Girl Land is not a place that exists in physical
space; it’s a place in time. Girl Land is the time between childhood and
womanhood, when girls turn inward, write in diaries, and dream of romance. Teen
girls need protection during this time; protection from the cruel world, from
boys, from the internet. They need a strong father in their lives to provide
this protection, yet divorce makes it common that a girl grows up without her
father present in the house to protect her from boys. Modern life is destroying
Girl Land. Rather than turning inward and writing
in a diary, the modern teenage girl is posting her every mood and deed onto
Twitter and Facebook. Worse, she is giving oral sex to boys and thinking she is
still a virgin. Refusing to allow the girl internet access in her bedroom is
the best gift the parents can give her, because this will protect her from the
cold, cruel world.
I found
Flanagan’s stand rather at odds with modern thought. Rather than teaching girls
to be strong and independent, she wants them to rely on their fathers to
protect them. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m all for keeping both parents present
in the girl’s life! But I don’t feel that having the father absent from the
dwelling is necessarily worse for girls than it is for boys, and I don’t feel
that the couple has to be heterosexual to raise a healthy girl. Nor do I think
that denying ‘net access in the privacy of a girl’s bedroom will keep her from
seeing the wrong things; most modern phones will allow her to see all the wrong
places anyway.
I just don’t
think that putting a teenage girl in a cocoon is the best way to prepare her
for adult life. If going through adolescence is as traumatic as Flanagan says
it is, girls need to be given the tools to deal with it, not hidden in fluffy
pink womb. Oddly, given that she has sons, the author ignores teenaged boys in
this world. Shouldn’t boys be brought up to respect girls and not rape, rather
than laying the burden of avoiding rape on the girls? There is something very
old fashioned in this book’s message, and I don’t mean that in the good way.
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