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KW: Hi, I’m Kelsey Wallace, the web editor at Bitch, and with me today are...
AZ: Andi Zeisler, the editorial and creative director, and
JF: Julie Falk, the executive director.
KW: And we’re here today to talk to you today about Girl Land, the new book by Caitlin Flanagan, and Andi, you had a pretty good quote that kind of summed up what the book’s about.
AZ: Well, let me first say that we were sent an advance copy of the book several months ago and I read it on a trip and I brought it back to the office and demanded that as many people as possible read this book so I could confirm my own feelings that it was in fact the worst book ever written, and Julie and Kelsey both read it and confirmed that, and as the book, since the book has come out a few weeks ago, most of the press it’s been getting confirms, not that it’s the worst book ever, but very few reviews have anything good to see. New York Magazine I think summed it up really well, saying “it’s a scattershot melange of slipshod research, nostalgic memoir and potted social analysis,” the Christian Science Monitor said “Flanagan reveals herself to be an amateur sociologist of the worst sort, the kind that relies on her personal yesterday as the sole piece of comparison for today.”
KW: Right, and her point with the book, we should say, it’s a collection of essays, they’re about this totally fabricated time in a girl’s life called “Girl Land,” which, I mean, number one, probably my biggest problem with it is that that’s the stupidest term I’ve ever heard.
AZ: Yeah, she’s really trying to make “fetch” happen.
KW: Yeah, she pushes it hard, so every essay is kind of at least supposed to be about this time between girlhood and young woman-hood, and the back of the book cover defines it as “that transition from girl to woman, an experience that has changed radically over the generations, from how a girl learns about her period, how she expects to be treated by boys and men.
AZ: And she really talks about none of that.
KW: A little bit about period fear...
JF: This is pretty nit-picky, but I kind of have to take issue with describing it as a collection of essays, that makes it sound–
AZ: –that makes it sound coherent–
JF: –and that each chapter is well thought-out and has a point–
KW: –chunks of words–
JF: Right, I also have to say that the continuity between the chapters was confusing and I wondered at times, because we have this uncorrected proof, whether things weren’t out of order, but certainly it doesn’t feel like a collection of essays.
AZ: It’s very disjointed, a lot of these, I remembered reading as partial essays or full essays in The Atlantic monthly, to which Flanagan is the main lady contributor, it really did seem like she was trying to string together these disjointed essays, and it’s funny, in preparing for this recording, I went back and reread some of the interviews from 2006 when her essay collection called To Hell With All That came out, and when people asked her what she was working on she mentioned that she was working on a book of essays about the transition from girlhood to womanhood, so clearly this is a project that has been in the works for a while, but her thinking doesn’t appear to have been clarified, like, I think it’s fair to say that it’s actually a really lazy book, I mean for someone who seems so sure of her rightness, she doesn’t seem to have put a lot of effort into creating sort of a trajectory for this book.
JF: That’s true, in a sense that this book is relevant and important now, it’s interesting, she has been working on it for a while, it seems like it could have been published any time in the past, twenty or so years, with the exception of her rather, you know, urgent remark that the internet should not be in girls’ bedrooms.
KW: Oh and her chapter about blowjob parties, because it was based on 60 Minutes–
JF: –but that’s old news!
KW: That 60 Minutes came out in the early 2000s, even that’s ten years ago. I thought it was, you know, it was interesting using the rainbow parties as an example, like that chapter is kind of about “oh, my female friends who have daughters were in a panic about these blowjob parties,” but throughout this entire book called Girl Land, I am struggling to remember even one quote from an actual girl, instead of a parent of a girl that she knows, a commentator on 60 Minutes from ten years ago, Patty Hearts, a family of girls whose diary she read that’s from the late ‘60s.
AZ: Absolutely, there’s no conversations with actual girls, I think it’s interesting to note in interviews where she’s been kind of put on the defensive by people asking “where are the real girls,” she brings up the fact that she used to be a teacher in this very exclusive private school in Los Angeles.
KW: When was that even?
AZ: Well, right, it was a long time ago since she’s clearly prided herself on being a stay-at-home mother for about, I don’t know, eight to ten years at this point, but there’s no, like she’s clearly just using that as some sort of establishment of credibility when in fact, if all the stuff that’s going on and she’s privy to it, it seems like it would not have been hard to round up a few girls to agree with her.
JF: Well, and she references, yes she uses it to build her credibility, but she doesn’t reference her time as a teacher specifically in any way that makes it a useful or interesting anecdote.
