Book Review: Text Me When You Get Home

[osprey_archer]

I enjoyed Kayleen Schaefer’s Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution and Triumph of Modern Female Friendship for many reasons - I am always a sucker for a good book about friendships - but perhaps what pleased me most about the book is that it takes on the “girls are so MEAN, so much meaner than anyone else!” myth directly.

Even books about female friendship often seem to feel that they need to kowtow to this idea as if it were a universal truth. Rachel Bertsche’s otherwise delightful MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend devotes the better part of a chapter to this myth, and not because Bertsche either meets a mean girl or remembers a mean girl from her youth. No, all the women she meets are perfectly nice people - obviously she doesn’t click with all of them, but no one is mean - and all her reminiscences are about the wonderful friends she made a summer camp, in school, etc., and then she’s like “Hmm but women ARE mean to each other aren’t they, that’s a problem that everyone tells me definitely exists. Now let me tell you about another really nice girl I met!”

How much does your lived experience need to contradict prevailing cultural norms before you go “Hey, maybe these ideas are not totally accurate”?

Unlike Bertsche, Schaefer has met a few mean girls in her life (and, post-graduation, befriends one of the girls she thought was mean during high school) - and had some moments where she was the mean girl herself. So her argument focuses more on the idea that meanness is a universal human trait, and “girls are no meaner or nicer than anyone else.” The difference lies in the way that we look at meanness: when boys are aggressive, it’s just boys being boys, but when girls are aggressive that’s aberrant.

And there’s also this intractable pop psych idea that girls use relational aggression while boys use physical aggression, which leads somehow to the corollary that physical aggression is preferable. Why? Because guys use it, duh. Everything guys do is better than everything girls do.

But the specific argument I’ve seen is that when guys have a problem with each other, they duke it out like men, and then it’s done and dusted and they can be friends again.

It seems to me to be taking an extremely rosy view to see this as the only kind of aggression men express. Okay, fine, when you have two guys of roughly equal size and social status, maybe that’s exactly what they do. But what about guys who roam the high school corridors picking on guys of lesser status: slamming them into lockers, giving them swirlies, telling everyone that so-and-so is a faggot or a pussy? What about guys catcalling girls and snapping their bra straps and bragging that they totally slept with Mary Jane, she’s totally easy? That’s all aggression too.

And in any case, the data doesn’t suggest anything like such a neat gender binary in aggression. What it shows is that both men and women use relational aggression - some studies show women using it more often, but others show gender parity - and men are more likely to supplement their relational aggression with physical aggression as well.

And frankly I would not be surprised to find that these numbers are skewed, simply because researchers expect to find more relational aggression among women. I read a paper about aggression in preschoolers for a child development class and the authors got very antsy when the preschoolers reported the “wrong” numbers for relational aggression. The kids reported slightly more relational aggression from boys than girls.

The flummoxed researchers concluded that the kids obviously didn’t understand relational aggression. Now I realize that preschoolers are not always the most astute observers, but if there’s one thing I expect them to have a handle on, it’s when another child has been mean.

***

Only one chapter in Text Me When You Get Home focuses on the idea of the mean girl; it’s just the part that caught my ranting facilities. The rest of it is memories about the author’s own friendship experiences (as well as those of her mother and many of her friends and often their mothers as well), and female friendship in books (I would have liked more about this: more books to add to my reading list!) and movies and TV shows.

I got a whole bunch of additions to my list of TV shows with important female friendships.

Broad City
Best Friends Forever
Playing House
Insecure
Big Little Liars

Lots of possible things to watch in the future!

Comments

[rachelmanija]

The "mean girls" thing is just another way to demean women. Men and boys can be incredibly mean, but they're not labeled "mean boys." Abusive men use relational aggression (put-downs, manipulation, etc) with great finesse, but somehow that doesn't stick to men as a concept but only attaches to women.

[osprey_archer]

It's such a reductive label. Why does she behave like that? Because she's mean. But why is she mean? Because girls are mean. But why are girls mean? Because they just ARE, okay, that's the way it is. They've been mean ever since Eve bit that goll-darned apple in the Garden of Eden.