The creepy condescension of Caitlin Flanagan

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:10:00 +0000

There is no way to deny that on NPR today, author Caitlin Flanagan tried to lecture me on how I might have had a "better" adolescence. (There is proof on the Internet, so I know I didn't hallucinate it.) Specifically, she tried to use me as an example of the perils of having the Internet in your room as an adolescent, because I didn't happen to meet a great guy to date in high school. The remedy? More princess movies.

Many people, including my actual parents, think I turned out pretty OK. And Flanagan, whose book "Girl Land" I reviewed here, usually restricts her professional vocation of annoying feminists to print. So what was I doing defending my very existence on the radio?

"Do you know about Quakers? They try to find the good in everyone, and I felt you tried to do that in Flanagan's book," the producer at NPR's "On Point" told me, as he tried to convince me to take part in the on-air discussion. (If you read my review, you'll see this says more about the laceration Flanagan received elsewhere than any unusual empathy on my part.) I told him I was reluctant to engage in something that could turn into a catfight, but was persuaded that the thoughtful tone of the show and its host would prevail. Ultimately, too, I didn't want to shy away from a fight that I thought was important.

Girl, uninterrupted

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:45:00 +0000

Of the many questions formed while reading Caitlin Flanagan’s “Girl Land,” most pressing is why it was written at all. One convincing answer comes not from its pages – which are filled with gauzy pronouncements on female adolescence, the occasional literary or even historical close reading, and no particular argument or thesis -- but from an interview on Vogue’s website. In it, Flanagan says, “I didn’t write this book from the perspective of being a parent; I wrote it from the perspective of my girlhood being so intense for me.”

Flanagan works as a critic, was once a teacher and counselor at an elite private school, and is the mother of two boys, but somehow nothing has matched the intensity of that girlhood; it forms the only authentically compelling material here. Roll your eyes all you want, and I did, at declarations like “one of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that a boy does not fetishize the tokens of his childhood.” (Flanagan appears to have missed the past couple of decades in popular culture.) But then comes the quiet horror of Flanagan's unerringly detailed recounting of an attempted rape she experienced at 16, and what it taught her about power and control and shame.

Salon.com > Caitlin Flanagan

The creepy condescension of Caitlin Flanagan

Girl, uninterrupted