Book Review: The Social Sex

[osprey_archer]

I’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.

Comments

[skygiants]

That all sounds VASTLY frustrating

[osprey_archer]

If she wants to write about friendship then why does she pick so many pairs that are at least arguably romantically involved???

She seems to be really intrigued by intense friendships (as are we all! no shame there!) but also not really comfortable with the romantic overtones that this kind of intensity sometimes gives a relationship.

[skygiants]

Right, if you're going to deal with the topic you have to deal with the topic and at least admit to the complexity and historical definitional shifts! Relationships in general are not a straightforward topic, and cultural language and definitions and expectations around those relationships vary wildly - you can't just shove everything into a "great! gals being pals!" bucket.

[ancientreader]

Just going by the titles you mention, there's a big difference between writing closely about specific relationships and making Big Historical Generalizations About Women. Strike the word "Historical" for that matter, which I shouldn't have included in the first place, since you mention the Mroz book: it sounds like the kind of thing I always want to drop-kick across the bookstore. It's like everybody forgot everything Stephen Jay Gould ever wrote -- and he's even a dead white guy! Seriously, though, has there really not been enough debunking of "scientific" generalizations about sex and gender yet?

But I come to this conversation grouchy anyway, because I'm chatting with someone else about the Great Lesbian Sex Wars of the 1980s, an era replete with generalizations about female behavior past and present that left me allergic to these kinds of books forever. I think I tried to read something by Marilyn Yalom once that did result in drop-kicking.

[osprey_archer]

TBF I'm not convinced Yalom has any pretensions to being scientific, at least in this book (haven't read anything else she's written): it's more like "here's a bunch of random facts I gathered together about female friendships through the ages!" *dumps facts on the reader's head*

A better writer could probably make that quite interesting, actually, but Yalom never really digs in deep, just moves on to the next pair.

She also mixes together historical and literary examples, in a way that doesn't differentiate between the two at all. It's as if someone watched The Winter Soldier and said "This is what male friendship in 21st century America is like! All male friendships are like this. And it's totally friendship and definitely not even slightly sexual even a little bit, because... it just is."