'Girl Land': growing up female

GIRL LAND, by Caitlin Flanagan. Reagan Arthur / Little, Brown, 224 pp., $25.99.

Caitlin Flanagan's essays in The Atlantic and The New Yorker in the early 2000s made people furious. Her attacks on women working outside the home got her labeled a "strident anti-feminist" and a "snobbish hypocrite" in Slate, a "provocatrice" in The New York Observer, and worse on blogs and listservs.

Well, everyone can calm down now. When it comes to the topic of girls' adolescence, the focus of her new essay collection, "Girl Land," Flanagan is not anti-feminist, or controversial. In fact, her methods and attitudes come straight out of the women's studies classes I took at college in the late '70s, and her outrage on behalf of girls coming of age in the "Brush Your Teeth With a Bottle of Jack" era will feel just right to most women in our age group.

The first chapters of her book decode the messages of various primary sources in familiar feminist style. She works out the semiotics of the board game Mystery Date, analyzes 1920s advertisements for tween clothing, compares Clara Bow to Lady Gaga.

In the final essays, Flanagan gets back on her more familiar soapbox. "Nothing says 'your very special night' like a $1,500 Jessica McClintock gown, a Hummer limo, alcohol poisoning, and a 'Pimps and Ho's' after-party," she writes of proms. "I believe that we are raising children in a kind of postapocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households -- individual mothers and fathers -- are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment," she rails about rap and the Internet.

But these right-wing-sounding views will likely get no argument from most liberal moms. The unparalleled academic and career opportunities for young women today combined with wildly misogynist, exhibitionist and retro-sexual cultural influences are enough to make any mother's eyes cross.

Flanagan herself is raising boys, as she mentions in the chapter where she writes scathingly of the middle-school oral sex scare that swept the country in the mid-2000s. "These stories made the average American middle school dude -- a kid formerly known for his enthusiasm for video games, tendency to lose his expensive retainer, and inability to bring his math textbook home on two consecutive nights -- look like a kind of Hugh Hefner of the eighth grade," she comments -- clearly the insight of a woman who has such retainer-losers at home.

Ultimately, however, she acknowledges statistics that show this panic was not all urban legend, and admits that if she were to learn that her sons had such experiences, it would be less of a big deal than if her child were a girl. Indeed, the fact that Flanagan is not raising girls might be the source of the less-than-fresh anecdotes and arguments in this book, and the uselessness of the advice she doles out in its final chapter. (Believe me, I don't need a "15-minute tour" of the cultural influences on my daughter!) Flanagan's not a hypocrite, as she may have been on the working mom issue. But now she's reporting on the war without being at the front.