Is the internet harmful to teenage girls?

Few people are as experienced at generating controversy as American essayist Caitlin Flanagan, who has previously incited female ire with her takes on everything from housewives ("Women have a deeply felt emotional connection to housekeeping") and working mothers ("At a certain point a mother must choose between her work and her child") to the flaws of Joan Didion. Last week, Flanagan's new book Girl Land, which argues that the internet has a destabilising affect on teenage girls, was published in the US (it will be released in the UK on Thursday), and promptly kick-started an internet war. "The current culture, with its driving imperatives of exhibitionism, of presenting oneself to the world in the most forward and blasting way possible, has made the experience of Girl Land especially charged and difficult," writes Flanagan. "There is no such thing as a private experience any more … I would contend that [this] is most punishing to girls." US critics have been swift to disagree. In the New York Times Emma Gilbey Keller accused Flanagan of "old-fashioned archetypes and abstractions"; at New York magazine, Meghan O'Rourke accused her of perpetuating "a tired picture of girls as victims-in-the-making"; while in a detailed takedown on Salon, Irin Carmon concluded: "Flanagan is too lacking in empathy and too interested in imposing the contours of her own life and her own conservative counter-rebellion to shed much light on them." That last piece led to an intense debate between the two women on National Public Radio's On Point, culminating in Flanagan asking a stunned Carmon: "What could we adults have done to help you with your dating relationships [at high school]?" The subsequent Twitter storm saw prominent American writers from the New York Times's Rebecca Traister to the New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum weigh in. "I'm not sure why having a boyfriend is a measure of your health as a young woman," tweeted Traister while Jessica Valenti, author of The Purity Myth, added: "Wow, I'm really glad you have someone like her looking out for […] your high-school dating life." The 28-year-old Carmon, who joined Salon as a staff writer from women's website Jezebel in October, admits she was surprised by Flanagan's attack. "I didn't expect her to try and psychoanalyse me or fix my childhood," she says. "I feel that she spoke to me … with contempt and profound condescension." For Carmon the bigger issue remains Flanagan's failure to place female adolescent experience in a wider context. "Most of the emails I got after that interview were from fathers," she says. "A lot of men disliked the way that she places all the responsibility on girls and women to make sure that boys and men treat them right." Flanagan, a self-described "pro-abortion, pro-gay rights Democrat" who argues that people mistakenly see her as conservative, is unrepentant. "She bought her personal life into the discussion. She said: 'I was on the internet as a teenager and I'm fine,'" she says of Carmon. "She's young and she's of that sexting, hooking-up culture. And I felt it was fair enough to ask: 'How did it go for you with boys at high school?' I wasn't surprised that it didn't go well." Flanagan argues that her book is only divisive because people are afraid to confront the reality of the internet. "I think people my age – I'm 50 – are anxious not to seem fuddy duddy and so they become huge advocates of internet use," she says. "I'm not saying no teenage girl should use the internet, simply that girls need a time when they're not constantly assailed by what everyone thinks about them or about what they wore to school." Flanagan has the syrupy tones of a movie homecoming Queen and an interesting line in sticky-sweet put-downs. When, for instance, I mention Carmon, her initial response is to say, with a tinkly laugh, "Who? Oh yes, I didn't remember her name," before twice referring to Carmon as Irin. But she is also adept at couching even her most outré and disorientating statements as little more than well-meaning concern. "I'm not against the internet," she says. "We've all wasted hours on it, but my issue is that there's a coarsening and deadening which I don't think would exist without the internet. I think this has led to an adolescent hook-up, sexting culture, which in turn means that young girls can graduate from college without having had a relationship based on more than sex. I think that lack of love or affection is hard on the female spirit." But isn't this argument placing the onus entirely on girls' shoulders? Iin essence falling back on a tired "nice girls don't put out" argument? "Girls are much more in charge of their social life with boys than they realise," she says. "Young men will do anything to get female attention and I think if you say: 'Treat me well, I'm not sure about you, study me like a book or a movie or a concert,' then that is what courtship culture is about." She refutes claims that Girl Land is saturated with nostalgia. "It's nonsense to say that teenage girls today don't like romance – look at Twilight – that could have been written in the 1950s, or the success of Taylor Swift. Those songs sound like they could be performed by Debbie Reynolds," she says. "Prom is still one of the biggest phenomenon in the US and girls are the ones driving that. An entire romance industry worth billions of dollars is driven not by boys but by adolescent girls. This isn't a controversial or polemical book, people see it that way because my name is on it." As an argument it's not convincing. For in Flanagan's Girl Land there are only two choices: a romantic retreat into a sepia-tinted past, or a headlong plunge into the maelstrom of girls performing oral sex on strangers. The reality is more complicated and less lurid. For both boys and girls, adolescence is a time when mistakes will be made and directions changed. It's not a case of there being one way to live but of finding the way that makes life work for you. In the end, Girl Land shines more of a light on the psyche of Caitlin Flanagan than the hearts of teenage girls.