The Curse of the Classist Girl

Elizabeth Wurtzel, of Prozac Nation and Bitch fame, has a truly nasty review up at Double XX today about Rachel Simmons’ new book, The Curse of the Good Girl. Rachel, as many of you know, blew apart the world of girl bullying with Odd Girl Out and started the Girls Leadership Institute. I was going to write a big ol’ review of Rachel’s new book after Labor Day, but I couldn’t wait to respond a bit to Wurtzel’s vitriol.
Wurtzel begins her review with a big classist, racist bang:

Elite institutions are not merely supposed to produce intelligent alumni–they are also supposed to teach rigorous thinking and create beautiful minds. Plainly, this is a mistaken notion on my part. Ever since the fancy schools started recruiting in the shtetl and the hood, elitism as a coherent narrative has declined to meaninglessness. It’s now perfectly Princeton to be, say, a fitness-equipment infomercial mogul, clever and determined but also, in some deeper way, crass and wrong.

Crass and wrong? Try assuming that letting in a more diverse student body and/or encouraging diverse passions, points of view, ways of writing and interacting with the world is somehow debasing. Apparently Elizabeth longs for the good ol’ days of overtly racist and sexist admissions and dead white men as the only philosophers that anyone thought worth reading. Seriously?
Then Wurtzel goes on to claim that Simmons has missed the boat in identifying what’s really wrong with the kids these days:

In some cases the horror is that there is no horror. The good high-schoolers, the ones with Ivy League futures, are positively babied by their overprotective parents, who don’t want their sons and daughters to do the things they did. Having gone through herpes-and-cocaine phases of their own, the Boomers and Xers who are rearing Dakota and Madison these days have scheduled them to death with cello lessons and tennis team–or a trip to the Girls Leadership Institute–until they have no time or energy for bad behavior.

Um, that’s exactly Simmons’ point, actually. She talks at length about the ways in which a girl’s quality of life is diminished when she isn’t able to take risks, fail and recover, go against the grain (whether it be her parents’ or peers’), and speak her truth. She is essentially encouraging “bad behavior”–at least defined as behavior that is growth-producing, independent, scary, and, ultimately, rewarding. Perhaps Simmons prose was so straight forward that Wurtzel’s elite-educated brain couldn’t even understand the argument.
For me, this stinks of one woman trying to tear another one down out of pure jealousy and snobbery. To Wurtzel, it’s only beautiful minds that matter. To me, beautiful hearts are pretty essential as well. (Rachel’s got both, for the record.) Wurtzel seems to think that trying to write an accessible book based on tons of experience with real girls and a decade-long dedication to not just postulating or waxing poetic about girls, but really making their lives better, is beneath her and any bonafide authors.
Well, if that’s the case, count me among the unbonafides. I’m much more invested in reaching people than sounding smart. That may make me dumb in Wurtzel’s book, but come to think of it, I don’t think I care. I learned that from Rachel, whose book advocates building a core made of something more solid than Ivy League diplomas, fancy vocabulary, or the approval of haughty intellectuals.
Thanks Rachel.