Apparently girls are too delicate for the Internet
I just read yesterday about this book “Girl Land” by Caitlin Flanagan, which apparently says that parents should turn off their daughters’ Internet access, for their own good. I haven’t read the book yet - and believe me, I will read it as soon as I can - but in the meantime, and with the caveat that these quotes may have been misquoted or decontextualised (though it sure doesn’t look like it), let me have at it.
1. Girls’ constitutions are too delicate for them to successfully navigate the torturous terrain of the Internet. Otherwise, why would she point out the:
coarsening and deadening effect of the internet
When someone uses the word “coarse” to describe a social context, they’re using it to allude to masculinity. The Internet is too male, and girls are too delicate to survive it. Strike 1. In fact, that’s Strike 1 and 1.5: not only are girls too delicate, but the Internet is the domain of masculine, coarse, bestubbled men. Hey Caitlin, don’t let’s get the truth of Internet users - now and in the past - get in the way of a good assumption, right?
2. Girls can’t handle how the public realm currently expects people to behave, and so they suffer. Probably to do with their delicate condition of femininity. They should probably get back in the girlhood version of the kitchen: the bedroom. (This is for their own good that we’re placing restrictions on their movement, btw.)
There is no such thing as a private experience any more … I would contend that [this] is most punishing to girls.
…
The current culture, with its driving imperatives of exhibitionism, of presenting oneself to the world in the most forward and blasting way possible, has made the experience of Girl Land especially charged and difficult
Except when we talk about the bedroom for girls these days, we’re talking about the complex negotiation they undertake through their computers and mobile phones, to the outside world that they can access: the Internet. Complex, yes. Too difficult for them to understand and adjust to? No. Particularly not if you consider she is implicitly saying boys can handle it. Strike 2.
3. I’m going to let Carina Garland finish this post off for me, and just imagine me standing next to her nodding furiously. BTW Carina, I’m going to be hunting you down and stealing your reading list from your PhD, for my PhD. Anyway, the final strike: replace the word “Internet” with, say, “the vote”, “tertiary education”, “any education”, “basic literacy”, or any kind of “self-determination”, and you have the must irritating crux of her argument: the paternalistic protectionism of femininity which is at risk from even existing in any self-respecting society. The kind of femininity which should be kept deprivileged, impotent, and controlled, for its own good. The decade changes, but the fear remains: that females and society will finally come into true contact, and that the world will then explode. Or at least the world as chauvinist misogynists know it, will then explode.
Boys have always been ignored in the age-old debates about adolescent sexuality, said Carina Garland, a lecturer in gender studies at the University of Sydney who has just completed a PhD on the history of girlhood.
”Flanagan’s essays called to mind essays from the 19th century,” says Garland, ”… about girls becoming frivolous and caring about make-up and fashion and not the way they’re supposed to behave.”
While the external threats to girlhood change with every era, the message remains the same, she said.
”In many ways, we’re not talking about real girls, we’re talking about this imaginary, idealised girl. This is the girl that public policy and discussion is directed towards.”
