Book Review: Girl Talk
Oct. 27th, 2018 10:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerJennifer 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?
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?
