The Lone Star Girl just finished reading Lord of The Flies for summer reading. She's astounded that the big boys couldn't be bothered to look after the little ones. She said none of that mess would have happened if the kids were girls instead of boys - that even the cattiest alpha girls would have been all about looking after the little bitty girls, no question. She says that even if there were no little girls to look after, the mean girls may have enslaved other girls but wouldn't have hunted them down and killed them. She has a point....
6 comments:
LSM, would you please have your lovely daughter (or you!) write a version of this novel that is all girls? Because I would LOVE to read it, and teach it, in my all-girls classrooms! This is an idea that is certainly ripe with possibility...
Thanks, but she says it would be boring - plane crashes on an island. Big girls take care of little girls. Everything's fine. Captain comes to save them and finds everyone happy. Big crisis was the difficulty in maintaining a nicely balanced diet.
It woukd make a fabulous short story. What a brilliant girl you have.
Thank you.
It's worth thinking about. My first reaction is to disagree, based upon what I've read about online emotional bullying. Perhaps the girls wouldn't have hunted down and killed the other girls, but they might have driven the girls to kill themselves. I wouldn't be so cynical on the Lone Star Ma Blog, but we are talking about Lord of the Flies!
In reality, I do think girls would enslave each other, in a complex and often cruel hierarchy, but I don't think they'd devolve into murderous chaos. Girls bully for status security, so it would be all about that. I think, though, that they might actually do less of that if boys weren't around, the way less of it happens at all-girls schools than at co-ed schools, because a lot of girls' worries about status have to do with looking attractive to boys, even subconsciously from very early on - snagging the good providers and all that evolutionary debris.
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