Odd Girl Out Read Free Page B

unknown number of others. Some students and parents expressed interest, then did not return my call or meet me at the appointed time. At every school I was disappointed, though not surprised, to find no parent willing to discuss a daughter who bullied.
    In addition to girls and their parents, I interviewed approximately fifty adult women by phone and in person. I include their stories because time and therapy have given them broader, more nuanced perspectives on their ordeals. Their voices present a marked contrast to the stories of young targets and bullies.
    Although I sought guidance from the methods of Brown and Gilligan, this book is not the product of a formal research experiment. In it you will not find statistics or scientific conclusions about girls and aggression or information about boys. Few would argue that boys have access to a wide range of ways to express their anger. Many girls, on the other hand, are forced to cut themselves off from direct aggression altogether.
    Odd Girl Out
is the first book devoted exclusively to girls and nonphysical conflict, and it tells the stories of aggressors and targets of what I call "alternative," or unconventional, aggressions.
    In no way do I want to imply that only girls behave in these ways. Boys most definitely engage in alternative aggressions, though reportedly at later stages of childhood than girls. Nor am I suggesting that
all
girls do it. Although I set out to map the hidden culture of girls' aggression, it was always clear to me that not all white, middle-class girls lock conflict out of their relationships. Overwhelmed by what I was discovering, I neglected to talk with more girls who do feel comfortable with anger and conflict. I regret that.
    I will use the term "girl bullying" throughout the book to refer to acts of alternative aggression. Yet I am arguing not that girls
feel
angry in fundamentally different ways than boys, but that many girls appear to
show
anger differently. Girls' aggression may be covert and relational; it may indeed be fueled at times by a fear of loss or isolation. That does not mean, however, that girls do not want power or feel aggression as passionately as their male peers.
    In their important book
Best Friends, Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Lives of Children,
Michael Thompson and colleagues point out that every child wants three things out of life: connection, recognition, and power. The desire for connection propels children into friendship, while the need for recognition and power ignites competition and conflict. My point is that if all children desire these things, they will come to them, and into learning how to acquire them, on the culture's terms, that is, by the rules of how girls and boys are supposed to behave.
    When I began this journey three years ago, I wanted to write so that other bullied girls would know they were not alone. As I spent more and more time with the girls, I realized I was also writing to know that
I
was not alone. I would soon discover that the bullying I endured in third grade was only the tip of the iceberg. I discovered that I harbored pain and confusion over many relationships in my childhood.
    Around the circles of girls I met with, I could see I wasn't the only one who felt this way. The knowledge that we shared similar memories and feelings, that someone else understood what we had previously held inside, was amazing. The relief was palpable, and it opened unexpected doors that we were able to enter together. If we began the journey at the memory of bullying, we ended up asking, and answering, more questions about the culture we live in, about how girls treat each other, and even about ourselves than we had ever thought to imagine alone.
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    When
Odd Girl Out
was first published, the little research that existed on alternative aggressions was buried in academic journals. It went unnoticed in the media frenzy over school shootings. Public commentary continues to suggest that bullying is