Elizabeth Wurtzel Takes On the Curse of the Good Girl

It’s always seemed odd to me that Lou Dobbs is a Harvard graduate, and downright ridiculous that Pat Robertson has a law degree at all, much less from Yale. They are both smart enough, and obviously successful. But both of them are incorrect or cacophonous—and embarrassing—much of the time. Elite institutions are not merely supposed to produce intelligent alumni—they are also supposed to teach rigorous thinking and create beautiful minds. Plainly, this is a mistaken notion on my part. Ever since the fancy schools started recruiting in the shtetl and the hood, elitism as a coherent narrative has declined to meaninglessness. It’s now perfectly Princeton to be, say, a fitness-equipment infomercial mogul, clever and determined but also, in some deeper way, crass and wrong.

I was forced to remember this because Rachel Simmons, the author of the really ridiculous The Curse of the Good Girl [2], happens to be a Rhodes Scholar, as is mentioned prominently on the back-jacket flap. In fact, her mission, which seems to be making teenage girls into solid women, is completely respectable unto itself. But her book is the sort of crap sociology based on pop psychology that a classical education is supposed to have taught her to view with a dimly critical eye. That’s what her editor and agent and publisher all must have thought when they ushered this book about teenage girls through the process as if it were a serious work of thought, when in fact it’s just obvious, unconvincing, and diagnoses exactly the opposite of what’s wrong with the kids today.

The book’s premise is pretty simple: Too many teenage girls, in an effort to please their parents and peers, don’t express their true feelings. “Where the truth is obscured,” writes Simmons rather sententiously, “assumptions will flourish.” The consequences of this quietude are enormous, according to Simmons: Repression leads to bullying or hysterical outbursts; keeping it all in results in depression and even suicide. Finally, if these girls make it to adulthood, they are lousy leaders and managers because they are aggressive or passive, instead of just being assertive.

When Carol Gilligan wrote about this same problem in 1982 in her influential and seminal In a Different Voice [3], she noted the way girls suddenly get shy and introverted at about age 11, how they go from being the best students in the class to ceding those positions to smart-alecky boys. These preteens seem to “lose voice,” as Gilligan put it. Then a professor at the School of Education at Harvard, Gilligan was documenting a real problem at the time, and her book rang true to an awful lot of us. Critics have since argued against Gilligan’s work—In a Different Voice was really about female morality and how distaff notions of right and wrong differed from male counterparts’—but her ideas have remained the reference point to this day.

Because Gilligan has done such solid work in this area, at least one problem with Simmons’ book is that it’s redundant. But truly, to catalog everything that’s wrong with The Curse of the Good Girl, I would have to go in alphabetical order. Among the goofier oddities are references to entirely new professions such as “brain scientist” (Neurologist? Neurobiologist? Neuropsychiatrist?) and “emotional intelligence expert” (this sounds like some sort of CIA analyst, but actually refers to an author).

But then it gets more troubling: Simmons’ research methods are unsound. Most of her observations are based on what she sees at the Girls’ Leadership Institute, an organization that Simmons founded, which is connected with no university or research institution that is peer-reviewed and accredited and which seems to mostly run camps and seminars and classes that train girls to avoid “losing voice.” Since the young ladies who attend the offerings of GLI are a self-selected bunch, mostly from good homes with loving parents who are concerned about their well-being, this group is hardly representative of what’s going down with teenagers. When Simmons’ girls “lose voice,” it’s a household emergency.

After all, in a list of phrases that Simmons’ sample considers the property of good girls, there are such characteristics as “good grades,” “well-rounded,” “healthy,” “confident,” “organized,” and “generous.” While the roster also includes silly things like “blue eyes” and sad traits like “people-pleaser,” it seems to me that many of the mentions are pretty right-on. I don’t think it’s quite time to call the men in white coats.

In the meantime, there is plenty about the current crop of teenagers that should have us all plenty worried, and in The Curse of the Good Girl, Simmons fails to identify the real horrors.

In some cases the horror is that there is no horror. The good high-schoolers, the ones with Ivy League futures, are positively babied by their overprotective parents, who don’t want their sons and daughters to do the things they did. Having gone through herpes-and-cocaine phases of their own, the Boomers and Xers who are rearing Dakota and Madison these days have scheduled them to death with cello lessons and tennis team—or a trip to the Girls Leadership Institute—until they have no time or energy for bad behavior. They are coddled and cosseted to such an extent that they remain childlike until that moment when adulthood dawns—usually at Amherst commencement ceremonies or maybe while walking down the bridal aisle in Vera Wang white. These goody-goodies never have a chance to cut loose, get stoned on some good hydroponic grass, and listen to Minor Threat, the way we once did.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Metro North tracks, there is hellspawn in the house. Eleven-year-old girls are meth addicts, they are pregnant at 13 and just dropping out—more fodder for the public fisc. The boys are bad news in entirely different ways—I shudder to think of what a Ritalin kid hitting puberty can come up with—but suffice it to say that neither of them is enjoying adolescence in innocently naughty pursuits. Think of any scene from the movie Thirteen [4], and you know what the kids whose parents are too overextended to notice are up to.

The teenager, which was a 20th century invention (in fact, like Eames chairs [5], really a midcentury creation), might no longer exist as a subgroup at all, which might be the real tragedy. It looks to me like there is, as there was pre-1950, childhood and adulthood, without the labile adolescent phase in the middle.

That some select segment of that population is trying too hard to be nice hardly seems like a reason to jump up and down and worry. After all, is this not a problem that plagues people in general—as opposed to pubescents in particular? The human condition is one of irrationally and idiotically doing what we can to fit in, which often includes saying one thing and meaning another. This coping mechanism is not a matter of “losing voice”—it’s an issue of getting through life without arguing with every person you come across. There are the rare renegades and rebels who always say what they mean—and it’s my guess that they, not the meek, shall inherit the earth—but most of us are just doing our best to make it through the day without causing confrontation any more than is absolutely necessary. C’est la guerre.

The era when even the nice kids could go to Woodstock on Saturday and drop acid with their friends and watch the grass grow while Hendrix strummed out the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and then show up to Sunday dinner with the parents in tattered bellbottoms bound to cause a mild household ruckus, is over. Teenagers are either growing up too fast or too slow. They exist as a marketing concept, as the people you sell to at Urban Outfitters or advertise to on Facebook, but as human beings they are either stuck online or stuck studying—or else they are babies having babies.

That blissful moment of splendor in the grass that is what sweet 16 is all about has gone away with the 20th century that made it.