Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls FROM OUR EDITORS
Why are girls becoming more aggressive in their everyday lives, and how is it affecting their overall self-esteem? Rachel Simmons, a Rhodes scholar who has painstakingly researched female bullying and the psychology of girls, feels that girls' aggressiveness is just as harmful as that of boys but is much harder to recognize. How can parents and teachers help with this growing problem?
FROM THE PUBLISHER
If your daughter has ever come home from school upset because her friends didn't walk with her to lunch, if she has wanted to stay home or has run up to her room in tears and won't tell you why, you may need this book. These may seem like minor problems - who cares about notes passed behind your back, or a nasty look, or a party you're not invited to - but they aren't, and they can have a lasting effect on a girl's-esteem.
In fact, as Rachel Simmons shows in Odd Girl Out, the secret world of girls' aggression is just as harmful as the aggression of boys, but it's harder to recognize. Girls are not encouraged to express their anger, and so it goes underground. The importance of relationships to women has long been understood. For girls, losing friends or becoming the object of a clique's derision can be devastating. Yet most teachers don't have time to notice and cope with the problem, and parents feel frustrated and hopeless in combating it. Every generation has struggled with this, and often parents still hold on to their own memories of suffering, making it more difficult when the time comes to help their children.
Now, Odd Girl Out shines the light of understanding on the secret lives of girls. By articulating the dynamics of this behavior, she helps us see where it comes from and offers parents and teachers ways in which to help our daughters.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New Yorker
Catherine Hardwicke’s new film, “Thirteen,” has once again raised the issue of adolescent girls’ social rituals, especially the more brutal aspects. The same topic propels two recent books, Rachel Simmons’s Odd Girl Out and Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman. According to Simmons, adolescent female culture is fraught with treachery and strained niceties (“alternative aggressions,” she calls them) that are more reminiscent of a sixteenth-century court than a sweet-sixteen party. Wiseman, whose book has been released in paperback, includes a set of charts that plot “power plays” and track the ascendance of a socially dominant girl, a “Queen Bee” among the drones. But by collecting the byzantine stories of betrayal, both authors provide a tonic to social isolation: as Simmons puts it, “What crushed girls was being alone.”
Linda Perlstein came to a similar conclusion in her interviews with Maryland middle-schoolers in Not Much Just Chillin'. For all their rebellion, experimentation, and body piercing, kids still want to be reached by their coaches, teachers, and even parents. “Wanting to be independent is not the same as wanting to be left alone,” Perlstein writes. The sixth to eighth graders she interviews have complex opinions on justice, religion, and mortality -- while adults fret over whether video games create irrational fears of violence, students formulate sophisticated responses to events such as the terrorist attacks of September 11th. And one seventh-grade girl is equally philosophical about love: “The one for you could be two years old right now, or ninety. My soulmate could’ve been Benjamin Franklin.” (Lauren Porcaro)
Publishers Weekly
Although more than 16 years have passed, Rhodes Scholar Simmons hasn't forgotten how she felt when Abby told the other girls in third grade not to play with her, nor has she stopped thinking about her own role in giving Noa the silent treatment. Simmons examines how such "alternative aggression" where girls use their relationship with the victim as a weapon flourishes and its harmful effects. Through interviews with more than 300 girls in 10 schools (in two urban areas and a small town), as well as 50 women who experienced alternative aggression when they were young, Simmons offers a detailed portrait of girls' bullying. Citing the work of Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown, she shows the toll that alternative aggression can take on girls' self-esteem. For Simmons, the restraints that society imposes to prevent girls from venting feelings of competition, jealousy and anger is largely to blame for this type of bullying. It forces girls to turn their lives into "a perverse game of Twister," where their only outlets for expressing negative feelings are covert looks, turned backs and whispers. Since the events at Columbine, some schools have taken steps to curb relational aggression. For those that haven't, Simmons makes an impassioned plea that no form of bullying be permitted. (Apr. 30) Forecast: This subject has received much media attention lately, with a 'New York Times Magazine' cover story two months ago and the March publication of Emily White's Fast Girls ( Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
KLIATT - Ann Hart
Approached from the viewpoint of working through past problems, this book relates the author's experiences of being shunned by a close friend and her eventual realization of her own abusive treatment of another girl. Quoting from her introduction, "Now is the time to end another silence: There is a hidden culture of girls' aggression in which bullying is epidemic, distinctive, and destructive." She researched this phenomenon for three years, conducting interviews with perpetrators and victims and leading many discussion groups with young girls to find out why this happens and gain some insight into the motivation for the ways girls handle their fear and anger. She points out the difference between aggression in girls and boys and the difference in the cultural reactions to these behaviors, and she highlights the insidious nature of what is happening wherever girls live out the dynamics of social life. Her victims' stories are often related in their own words. Straightforward, clear, and insightful, this book tells about the pain and isolation that bullying causes among school age girls, gives various reasons why they use it, and makes an attempt at supplying some responses to this long ignored problem. It could be emotionally painful to find yourself in these pages, but it could be helpful to realize that it is widespread, and there is a need to become aware of the dynamics and how to combat the problem. The book is weakest in the area of concrete responses, perhaps because of a general lack of experience in this area. One chapter deals with how parents and teachers can approach it, and one chapter deals with better attitudes than we have traditionally used in relating to loved onescaught in these power plays. The book is well indexed and footnoted and an extensive bibliography will guide the reader to more information on the subject. It would be valuable to any collection, professional or regular, for raising consciousness about the problem. KLIATT Codes: JSAﾽRecommended for junior and senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Harcourt, 301p. notes. bibliog. index.,
Booknews
Boys use direct physical and verbal behavior to bully others, says Simmons, but society denies those weapons to girls, so they deploy backbiting, exclusion, rumors, name-calling, and manipulate psychological pain on target victims. Drawing on her training in political science and women's studies, she explores epidemic, distinctive, and destructive aggression of girls. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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