Book Review: Girl Talk

[osprey_archer]

Jennifer Mroz’s Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us about Female Friendship is a useful compendium of interesting books about female friendship. I jumped right into Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, about which I shall write a review anon, and I’ve added Marilyn Yalom’s The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship to my reading list.

Otherwise, though, Girl Talk is rather a wash. She opens with a facile chapter about the history of female friendship, which kicks off with the assertion that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought women couldn’t be friends, when in fact we only know that Greek and Roman men thought women couldn’t be friends. We have very little evidence what women thought about the matter.

And the absence of evidence shouldn’t be assumed to imply agreement. In societies where we have ample sources from both men and women (like, say, our own; or nineteenth-century England and America) there’s often a distinct difference in what men say about women and women say about themselves. Just because the men thought “women can’t” doesn’t mean women agreed. Sappho would be a far better starting place to understanding the lived experience of woman in classical antiquity than Seneca.

But okay. Mroz is a science writer; history may not be her forte. Maybe it’ll get better once she gets to the science.

But no. Mroz seems puzzled about what possible evolutionary advantage female friendship could have, and she remains puzzled even after she quotes evidence that shows that animals (including humans) with wider social networks tend to live longer and have more surviving offspring.

That’s… that’s the definition of an evolutionary advantage. I don’t know what else she’s looking for.

Or actually I do: she wants some kind of scientific, evolutionary explanation for the patterns she’s noticed in her own friendships, like the fact that female friends feel compelled to be supportive of their friends even when they know their friends are in the wrong, and to sweep conflict under the rug, which can lead to friendship break-ups as devastating as divorces.

But evolution isn’t going to answer these questions, because this is a cultural issue, not an evolutionary one, as becomes clear in Mroz’s chapter about female friendship in other countries. In Korea, for instance, friends are not expected to be supportive no matter what, but to bluntly confront each other with their flaws if necessary. If your friend loses her job, and you know that she’s been late every day and she spends most of her time in the office playing Candy Crush, a white American might feel compelled to say, “How could they fire you! You’re so great!” (aware all the while that this is a base lie, but that telling the truth may destroy the friendship), whereas a good Korean friend would say, “They fired you because you were a horrible employee. Play less Candy Crush next time.”

Mroz writes an entire chapter about this sort of thing - and then pops right back into “so how can we use evolution to explain (white, probably middle- or upper-class?) women’s friendships in America (or maybe the Anglophone countries more generally?” And the answer, as Mroz just demonstrated, is that you can’t! Because these are cultural patterns, not genetic ones! Did she write that entire chapter about the differences in friendships in different cultures without ever realizing that it meant most of her generalizations about women and the nature of female friendships are bunk?

Comments

[landofnowhere]

*That sounds about as bad as I expected from the title -- or maybe a little worse. Not surprised that the answer to "what science can tell us about female friendship" is "not very much", especially if by science she means evolutionary psychology.

There's some interesting theory out there as to how humans evolved to cooperate with each other -- which, oddly, it doesn't like she's particularly aware of, if she's questioning why women even build friendships. But evolutionary theories really don't have enough power/specificities to predict specific behavioral patterns, or explain how female friendships are different from male friendships; as you noted there are a lot of cultural influences in play too.

Does the author also seem puzzled about the evolutionary advantages of male friendship?

[staranise]

Yeah, and I'm especially interested what she thinks of female alloparents.

Why am I interested since she probably has nothing useful to say? It's kind of like sifting through bits of a trainwreck, trying to see where it first went off the rails.

[osprey_archer]

She has nothing to say about female alloparents (at least in this book; I suppose she might talk about it elsewhere) so you need not let your curiosity sucker you into checking the book out.

I think my favorite part (and by favorite I mean "the most trainwrecky") is the bit where Mroz is interviewing a biologist who explains that it makes no evolutionary sense to invest in relationships with women who aren't blood relatives. Then the biologist discloses that she has no female friends herself, and it's like, well, that seems like the logical outcome of that understanding of "evolutionary sense."

[staranise]

Has... has she ever tried to look after a baby for longer than four hours.

[osprey_archer]

Mroz or the biologist?

