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dr_pretentiousThe vestige of my fourteen-year-old former self pops up, as in Hollywood's angel-and-devil-on-shoulder dialogues, and she chuckles with vindication at the words above, which turned up in this article about an outbreak of mass hysteria. There's a lot of sadness in that story, I point out to my fourteen-year-old self. "It could have happened to us," I remind her.
"We were too socially marginal to catch a mass psychogenic illness," replies Sarah circa 1984. "To catch conversion disorder from the Queen Bee you curry favor with, you would first have to curry favor with a Queen Bee. We would sooner have burned down the school, except that would have required looking up from whatever we were reading."
She could be a real a brat, that old self, but she's not always wrong.
Okay, maybe I could have resisted an outbreak with a cheerleader for its Patient Zero. But in one of my favorite episodes of Radiolab (which is the best of all possible podcasts), there's that piece about the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, and the description there is of an utterly pervasive mass hysteria. I speculate that there was no equivalent social status to Geek in rural Tanzania in the early 1960's, but if there were geeks in Tanganyika, they were probably laughing along with everybody else.
All this comes up because one of my back-burner writing projects is an essay on the question people love asking of homeschoolers: What about socialization? I may have something original and useful to add to this topic, despite the fact that nearly all homeschoolers in America have to field that question (and many of them have posted or published their thoughts about the experience), and despite the fact that my kids are not yet of school age. But I'm not going to write that essay yet--no, definitely not--because I have other writing obligations that must come first.
My bratty fourteen-year-old former self wants to say, "What about socialization? Yeah, what about it? I served my sentence in public schools, and I'm not exactly a paragon of socialization, am I? I'm the walking wounded, here. You can't write me off by saying my future 42-year-old self turned out okay. Every useful thing she knows about social skills, she had to learn by unlearning her entire school experience."
She's got a point, but even in a Seurat painting, a point is not the big picture.
So I read, among other things, Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World. Though my own kids are boys, I have three nieces and an endless succession of students, and I would like to have a clue about what they're up against. Whatever it is, it'll be different from what I saw in the mid-1980s.
Wiseman describes a social order of brutal stratification, brutally maintained by those at the top, and brutally resisted by those unable to settle for less. In her account of things, teenage girls regard their status relative to one another as the measure of their human worth and of their odds of literal survival. Protecting their status from attack is so all-consuming a project that they rarely have energy left to care about anything else. Perhaps the most crazy-making part is that the fastest way to lose status and friends is to admit to having a hard time: "In girl world, everything must appear effortless." That sentence was the first thing I thought of when one of the girls in the Times article insists that she was not under stress when she took sick--insists to the point of saying her mother's long series of brain surgeries was "a walk in the park."
Is Wiseman right? I have no idea. I spent those years of my life misdiagnosed with a terminal illness, so my take on all that stratification was, I'm going to be dead in five years, and you want me to spend what time I have left fretting about how my shoes affect my image? Seriously? My disdain for normal status markers--and I confess, it was disdain--was infuriating to the normal female classmates who wanted to solidify their social positions by attacking mine. According to Wiseman's interpretation of girl world, those girls may have been suffering just as much from feeling their status threatened as I was from being misdiagnosed with a nonexistent spinal cancer. Okay, maybe. Let's go with that, because then I can feel all gracious toward those people now. Anyway, I had a handful of amazing school friends, of both genders--well, more than both genders, though I didn't know at the time--and instead of gossipping about the mainstream social structure at our school, we talked obsessively about all the stuff geeks talk about. Books, science, films, games, how to survive various technological and fantastical apocalypses, politics, religion. Does that mean Rosalind Wiseman oversimplifies the kids she studies and teaches, or does that mean we were demographic anomalies?
What I can say about Queen Bees and Wannabes is that, if Wiseman is right about the unrelenting, overwhelming stresses that come with being a normal teenage girl, then the amazing thing is not that epidemiologists think there are (according to that NYTimes article) hundreds of outbreaks a year of mass psychogenic illness in the United States, half of them in schools. The amazing thing is that such outbreaks are not happening every year, in every school.
Snarky young 1980's-me insists on adding, "Maybe they are."
"We were too socially marginal to catch a mass psychogenic illness," replies Sarah circa 1984. "To catch conversion disorder from the Queen Bee you curry favor with, you would first have to curry favor with a Queen Bee. We would sooner have burned down the school, except that would have required looking up from whatever we were reading."
She could be a real a brat, that old self, but she's not always wrong.
Okay, maybe I could have resisted an outbreak with a cheerleader for its Patient Zero. But in one of my favorite episodes of Radiolab (which is the best of all possible podcasts), there's that piece about the Tanganyika laughter epidemic of 1962, and the description there is of an utterly pervasive mass hysteria. I speculate that there was no equivalent social status to Geek in rural Tanzania in the early 1960's, but if there were geeks in Tanganyika, they were probably laughing along with everybody else.
All this comes up because one of my back-burner writing projects is an essay on the question people love asking of homeschoolers: What about socialization? I may have something original and useful to add to this topic, despite the fact that nearly all homeschoolers in America have to field that question (and many of them have posted or published their thoughts about the experience), and despite the fact that my kids are not yet of school age. But I'm not going to write that essay yet--no, definitely not--because I have other writing obligations that must come first.
My bratty fourteen-year-old former self wants to say, "What about socialization? Yeah, what about it? I served my sentence in public schools, and I'm not exactly a paragon of socialization, am I? I'm the walking wounded, here. You can't write me off by saying my future 42-year-old self turned out okay. Every useful thing she knows about social skills, she had to learn by unlearning her entire school experience."
