Life
Elizabeth Wurtzel Takes On the Curse of the Good Girl
If only niceness were teenage girls' worst problem.
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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, 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, 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.
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Comments
How does good = bad?
By: reader2 | Fri, 09/25/2009 - 10:08
Since when is responsibility and maturity a bad characteristic, in anyone? While it may be true that teenagers are not allowed much adolescence anymore, the reviewers' examples and "analysis" hardly make such a case. Why on earth anyone would want their children to experiment with drugs, and think that doing so is a vital part of their adolescence, is beyond me. There are other ways to explore and express individuality - let's have an intelligent conversation about those, rather than reflexively knee-jerking that "I had so much fun doing drugs, poor poor kids today who can't!" Oh, and btw, as previous posters have pointed out, kids today have no problems accessing drugs, even the good girls in this article.
This book was not solely
By: shin | Wed, 09/09/2009 - 23:16
This book was not solely based on the experience of GLI participants. As I note in the introduction, "My findings are based on interviews and observations of Girls Leadership Institute participants and girls at a handful of public and middle and high schools I visited on the East Coast" (11). I go on to state that 20% of GLI participants are on scholarship, making what I observe hardly a problem of overprotected rich kids.
I should add that this book was never intended or advertised as a work of academic research. It is based on my experience as an educator.
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Manic Rage?
By: angry foo dog | Sun, 09/06/2009 - 12:47
This sounds like it was written during a manic rage. It is insulating and adds nothing in quality to double x. I'm really surprised it was published.
Correction
By: Bascombe | Sun, 09/06/2009 - 11:48
Ms. Wurtzel and/or Double X editors,
The term "lawyer" is reserved for someone who has passed a bar examination and been admitted to the bar of a state or the District of Columbia. A person who has not passed a bar exam cannot, by definition, be a lawyer. Since Ms. Wurtzel has not passed any bar exam, she cannot accurately be described as a lawyer. She is a law-school graduate, but no more than that.
Illogical, racist, and anti-Semitic
By: Ellid | Sun, 09/06/2009 - 09:52
It is hard to take Elizabeth Wurtzel seriously when she begins by decrying the alleged lack of class since "the fancy schools" began "recruiting from the shtetl and the hood" after giving as examples of unclassiness two elderly white men (one the son of a United States Senator!) who graduated from Ivy League colleges when there were still quotas on non-WASPs at elite colleges. Even worse, the use of loaded terms for European ghetto towns and poor inner city neighborhood implies that Ms. Wurtzel thinks that residents of such places (that is, the poor, the dark-skinned, or members of non-Christian religions) should not be allowed anywhere near the hallowed halls of Harvard or the sacred towers of Yale.
The racism, anti-Semitism, and just plain bigotry of this is appalling. It is also flat-out *wrong*. God only knows what Harvard was like when she was an undergraduate*, but when I was at Smith the school was focused on educating young women to be strong, independent, and prepared for anything, regardless of the color of their skin, socio-economic background, or religious background. This emphasis has only increased, and it's resulted in the most gloriously diverse class of Smithies since Sophia Smith's will was prorated.
Then again, Elizabeth Wurtzel doesn't have the most beautiful mind herself, unless one counts being fired from a newspaper job for plagiarism.....
*and has it ever occurred to her that it's only been about forty years since *she* would have been considered unacceptable at Harvard, producer of beautiful minds? Or didn't they teach self-awareness while she was an undergrad trotting about Harvard Square?
The shtetl and the hood?
By: eli | Sat, 09/05/2009 - 11:54
"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."
No one is jumping on this one? Really? Elizabeth Wurtzel's fundamental thesis as to what ails America's elite institutions is... too much racial and ethnic diversity? No self-serving, basically thoughtless jerkoffs went to Princeton prior to "recruiting in the shtetl and the hood?"
I honestly don't understand why this isn't a horribly embarrassing statement to have made in public.
"If only niceness were teenage girls' worst problem."
By: dyinginlawschool | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 21:20
Must a book tackle the worst problem for a chosen demographic in order to be worthy of writing? This review strikes me as a reviewer being difficult for the sake of it. I'm all for difficult women, but have a good reason for it.
The biggest issue I have with this article is that it seems to forgo the "review" aspect in order to be controversial and tantalizing. I'd like to see if Ms. Wurtzel could actually review a book; if so, a scathing such as this might be more respectable. In other words, I'm not impressed, and I think Elizabeth might be better off writing books or studying for the NY bar exam.
10 more years on the couch for Elizabeth Wurtzel?
By: jcash | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 13:31
Wow. I don't think I've ever seen a review quite like this. I'm shocked it was actually published. This is not simply a "negative review" as some have previously stated. This is a vitriolic attack clearly motivated by intense, unresolved feelings on the part of Ms. Wurtzel. It is an embarrassment to Ms. Wurtzel and the editor of doubleX.
So let me get this straight
By: nagatuki | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 12:56
In response to a negative review of a book about "good girls," you're all commenting that it's "mean"?
Hahahaha... Does anyone else see the irony, or is it just me?
Sigh... Look, it's just a review. The book doesn't sound scientific (and the author says as much), and if you don't like sociology (IMO the science of making (or making up) observations and then writing it down to sell books), then you likely won't like the book. It's that simple.
Some of us want a more studied approach to life, and some want more general observations, but the critic is not "mean" for pointing out that this book is the latter, nor offering her own opinion that it fails to point out more detrimental issues in society (with which I happen to agree - I'm not pretending otherwise).
Conclusion is bunk
By: Fitzpatrick | Fri, 09/04/2009 - 10:13
So, here's the logic of this review: the book addresses a problem that used to be a problem, but isn't anymore because someone else already wrote about it. Plus, other kids have worse problems than this one, so teenagers qua teenagers no longer exist. And the same problem affects adults, so don't bother with the (non-existent) teenagers anyway, because we can't address their problems unless we address everyone's.
So was Wurtzel stoned when writing this? Besides the plenty of "plenty's" and the inane criticism of terms like "brain scientist" (which yields Google hits from the NYT and NPR, among many others), the utter lack of logic makes one wonder if there is a subtext of personal dislike. Or maybe it's just one of those days.