Emma Cline's The Girls, and women betraying other women

Reading Emma Cline's massively acclaimed new novel, The Girls [SPOILERS UPCOMING] - which I believe deserves nearly all the hype it's had recently - it occurred to me how much of the story is really about the terrible lengths women will go to in order to earn the adoration of a man.

Loosely based on the horrific true story of the Manson Family, the book follows a fictional teen girl, Evie, who is seduced into the world of a cult, consisting mostly of young women like herself, and led by a charismatic older man. Competing for the male leader's attention, and all making themselves sexually available to him, the young women resort to more and more extreme acts, until the story ends much like the real Manson Family's story did - in a bloodbath. This really got me thinking about how one of the trickiest parts of being a feminist (and a polyamorous one at that) is resisting the conditioning that tells us to hate, fear and treat other women as our competition. And how, like loving your neighbour as yourself and turning the other cheek, the hardest thing of all is remaining generously disposed towards women who are willing to mistreat you in order to gain the approval of a man.

So much of the book ponders on the asymmetry on the way girls and boys are raised to view their selves and their romantic lives; Cline does a fantastic job of setting up exactly what makes it so easy for Evie to get sucked into the cult. Passages such as this absolutely nail just why, however strong and sassy teen girls may seem, they are trained to want male validation from day one, and this is exactly what predisposes them to become victims:

"I waited to be told what was good about me. I wondered later if this was why there were so many more women than men at the ranch. All that time I had spent readying myself, the articles that taught me life was really just a waiting room until someone noticed you--the boys had spent that time becoming themselves."

If you've ever been a teen girl, chances are that passage will ring painfully, painfully true.

I loved Russell T Davies' Channel 4 drama, Cucumber not just for its frank, hilarious and real portrayals of the lives of gay men in the 21st century, but also for its commentary on the sad fate that seems to befall every heterosexual girl sooner or later. In my favourite bit of dialogue, protagonist Henry is confronted by his sister Cleo, regarding the soft porn YouTube channel he's been helping her teen son to run (yup, it's all a bit dysfunctional from the off). It's not the involvement of her son she minds so much, but the effects that this pornified world is having on her daughter, who has been plucking out her pubic hair until her skin is raw. Cleo rails against the world that has driven her clever, amazing child to this self mutilation:

"I looked on her phone. And there they are. All the photos. 12 years old and she's giving regular updates on her vagina. To the boys. Because that's what they do now, the boys. They tell a girl she's dirty if she's got hair, she's filthy, she smells. So she's literally pulling out every hair as it appears. And then she photographs herself. Because that's her currency. That's where she ranks. On the league table of vaginas. 

Since they were eight, nine, that gang of girls has sat in this house and said 'No boy is ever going to tell me what to do.' And then they hit puberty and it's like someone flicks a switch. All of a sudden it's like, a boy can walk into the room, and they become slaves. On the spot. They are enslaved to him, like's it genetic. And there's nothing I can do to stop it."

Enslaved.

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