology. I found the observations original and charming: "Like a tribe in an ancient forest telling stories about the moon," White writes, "kids tell slut stories because they need an allegory for the mystery of sex itself." The "slut story," far from reflecting what parents imagine to be the hypersexuality of teenage girls, results in part from girls' sexual ignorance and inexperience. The media images of sexuality that girls are exposed to are sensational, prurient, and romantic, but, even today, not literal. White reports that "girls do not tend to have graphic conversations about sex the way boys do; they speak in terms of Did you ... ? Did you ... ? Thus the slut and her rumored acts exist in an elliptical darkness; her techniques are a mystery. Faced with this mystery and with no way to alleviate it, girls lash out. ... Girls hate the slut because she is a story they are not allowed in on." The books on gender and feminism that exploded onto the cultural landscape in the 1960s and 1970s took on many of the same subjects as today's crop does, including female insecurity, backbiting, competition for men, anger, silence, sexual ignorance, and nurturance. But there is a big difference: In most of today's books, the politics and passion, the courage and anger, the analysis of the impact of culture and context on behavior have been stripped away, leaving the solipsism of one's own experience: "My troubles with my bitchy female boss" = "female bosses are bitchy." In the 1970s, social scientists like Rosabeth Moss Kanter (in Men and Women of the Corporation) showed that bitchiness was not a matter of gender, but of position in the organizational hierarchy: Bosses of either sex who have little real authority and low chances of promotion are more likely to take it out on their employees. Similarly, both sexes are more inclined to express hostility and aggression directly to those with less power than they; when they perceive no consequences to their actions; or when they feel anonymous (hence all those belligerent female drivers of SUV's). But today, bitchy behavior or aggressiveness are regarded as inflexible personality traits, inherent in a person's gender by virtue of hormones, socialization, or genetics. Accordingly, in the spirit of the day and in full compliance with the gender-genre requirement, Wiseman, Lamb, and Simmons dispense psychological advice: how to understand your teen's behavior, how to talk to her, and how not to talk to her. (Only Emily White, again to her eternal credit, lets readers draw their own conclusions about what, if anything, to do.) Of course, there's nothing wrong with good advice, and parents may find useful suggestions in these books. Wiseman travels the country promoting her Empower Program with its trademarked curriculum, "Owning Up." (The "empowerment" movement seems to have replaced the self-esteem business, both being efforts to help everybody feel good about themselves without, as far as I can tell, actually giving anyone actual power or a skill to feel esteem about.) Unfortunately, the only other solution that Simmons can think of is prohibition. Schools, she suggests, should prohibit not only "male" forms of bullying and aggression, such as physical assault, but also "female" forms, such as "rumor spreading, alliance building, secret telling, and severe episodes of nonverbal aggression." She seems blissfully unaware of the chilling effect such prohibitions would have on freedom of speech and assembly, let alone of how those stupid zero-tolerance rules have already been misused and directed at everyone from kindergartners to college professors. Now we are to regulate friendships and "alliances"? Ban secrets? Psychological and punitive solutions are appealing in today's conservative times, when people don't want to think much about what it would take to create a "tending society" or make schools more appealing places to attend. The psychologizing of social problems is so much easier, because psychology directs us to look inward, to personal solutions rather than institutional changes. People cannot control the fact that peers are powerfully important to adolescents, and parents cannot force a child to "fit in" to an unwelcoming group. But they can supervise and influence the kind of peer groups their child belongs to, help the child find groups in which he or she will thrive, and press for programs that foster cooperation rather than competition among groups. In the same spirit, as long as we keep seeing the sexes as opposite players in some unwinnable zero-sum game, rather than as allies seeking to solve a specific problem, whoever suffers from it, society's responses will careen drunkenly from one sex to the other, depending on who is making the most noise, whose problem seems worse, and whose problem makes the news this week. And as long as women focus exclusively inward on their feelings and their pasts, as long as they are lulled by the mindless if soothing hum of psychobabble, they will lack the knowledge and will to find solutions beyond the self -- and to reframe the conversation away from "us versus them," and forward to "us and them." Carol Tavris is a social psychologist. Her books include Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion (Simon & Schuster, revised edition, 1989), The Mismeasure of Woman (Simon & Schuster, 1992), and, with Carole Wade, an introductory textbook, Psychology (Prentice Hall, seventh edition, 2002). BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY The Birth of Pleasure, by Carol Gilligan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut, by Emily White (Scribner, 2002) Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons (Harcourt, 2002) Queen Bees and Wannabes: A Parent's Guide to Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence, by Rosalind Wiseman (Crown, 2002) The Secret Lives of Girls: Sex, Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt, by Sharon Lamb (Free Press, 2002) The Tending Instinct: How Nurturing Is Essential for Who We Are and How We Live, by Shelley E. Taylor (Times Books, 2002) Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, by Phyllis Chesler (Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2001) http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education