KW: Most of her anecdotes, I really think, that although I would have still really hated the book, that I would have had less of a problem with it if it was framed as a memoir because that’s what I think it mostly was anyways, instead of trying to make a statement about everyone’s girlhood. The only real anecdotes she has in her are about herself.
JF: Which I thought were her most interesting parts, it’s when she tries to put her memories into this historical and psychological context that it just begins to feel like fluff.
AZ: It has to be said that she is one of the most cloying sentimental writers out there. If you read her past stuff, she’s clearly has a lot of childhood damage that comes from on the one hand feeling like she could’ve had a really idyllic upbringing, but also she’s written before about being incredibly traumatized when her formerly stay-at-home mother went back to work, and how that damaged her. She’s constantly referencing the sort of magical time that really never existed, and that her own anecdotes point out never existed, she’s writing about this time when girls were sort of cosseted with diaries and crinolines and proms, but she also recalls almost being date-raped, so clearly the time she’s talking about wasn’t so idyllic even for her, but she’s really insisting on it as this 8:25 time, that we need to go back to somehow, by maybe restricting girls’ internet usage.
KW: Or that girls will create that time for themselves, like it’s a natural occurrence of getting older as a girl, like this “girl land” period where she uses all these adjectives and adverbs of “dreamily,” “inwardly,” “dreamworld,” the girls need all of this sort of cloistered, precious pink alone time, and so even though we live in like, a hellmouth, where everyday girls are going to blowjob parties, if you could just sort of provide a small alone space for them, they would sort of revert back to a pretend 1940s teen girl who never existed in the first place. Even her examples, like–
JF: But even if she were successful in that, what does she what next? What are the positives that come of that kind of preciousness, she doesn’t even say why that’s so important.
AZ: I think she wants to be right, I think she wants her worldview validated, and I think that’s clear in the interviews she’s given, that’s all she does, I think both in the book and in her larger, you know, she’s a pretty prolific commentator out in the media, and in the interviews she’s given since the book has come out, she’s really been sort of rapidly setting up these straw women and men, one quote that she, that I wrote down was “if you’re the sort of person who wants your daughter to have indiscriminate physical contact, shaped by pornography, often without commitment or affection, you’re set, you don’t need to read any books, the culture is here to support you. If you’re looking at your five year old and thinking, I really hope she knows how to give oral sex at sleepovers, then your job is done.” She actually says these things, in her mind, she actually thinks there’s mom’s out there going “oh yeah, that’s totally, rainbow parties are awesome, I really hope my ten year-old goes to them.” She just wants to be right, she wants to be right by creating women and girls who don’t exist.
JF: Her sons do exist, I’d like to hear more about what she’s learned by being the mother of two boys.
AZ: I don’t think we’re ever going to hear about it, because she’s always completely let men and boys off the hook in her writing about gender roles, she’s never, she puts the onus for everything on women from housecleaning to being a communicator, to sexual advances,
KW: Oh, “you can only have a successful dating life if you’ve had a strong father figure,” because that’s the only way to sort of keep, you know, keep danger at bay and keep you from going to a rainbow party, obviously your mother would never intervene, and if she did, you wouldn’t care, and of course the relevant example is the Diary of Anne Frank, where Anne would fight with her mom and idolized her dad, as if that was a situation that applies to every girl’s life.
JF: It’s a really universal...
AZ: Yeah, I don’t want to talk about Caitlin Flanagan’s children too much, but I have to say, if she’s really, truly, because I do believe her writing in a lot of ways is extremely disingenuous, but if she is raising her sons according to her kind of worldview, they’re going to be monsters.
KW: And if one of them asks you on a date, don’t go.
AZ: Stay away from Patrick and Connor Flanagan. I think, also something really interesting that’s come out in the wake of Girl Land coming out is the fact that Caitlin Flanagan has a very real-life stake in girls existing in this kind of fantasy culture. Her husband is a top executive at Mattel and is in charge of their Barbie properties.
KW: He writes the songs for those computer-animated Barbie DVDs, right?
AZ: Yeah, so he’s like, Mr. Princess. So she has a very, you know, concrete stake in pushing the idea that girls do want to be safe, they do want to be princesses, they don’t want to participate in what the rest of us see as kind of, like, the actual reality of teen girls.