Given that Mroz wrote an entire chapter about cultural differences in friendship without quite seeming to realize that the existence of these cultural differences really ought to complicate/annihilate her arguments about how evolution shaped friendship - I suspect that looking after someone else's baby wouldn't force a realization either.

[osprey_archer]

She doesn't seem puzzled by the evolutionary advantages of male friendship, but I'm not sure if that's because she considers the utility of male friendships totally obvious (men became friends in order to hunt together! How else do you bring down mammoths? Duh!) or because she talks about male friendship less, so there's not as much time for the puzzlement to become noticeable.

I do get the impression that she's one of those people who somewhat idealizes male friendships and wishes that female friendships were more like what she imagines male friendships to be, but I would be hard-pressed to point at a particular passage to prove this.

[missroserose]

Wow, that's frustrating. Sorry to hear the book was such a disappointment, though I'm glad to hear it lead to some good recommendations.

I actually struggle quite a bit with conflict in friendships—my personal gut reaction is much closer to the Korean approach, which I suspect contributed to the fact that I had rather more male friends than female friends earlier in life. I've been slowly working towards developing some tact and sympathy, and only expressing my opinion/offering advice if asked, but it's been a tough road—and I had one devastating-friend-divorce that happened in part for the reasons you cite, which was super frustrating in part because I'd been trying to rein in my critical tendencies, the least she could do would have been to tell me if something I was doing or saying bothered her. (I recognize that this is simplistic and unfair, but feelings often are.) If nothing else, though, it's made me greatly appreciate the friendships I do have where the participants are willing to speak up about potentially difficult topics, especially when done with compassion and care.

[osprey_archer]

I didn't realize until recently that there are times when the cultural expectation is that friends should straight-up lie - not just lie by omission by refraining from pointing out "You realize you got fired because you were a terrible employee, right?", but actually pretend that it was TOTALLY BAFFLING AND UNFAIR that friend-who-is-always-late-to-work got fired.

I think this is a terrible cultural expectation that may give short-term comfort but causes long-term harm, so I don't really intend to comply with it, but it was nonetheless startling to realize that I was evidently supposed to be doing this all along and I just never noticed. What else have I missed? Did I just get a different Friendship Handbook than everyone else?

[missroserose]

You and me both, apparently. :/

[osprey_archer]

It also took me a very long time to realize that a lot of people in the US use the word friend as a synonym for "acquaintance I like," which is just... not how I've used it ever. That seems like such a low bar! If all the acquaintances you like are friends, then what do you call someone who would drive you to the airport?

[missroserose]

I remember your post about this topic a bit ago, and I agree—it's a little awkward. I was having that difficulty earlier, when talking about the artist who designed my new tattoo—I don't know him well enough to feel comfortable in calling him a friend, but we've had him over for dinner a couple of times and invited him to our Thanksgiving dinner, so clearly he's more than an acquaintance.

I usually end up using "casual friend" and "good friend" to denote different levels, but it's a clunky fix at best.

[staranise]

I think the cultural standard may come, in part, from the North American expectation that women always appear happy, artless, and effortless. I've been watching a lot of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, which in part deals with a crying comic saying to her bewildered butch manager, "Sometimes you are going to have to hug me when I cry and say I was good when I wasn't." It's kind of a reflection on the things women had to do to maintain that 1950s standard of femininity.

In that world, women aren't encouraged to be serious, diligent, and committed. Appearance matters more than actual effort. So it's better to be a cheerful and smiling flake, flighty and charming, than a dour workhorse. But this seems to be a very culturally bounded phenomenon, and accessible only to women with certain qualities of attractiveness, wealth, and social status.

[asakiyume]

whereas a good Korean friend would say, “They fired you because you were a horrible employee. Play less Candy Crush next time.” --This made me laugh--and made me suspect that people avoid their friends when they've gotten themselves into bad situations of their own making.

But yeah, wow: sounds like the author has some *huge* blind spots.

[osprey_archer]

There's just this huge disconnect between the chapter on cultural differences in friendship and everything else in the book. I wonder if someone (it would be ironic if it was a friend trying to be tactful) suggested the chapter on cultural differences in the hope that it would help Mroz see the limits of the evolutionary approach in the other chapters, and it just... didn't.