The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and sweet and kind, a little kid who cried when I accidentally squashed a ladybug. I can’t imagine her hurting someone on purpose, or someone wanting to hurt her.

First and foremost, this is, hands down the best-written blog on the web (and I know these things, having, as I do, exquisite taste for language and narrative structure). This single post can be used as a pretext for asking a whole lot of interesting (to me with my exquisite tastes) questions.

Let’s start with the really puzzling question of literary quality. There are an enormous number of talented writers on the web (Offsprung features quite a few of them). Why does Terrible Mother stand head and shoulders above so many of them? I’d be the first to admit the subjectivity of narrative aesthetic experience but there are some writers whose quality cannot be disputed regardless of enjoyment. TM is one of them. I (and many good critics) can generally recognize them but if we were to apply an arsenal of recognized techniques of literary analysis would the ‘good ones’ be enmeshed in the web or slip through the cracks (to mix me a metaphor or two)? I suspect conceptual and formal blending has something to do with it. Just the right amount of description to trigger the right images, set up and confound expectations, follow through with the emotions. In other words, the really powerful writer, reconfigures the constraints on conceptual integration that usually apply in our world of speech and thought and substitutes those applying in a world over which she has full control. Given that blending is not a discrete serial algorithmic process but rather a massively parallel fuzzy process, in which underspecification of reference is as important as the profiling and backgrounding of conceptual elements, it is unlikely that the identification of quality can be completely universal or subject to traditional ‘academic’ analysis. No wonder, then, that so much literary criticism (all of it, in fact) is mostly poetry about poetry. And, on reflection, despite the formalists, structuralists’ and others’ efforts to the contrary, may be a good thing. Now for something completely different: Feminism and social psychology. First, both ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ can be cruel in the folk theoretical framings currently being negotiated in the Anglo culture. Some have expressed a surprise at Private Lyndie English and others have seen it as a confirmation of the untenability of the ‘women as the gentler sex’ hypothesis. Quite obviously, human beings, when put in certain configurations will display the kind of ‘banal evil’ that when given an institutional backing can devolve into repression or genocide (Arendt, Baumann). It’s been more than thirty years since the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram’s work and over half a century since Asch’s work on conformity. Jane Elliott replays many of these in her Class Divided and Blue Eyed work. (It is interesting on its own that these seminal results have not made more of an impact in education and social science.) All of these experiments play themselves out daily in ‘boy groups’ and ‘girl groups’ in the ‘innocent’ guise of BFFs and ‘frenemies’.

Now for the advice to educators and parents (just as an interested observer rather than an active participant). The one concern expressed in public debates and private moments of anguish by parents is whether their child will be bullied in school. But in fact, the question they should be really asking, will their child be a bully? This is in some respects much more likely. Not because their child is bad (it is likely that only a comparatively few children are truly evil) but because of the capacity of enforced group identities to produce ‘banal evil’. But it is also interesting how little effect the efforts of educators seem to have. ‘How do you think that feels’ is as useful in engendering desired behavior as ‘have you taken out the trash?’. They should really look at some of the answers Milgram and Zimbardo offer. Some people seem to have an intrinsic ability to overcome the pressures put upon them by the authority of the individual or the group but most need help. In the groups of tweenagers, this is difficult because the sources of authority and prestige are so fluid. Adults play a certain role but the peer group is beginning to assert itself more and more. Furthermore, it is difficult to identify how a single individual will be influenced by their context. So an individual parent is pretty much stuck. Social psychology can explain and predict group behavior pretty well but is much less successful at the individual. Psychoanalysis does not as good but decent job of the individual at the start and the end of the process of group interaction but is useless at navigating throughout simply because it cannot account for all the variable the group configuration will present. Bottom line, parenting is difficult for all and agonizing for the secular humanist parents. But in the hands of a gifted writer like Terrible Mother, it makes a hell of good read.