Rachel Simmons, author of best-seller Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, has followed up with her latest, The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. The first book addressed societal pressure on girls to always be sweet and nice, which represses powerful emotions, especially anger. That’s why the aggression winds up “hidden,” expressed indirectly and passively.

The books chronicle years of Simmons’ research, including case studies and informal exercises with young girls. “A really great exercise,” she says, “is to ask girls to sit the way a typical guy sits and then ask girls to sit the way a typical girl sits. And you will see two completely different postures. Guys have way more permission to take up space in every sense of that phrase. There just aren’t the same rules as there are for women, and that’s going to lead to a different consciousness and a different set of concerns.”

The problem isn’t confined to American society, either. “The very first countries to translate Odd Girl Out were all Asian,” Simmons says. “I think that there is a huge, huge indirect aggression problem in Asia. It has to do with the Asian culture’s very inflexible expectations of women and girls.”

The Curse continues meditation on this trend of suppression, and takes it a step further to advise parents on how to raise their daughters differently. By letting them be honest about their full range of emotions, however unpleasant, we can guide them out of mean-girl culture and into well-adjusted womanhood.

Source:

“When Being a Good Girl is a Bad Thing” (Frances Romero) Time Magazine Online. August 31, 2009

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