She's got a point, but even in a Seurat painting, a point is not the big picture.
So I read, among other things, Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World. Though my own kids are boys, I have three nieces and an endless succession of students, and I would like to have a clue about what they're up against. Whatever it is, it'll be different from what I saw in the mid-1980s.
Wiseman describes a social order of brutal stratification, brutally maintained by those at the top, and brutally resisted by those unable to settle for less. In her account of things, teenage girls regard their status relative to one another as the measure of their human worth and of their odds of literal survival. Protecting their status from attack is so all-consuming a project that they rarely have energy left to care about anything else. Perhaps the most crazy-making part is that the fastest way to lose status and friends is to admit to having a hard time: "In girl world, everything must appear effortless." That sentence was the first thing I thought of when one of the girls in the Times article insists that she was not under stress when she took sick--insists to the point of saying her mother's long series of brain surgeries was "a walk in the park."
Is Wiseman right? I have no idea. I spent those years of my life misdiagnosed with a terminal illness, so my take on all that stratification was, I'm going to be dead in five years, and you want me to spend what time I have left fretting about how my shoes affect my image? Seriously? My disdain for normal status markers--and I confess, it was disdain--was infuriating to the normal female classmates who wanted to solidify their social positions by attacking mine. According to Wiseman's interpretation of girl world, those girls may have been suffering just as much from feeling their status threatened as I was from being misdiagnosed with a nonexistent spinal cancer. Okay, maybe. Let's go with that, because then I can feel all gracious toward those people now. Anyway, I had a handful of amazing school friends, of both genders--well, more than both genders, though I didn't know at the time--and instead of gossipping about the mainstream social structure at our school, we talked obsessively about all the stuff geeks talk about. Books, science, films, games, how to survive various technological and fantastical apocalypses, politics, religion. Does that mean Rosalind Wiseman oversimplifies the kids she studies and teaches, or does that mean we were demographic anomalies?
What I can say about Queen Bees and Wannabes is that, if Wiseman is right about the unrelenting, overwhelming stresses that come with being a normal teenage girl, then the amazing thing is not that epidemiologists think there are (according to that NYTimes article) hundreds of outbreaks a year of mass psychogenic illness in the United States, half of them in schools. The amazing thing is that such outbreaks are not happening every year, in every school.
Snarky young 1980's-me insists on adding, "Maybe they are."
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no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 06:18 am (UTC)I would argue that Wiseman is looking at particular schools. I think back in the days of our summer Reunions, we each discussed our high school experiences and they varied a lot. Mine was nowhere near the angst that so many of my friends went through. I've often wondered if it was because my school was so big that cliques didn't matter.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 05:30 am (UTC)Your high school experience sounded pretty good. I think I still have some snippets of your radio show, maybe on one of Danny's mixtapes.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 08:26 am (UTC)"I want my child to be social not socialized"
no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 05:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 11:59 am (UTC)What would be the point of fighting my peers' assessment? After all, I knew they were right. They weren't the ones who had me sing along with Rod Stewart that If you want my body / And you think I'm sexy / You've got very bad taste. Instead, I begged my family for a chance to leave school early, to leapfrog over high school and go straight to college. I could handle social isolation, but social isolation plus academic boredom was too much to take. That's when my mother told me that she was concerned about my relationships with my peer group. I needed to build friendships with kids my own age, I was told. "Why are my peers defined by my age?" I railed.
Eventually, I did change schools. My new high school was large enough that it had a small population of geeks. One of them was kind enough to a newcomer to draw a Venn diagram of the cliques and tribes, to help me learn my way around.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 05:46 am (UTC)Why are my peers defined by my age?
One of the things homeschoolers of all kinds most consistently say they like about their approach is that the kids get to meet people of all ages, have meaningful interactions with them, and learn to be comfortable with them. The first homeschooling family I ever knew had five kids, ranging from thirteen to one in age when I met them. The oldest two were respected volunteers at the co-op, and they actually trained me in a couple of the volunteer tasks I did there. I was a grad student at the time. They were a joy to work with.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 12:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 03:24 pm (UTC)I love this phrase.
A book I read (knowing that I had no intention of having kids) that I've recommended to every parent of a girl-child:
"Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," by Mary Pipher. Predates "Queen Bees," and very good stuff.
I'm glad it was a misdiagnosis, and that you're still here, though the level of psychological and emotional complication that that must have thrown on an already-complicated period of life-- I can't imagine. Wow.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 05:52 am (UTC)I'm glad I'm still here, too. The mostly-fabulous life I have now is like nothing I could have predicted for myself then.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-09 05:15 pm (UTC)Maybe if I ever figure it out I can help my daughter and other young women survive adolescence with a few less psychological scars. So far I've got: explaining that popularity is not that important well before puberty hits, building confidence (learning and mastering new skills in middle childhood helps but the trick is not giving them up when puberty hits), protecting girls from pop culture messages that want to sexualize them far too young. I'm sure there are more things that should be on on the list. I guess I am assuming a reasonably stable home as the norm.
It also occurs to me that I always thought wasting a lot of time and energy trying to be popular. But there is a difference in being "popular" and just being able to fit in well enough to not stand out and get harassed. I imagine it is much harder on on anyone who has an obvious characteristic that makes them stick out in a negative way. That wasn't really my experience so I can't speak to what it feels like.
I'm not sure how the mass hysteria fits in but I"m glad you posted this.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-13 05:58 am (UTC)