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

[asakiyume]

I'm laughing and laughing at the idea that when researchers got data they didn't want from preschoolers, they decided the preschoolers didn't understand the term. That's wrong on so many levels. Sure, preschoolers might not understand an abstraction. But frankly, that lack of understanding maybe should tell the **researchers** something about their construction of the abstraction. And that doesn't even touch on the fact that discounting the kids' experience is exactly what researchers aren't supposed to do. Jeez!

I do think that one's own lived experience is a tricky yardstick to use for things--I've never been catcalled, for instance (or at least, if I have, it was so unimportant to me that it left no mark on my memory), but this is apparently a thing that happens to most women. But in the case of experience with "mean girls," it's the whole construct that's messed up, in all the ways you describe.

You can describe certain behaviors that girls may do more often than boys (though hell, I'm not even sure)--things like making hurtful remarks about someone to a friend as that person is walking by, intending for that person to overhear--and you can label that as mean behavior, and then, sure, you'd have mean behavior that girls do more often than boys--but that's because you constructed the definition that way.

[lilysea]

I'm wondering if the "girls are MEAN" thing comes about because

a) girls/women on average spend more time with girls/women than they do with boys/men, so there are more opportunities for them to experience meanness from girls/women based on sheer hours spent together;

b) girls/women are allowed to talk about their feelings and experiences of people being mean to them
whereas when people are mean to boys/men, they're supposed to be stiff upper lip about it...

[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]

I definitely hear you about the difficulty of using lived experience as a yardstick. If one's lived experience is totally at odds with a cultural idea then I think it's worth investigating a little more to see how well that idea actually holds up to reality, but it's definitely a starting point rather than a "well obviously that idea is WRONG." Sometimes it just turns out that one's lived experience is unusual.

Re: your last paragraph. I don't know how often guys will make hurtful remarks about other guys in that fashion, but they definitely do it about girls: loudly teasing each other "Go ask her out!" (so the girl will hear the teased guy reply "No, she's too fat!" or whatever), or just straight up rating girls as they walk by. I think a lot of the idea that guys are less mean comes from the fact that we as a culture just flat-out discount a lot of male aggression toward women.

[osprey_archer]

I think both of those may contribute. But I also think that the fact that it's so prevalent in pop culture is because it's convenient to men to convince women that they can't trust or rely on each other - because who does that leave for women to turn to, but men?

[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.

[skygiants]

Oh hey are you still looking for female friendship TV shows? Because I am going to sidle in with some kdrama recs:

- Avengers Social Club, in which three middle-aged women team up for revenge on their variously terrible oppressors (mostly spouses) and find out that maybe the real revenge was the friendships we made along the way
- Age of Youth/Hello My Twenties, about five college girls who manage to befriend each other despite drastic personality differences, ghosts, stalkers, kidnapping, murder, and the fact that their apartment only has one bathroom
- Capital Scandal, set in 1930s Japan, which prominently features the friendship/mentorship between two women fighting a revolution
- Ms. Perfect, which is ... a thriller about a dynamic between two women that is definitely NOT a friendship, but also has so many scenes in which everyone important in it is a woman over 30! (MOST of them are in fact friends with each other...)

[osprey_archer]

I am compiling a list! The masterlist is actually over on this post, so you might want to C/P your recs into a comment over there; I'm trying to get them all in one place so I can find things again rather than going "Well I know someone recced me some kdramas... on one of my posts... somewhere."