What We Already Knew About Girls

In The Secret Lives of Girls, Sharon Lamb urges her readers to reevaluate what they consider to be “normal.” In Lamb’s view, most Americans need to shift from thinking that a young girl’s sexual and aggressive expressions are “bad” to categorizing such behavior as, simply, what all girls do. Lamb claims that a large percentage of young girls in America feel that they are leading double lives, pretending to be sweet and innocent while secretly engaging in sexual play and aggressive acts that are traditionally considered masculine.

For her study, Lamb interviewed over 100 women and girls of varying ethnicities from all over the country in an effort to demonstrate that all girls share in this fantasy life. In her analysis of the girls’ feelings, Lamb holds up traditional social norms in order to disprove them. However, she succeeds only in replacing the old clichés with newer ones.

Lamb’s campaign to encourage girls to embrace sexuality and strength is admirable, but it is such a familiar message that it is hard to take the revolutionary tone of the book seriously. The fantasy lives of young girls may be “secret” in that the girls did not discuss them before they were interviewed for Lamb’s book, but it is hardly shocking to the modern reader that young girls masturbate or are curious about boys’ bodies. Lamb seems occasionally to assume that the feelings of repression voiced by the older women she interviewed are also applicable to the younger generation. As a result, she fails to convince her readers that the social norms that she aims to dismantle are actually present in contemporary American culture.

The Secret Lives of Girls does provide compelling insights into specific aspects of the evolving attitude toward female aggression. Lamb’s discussion of the increase in females who participate in aggressive sports and her analysis of the unique role of aggressive behavior and speech among African-American women address issues that are worthy of further investigation. Ultimately, however, The Secret Lives of Girls reinvigorates long-outdated ideas of “good girls” and “bad girls” only to replace them with the ’90s motto, “girl power.”

books

The Secret Lives of Girls

By Sharon Lamb

Free Press

256 pp., $24