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Book Review: The Social Sex
Dec. 17th, 2019 05:01 pmI’m about a third of the way through Marilyn Yalom’s The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, and I’m finding it really frustrating. Possibly I should have expected it, because I first heard about this book in Jennifer Mroz’s Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us about Female Friendship, which I also found frustrating… But then that book is also where I first heard of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, which I loved, so maybe there was no way I could have known.
One of the aspects I found most frustrating in Girl Talk was the author’s capsule history of female friendship, which struck me as facile. For instance, she starts off with the assertion that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought women couldn’t be friends, without having any sources that could shed any light on the lived experience of ancient Greek and Roman women. It’s all quotes from Cicero and Seneca and Aristotle.
Well, it turns out that Mroz lifted this analysis (such as it is) wholesale from The Social Sex, which is ten times longer than Mroz’s chapter but nonetheless never manages to dig any deeper. Mostly Yalom uses the extra length to introduce more friendship pairs from many different times and places, which I do appreciate, but only in the sense that I would like to read more about many of these people in some other book, written by an author with a more nuanced analytical toolkit.
In particular, I feel that an author who has some familiarity with queer theory would be helpful. Yalom keeps quoting things like Katherine Philips’ seventeenth-century love poems to other women and being like “THIS IS TOTALLY PLATONIC, YOU GUYS,” and I feel that there are only so many times you get to play the TOTALLY PLATONIC card before you need to either rethink your choice of sources - does this love poem fit in a book about friendship? Does it really? - or your definition of friendship. Maybe friendship sometimes has an erotic element, particularly the kind of really intense friendship that Yalom chooses to highlight.
Upon reflection, it may not be worthwhile to finish this book. Possibly I should check the endnotes to see if Yalom cites any sources that look interesting, and read those instead.
One of the aspects I found most frustrating in Girl Talk was the author’s capsule history of female friendship, which struck me as facile. For instance, she starts off with the assertion that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought women couldn’t be friends, without having any sources that could shed any light on the lived experience of ancient Greek and Roman women. It’s all quotes from Cicero and Seneca and Aristotle.
Well, it turns out that Mroz lifted this analysis (such as it is) wholesale from The Social Sex, which is ten times longer than Mroz’s chapter but nonetheless never manages to dig any deeper. Mostly Yalom uses the extra length to introduce more friendship pairs from many different times and places, which I do appreciate, but only in the sense that I would like to read more about many of these people in some other book, written by an author with a more nuanced analytical toolkit.
In particular, I feel that an author who has some familiarity with queer theory would be helpful. Yalom keeps quoting things like Katherine Philips’ seventeenth-century love poems to other women and being like “THIS IS TOTALLY PLATONIC, YOU GUYS,” and I feel that there are only so many times you get to play the TOTALLY PLATONIC card before you need to either rethink your choice of sources - does this love poem fit in a book about friendship? Does it really? - or your definition of friendship. Maybe friendship sometimes has an erotic element, particularly the kind of really intense friendship that Yalom chooses to highlight.
Upon reflection, it may not be worthwhile to finish this book. Possibly I should check the endnotes to see if Yalom cites any sources that look interesting, and read those instead.
