Writing this, I think even of the hours and months my high school best friend and I spent obsessing over fictional characters on soap operas. None of which led us to stab anyone, but which was certainly symptomatic of how powerful and intoxicating escapist fantasy from the sometimes scary world of female adolescence, especially in thrilling tandem with another person, can be....More at the link, including some discussion of the excellent movie "Heavenly Creatures."
For generations, it was accepted that adolescent girls might form highly emotional, deeply felt relationships with each other, kind of proto-marriages. For periods of American history, adolescent and teen schoolgirls regularly shared beds, openly expressed their adoration and devotion to each other and were sometimes said to be “smashed”—entwined in committed partnerships. But in the early-20th century, as heterosexual marriage came to be seen as a relationship based on emotion and mutual desire, female partnerships began to be seen as competitive and suspect. Young women were encouraged to train their attentions on young men; a dating culture emerged, and we have not spent nearly enough time since acknowledging the powerful influence that adolescent girls continue to have on each other.
Not that that influence is usually murderous!...
June 5, 2014
What the Slenderman stabbing might suggest about intense, fantasy-ridden relationships between young teenage girls.
Rebecca Traister contemplates. Excerpt:
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18 comments:
Young girls who stab other girls do it romantically. They aren't young psychopaths like boys.
No #YesAllWomen for this murder
Give me a break - we indulge this shit into adulthood.
It's a sick culture and the evidence is all around us,...
Young girls who stab other girls do it romantically. They aren't young psychopaths like boys.
Maybe girls who commit murder are just romantic psychopaths. I can see how the megalomania aspect of psychopathology could fit nicely with a romantic "us against the world" scenario. Is there really that much difference between these two girls and the Leopold/Loeb murders. Except, of course, just like suicides, the guys get the job of (self) murdering done right, while the girls are half-ass slackers about it.
MayBee, absolutely love the #YesAllWomen hashtag. Big kudos, girl!
Very interesting article. But the author never says why adolescent girls wanting acceptance turn to a Slenderman god that speaks to them about murdering people.
I knew some great duos of female friends in adolescent years from 9 to 16, but none of them wanted to murder people to win acceptance.
Oh, good lord. Apparently someone's copy editor jumped her shit recently about not overthinking things.
What it might suggest is that these two girls were nuts. Eric and Dylan nuts.
Frankly, from a purely fictional standpoint, Slenderman is one of the creepier internet phenoms. It started on a forum and got built up through the work of some very inventive photoshoppers. Some of the original examples are chillingly realistic.
If girls think that their attractions toward each other can be dangerously addictive or otherwise screwed-up, they might conceivably check whether this is so by determining whether they can hate fellow members of their sex. Since females can't sodomize, I think it unnatural and crazy for females to be that wary and afraid of their feelings toward each other. But society or large parts of society declaring female/female attraction as inherently messed-up and thus dangerous could I suppose create such fear in females as to be a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, making female/female attraction more dangerous than it would be if the whole matter of girls being intimate with each other were merely viewed as at worse innocuous.
As for this particular incident, another possibility is that at least one of the alleged perpetrators had some selfish reason to dislike the girl stabbed, and the selfish perpetrator was confused (evil) about what her self-interests were. Yet another possibility is that there could be both evil selfishness and stupid crazy-cruelty going on simultaneously.
The World of Henry Orient
Sorry for the long post, but I'm trying to find common cause with Althouse:
A simple argument I find compelling is the idea that unless other liberal forces provide some brakes on feminist ideologues, the ideologues and the ideology eventually ends up running bigger portions of the liberal tent (like a radical, ambitious sect in a church), and they're no more liberal than extremists of any stripe.
Feminist ideology pours out of our institutions and into our politics, laws, and media outlets (it might yet get Hillary elected for reasons not elated to character and competence), but eventually it tends to attract people of like activism and ideology to itself and also provokes activism and extremism in response on the opposite end of the spectrum.
There's an army of scribes and scribblers out there which Althouse keeps an eye on, often drawing their ire, and the attention of conservative men.
Wise and balanced people usually go about their business, until such folks start visibly affecting their lives.
I'm guessing a major food source for feminist ideology is still the genuine injustice women often faced in the work-force and in society under a more traditional set-up.
Even real shitheels knew they were better than women under this system, and I'm guessing for women like Althouse, that was/is particularly galling.
The limited sphere of freedom for women physically and in terms of education made a lot of women very unhappy.
Yet, despite this, women are not men, and the sexes aren't the same, and people's abilities and talents aren't equal and when feminist ideologues run the show, they tend to make us all less free by demanding ridiculous radical equality under bad laws derived from their ideology.
Jesus, what is it with these teleologues? It's like people are these little empty-minded robots until The Culture fills their minds with impulses, over which they have zero control. So we better fret and dwell on The Culture, make sure it's giving good instructions to all us shiny little cogs.
Nobody has a character, a mind of his own, a decision-making apparatus upstairs...responsibility?
These people think being Borg is the ideal. How I wish they could all be sent off to live in some interstellar arcology somewhere, like the insects they long to be.
1. Has a lot of good points.
2. Considering the evidence for the visions of St. Joan of Arc and St. Bernadette, as well as the accuracy of the Kibeho apparitions (which didn't appear to just girls or just non-adults, btw), it's obviously not right to talk fictionalization. If you're hitting out at religion, why just Catholics? And why would you hit out at religion when it's beside your point? Your point is the occult or murder, surely.
3. If you want to talk girls and religiosity, or girls and fooling people, you should probably talk the Fox Sisters (who did found a religious movement) or the fairy photographers. Or poltergeist activity. Or....
#BanBossy
Let's Lean In a bit, mkay?
Why is she bringing in mass hysteria of girls, and ignoring mass hysteria of boys, men, etc., even though they were part of most mass hysteria events? Mass hysteria is totally different than murderous team-ups.
Interesting note regarding Heavevly Creatures: Pauline Parker, the daughter of the mom that the pair killed, went on to become a successful fiction writer under the pseudonym of Ann Perry.
The movie is well done and worth watching.
The smartest female friend I remember growing up also had a close female friend, and they seemed to do everything together through out Elementary and High School. If you saw one, you saw the other.
After leaving town for an out of State college the two drifted apart. After graduation time, my close friend did marry a man she met at college. They seemed to be in love.
But she later divorced him and became a writer and a practicing Psychologist in Berkeley, Ca. with her specialty in the Psychology of Bi-sexual Women's relationships.
crack: "It's a sick culture and the evidence is all around us,..."
Why can't we be more like our non-white, non-western betters and simply give these young gals a cliterectomy, a veil and a husband the way crack pals would have us do?
I mean, what is it with our "sick culture" that keeps us from taking these "common sense steps" for dealing with young girls?
These girls are evil. Their kind has always been with us and always will be.
Side note I find interesting: when Peter Jackson wanted to recruit renowned Tolkien artist Alan Lee to serve as conceptual designer for "Lord of the Rings," along with the equally renowned John Howe, he sent Lee two of his films: "Meet the Feebles" and "Heavenly Creatures."
Lee watched them straight through, back to back, and when Jackson called, said it was just a matter of waiting for Jackson to finish so he could say "yes." Howe said almost exactly the same thing, and it was in working on the film that the two artists actually met for the first time.
Juliet Hulme = Anne Perry.
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