Girl Land

October 31, 2011
Flanagan’s personal essays on girlhood, dating, menstruation, diaries, proms, and sexual initiation take a noble subject—the interior lives of girls transitioning into womanhood—and do it a disservice. The author, indisputably a strong and elegant writer, unfortunately skips making arguments or providing evidence in favor of settling for outdated generalizations (“Girls with a father living at home always fare better in the dating world, because malevolent adolescent boys... don’t want to come up against the authority of grown men. In fact, the hallmark of most dangerous teenage boys is that they have never been held to account by a grown man, and they move more confidently in a world of women, where they can threaten and cajole”). Her authorial voice shifts radically from overprotective mother to victim and back to thoughtful intellectual. Nuggets of brilliance (on how the 1990s were especially schizophrenic in regards to gender relations, say) get buried beneath screeds and mounds of well-meaning but off-the-mark advice.

November 1, 2011
Flanagan (To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, 2006) argues that society "has let its girls down in every possible way" by failing to protect them against sexual exploitation. The author claims that parents who impose protective limits on their daughters are not shortchanging them by treating them differently than sons—especially because we are living in a media and marketing-driven culture that is "openly contemptuous of girls and young women." Flanagan points to the inherently different ways that females experience the onset of adulthood: menstruation, which raises the dangers associated with pregnancy as well as the promise of motherhood; the lurking possibility of date-rape as well as the opportunity for sexual fulfillment; and more. In her opinion, today's pornography-saturated culture devalues intimacy and threatens a young woman's sense of identity as she deals with her vulnerable emerging sexuality. While in the past a girl might retreat to her room to entrust her secret fantasies to a diary, today she is more likely to be online, reporting them to the world on Facebook or Twitter. The author trolls through the pages of Seventeen, uncovering evidence of how growing up has been transformed since the end of World War I. She takes the prom as a benchmark. From a dance celebrating high-school graduation, it has gradually morphed into a costly formal event almost on par with a wedding, with formal dress and a strict code of behavior. Today, the chaperoned prom is often followed by another party, with heavy drinking and, often, sexual exploitation or abuse. A compelling, convincing case for more parental involvement in girls' lives.

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August 1, 2011

National Magazine Award winner Flanagan has stirred controversy with her pieces on sex, marriage, and family life. Now she turns her attention to girls--specifically, how they negotiate key life events like puberty, which she argues have remained constants. Good for forward-looking discussion groups.

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