larrys's review
2.0
I was a bit worried to find that the very first reference links to an outdated and awful study that has since been taken down by Cordelia Fine in her excellent book Delusions of Gender. (The one where female babies are apparently more inclined to look at faces than boy babies. It’s bullshit. Seriously, go check. Cordelia Fine’s book is a must-read.)
Hamilton’s book is already 7 years old, which is a long time in teenage-land, so it’s probably unfair of me to point out that there was nothing new to see here. The book offers some insights, sure enough. But many suggestions offered to parents, such as encouraging girls to be less consumerist by shopping at second-hand stores and practising ‘simple beading’ are, frankly, more likely to put your daughter in an ‘About A Boy’ type scenario. With suggestions such as those, I don’t fully trust that the author has a full grasp on the world of teenage girls, even after her many interviews and hours of Internet research. When this book was written I was just finishing up a stint of teaching in a girls’ high school, and though I saw plenty to be alarmed about, this book falls into the category of ‘alarmist’.
That’s really unfortunate, because teenage girls in general have a PR problem. When I was teaching them, the general reaction from people who found out what I did for a job was a look of horror, followed by, ‘I would be scared to teach teenage girls’. And that, in my opinion, is a large part of the problem. People are scared of their teenage girls. Scared to set boundaries, scared to find out what’s really going on with them. Pretty sure this book won’t help much with fixing that.
This book could have been less alarmist. First, it would have been better, perhaps, to focus on stories coming out of Australia and New Zealand rather than taking the most sensationalised, terrible stories from England and America, in which case you’ll be left thinking the world is coming to an end. Second, teenage girls themselves are not the best conveyers of information, for the exact reason that they’re in the thick of it, but also because they would know that they’re being interviewed by a woman writing a book, and I’m in no doubt that they would have furnished the author with the most interesting and provocative stories they had heard. Third, offering a scene from a (fictional) movie Thirteen doesn’t actually say all that much about shoplifting. It’s fiction. Sure, that film illustrates a particular dynamic, but I suppose I was hoping for an argument with more ‘meat’ on it. The book Queen Bees and Wannabes offers good insight into why clothes and phones are so important to teenage girls. In short: It’s never about the clothes and the phones. It’s always about the other girls. Until that is understood, teenage girls can come across as scatty and superficial.
Worse than the alarmist tone, there is an icky conservatism in places.
‘When buying a girl a mobile phone, parents need to ask themselves whether she needs to take photos. If so, they need to educate her on what can happen if she does take ‘silly’ photos’. (The speech marks are the author’s.)
By ‘silly’, the author is referring to naked pictures. At best, this advice is simply 7 years out of date — try buying anything other than a camera-equipped phone for your teenage daughter and see how that flies — but there’s a kind of darkness there too, related to fear of teenage girls doing anything sexual at all. The issue of teenagers and sharing naked pics of themselves was recently covered on a Slate Double X podcast, and modern parents kind of just have to acknowledge that we’re now in a place where, for better or worse, sharing naked pics is a part of the whole dating process. Calling these pics ‘silly’ would be a sure-fire way of confirming for a teenager that you have no idea. It’s also a bit girl-blamey. As usual, girls are blamed for sharing the pics with certain boys (‘Silly girls!’), and not enough heat is heaped upon the boys (or whoever) who shares those pictures without the girl’s consent.
An irritating thing about pop non-fiction books which has nothing to do with the content — I wish to hell book designers would stop pulling quotations from the text and highlighting them in bold. This book is an especially bad example of that. You’ll read a sentence then realise you’re reading the exact same sentence again. If book designers want to encourage skimming and scanning, just embolden the main ideas, period. No need to break up the page with frequent and irritating repetitions.