KW: Which, you know, that’s never mentioned in the book, anything about her husband, and honestly, I feel that could have at least lent some credibility to some of the statements she makes, if she could have said, you know, “my husband is really tapped into this market, and here’s real data I have about real life girls in the post-21st century media-world.”
JF: Yes, and that, I mean, that kind of gets at part of what really irks me, which is that a lot of what she says would be embraced by feminists if instead of saying that girls needed to be saved and protected that they needed to be educated and empowered, because, you know, feminists have many of the same concerns that Caitlin Flanagan does, perhaps not voiced in the same way, but it’s protection and, you know, and innocence that she’s trying to impose, not strength and empowerment, and it’s grating, and to me, what she doesn’t address at all in this theft of innocence and loveliness that is this opportunity to exist in this period between being a girl and being a woman is the assault of commercial culture, generally, on girls and–
KW: –and boys too, that’s never mentioned–
JF: It’s related to sexuality and sex and it’s completely, it’s not part of her argument, or even part of her concern.
AZ: Well, the real contemporary world beyond this sort of nebulous, awful that she considers the internet to be, nothing in the real world is considered, that’s not relevant to her worldview. Her worldview is like Patty Hearst and Anne Frank–
KW: –and the Bella sisters, which, by the way, I want to read a Caitlin Flanagan book about those sisters. That was one of the most interesting–
AZ: –I think I’d prefer to read someone else’s book about them.
KW: I guess, maybe it was the only moment of levity in the plane-flight-from-hell where I read this book, was that I was getting a kick out of how into those sisters she was, she clearly, even though they all kind of met pretty horrible adulthoods or didn’t make it to adulthood, it’s these four sisters who grew up in the 70s in a house that she was fetishizing the shit out of.
AZ: It was her version of the Virgin Suicides, if Caitlin Flanagan were the narrator of that book.
KW: Right, so I guess that shtick would get kind of old after a few of pages, but I was thinking of Caitlin Flanagan sort of writing her life story, I might read that.
AZ: But I did think that was sort of interesting that that was the one time in the book where she seemed to spark up and get into her own material, the rest of it is just so static and it just, flowery but with no substances behind it.
KW: Right, at least that chunk, I mean the same with Patty Hearst, maybe it’s because those things actually happened, so it wasn’t just Caitlin Flanagan talking for Flanagan’s sake, I think those were the only parts that felt credible or even semi-researched to me because it was something she did do a minimal amount of research about, but they did happen 40 years ago, or more. Diary of Anne Frank, Patty Hearst, the Bella sisters...
AZ: I think it just furthers the theory that she’s just completely arrested in her own adolescence where something radically changed and sort of damaged her, and also sort of preserved her own thinking in this kind of amber moment that she can’t escape.
JF: Well, I agree and it seems like what she fears for girls is exactly what she is, what’s so affecting her today, she’s worried about the effect that, you know, pornography is going to have on girls, and she, she doesn’t act like she comes to this knowledge of what she hears about on 60 Minutes or what she reads about in the media with any kind of intellectual acuity. She seems hysterical when she reads about hysterical girls.
AZ: Yeah, do you want to talk about that piece about from the New York Times that she wrote this past weekend.
KW: We have it here: “Hysteria and the Teenage Girl” by Caitlin Flanagan.
JF: I was shocked that this was published in the newspaper of record. I couldn’t believe it.
AZ: Yeah, so, do you want to summarize it? I guess there’s been this spate of–
JF: –spate? Maybe three?
AZ: I don’t know.
KW: There have been a handful of occurrences in a town, what she is talking about is one town, but she expands it to a couple of other examples over the past decade, of basically what she calls hysteria, a kind of–
AZ: –it’s like girls exhibiting actual physical symptoms that are sort of like Tourette’s, a series of tics....
KW: ...facial tics, anxiety.
JF: That start with one girl, they’ve been cheerleaders, and then other friends, cheerleaders also assume these tics, and there’s no explanation for it.
AZ: And Caitlin Flanagan’s prescription is that girls need diaries and they need to be dreaming. That seems to be it.
KW: Yeah, because “on their minds is their new potential for childbearing. An event that for most of human has been fraught with visible peril.” She also, she does talk a lot in Girl Land and this article about kind of how one of the things that shapes female adolescence and requires the diary space of Girl Land is a mortal fear of getting your period, and that that’s what puts these cheerleaders over the edge.
JF: Aren’t these the same ones that are doing blowjobs at five years old?
AZ: Yeah, I see what you’re saying, she’s really creating connections where they serve her and disconnections where they serve her.