Rachel Simmons speaks on cyber bullying

How is it that something girls love so much – social media -- can also create so much anxiety and aggression?  Rachel Simmons, who wrote the New York Times bestseller, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, will speak on September 19 at Convent of the Sacred Heart, 1177 King St., Greenwich. 

The public is invited to the free lecture for parents and educators on Monday, September 19 at 7 p.m.  in the Lennie and John de Csepel Theater.   Light refreshments will be available at 6:30 p.m.  The event is co-sponsored by Convent of the Sacred Heart, an independent, Catholic school for girls from preschool through twelfth grade, and its Parents’ Association.  

              Ten years after it was first published, Ms. Simmons has revised and updated Odd Girl Out with four new chapters of strategies and insights for girls, parents and educators.  A pioneer in the study of schoolgirl cruelty,  Ms.  Simmons says that girls do not have a lot of communications skills when they are teenagers, so they lean on social media to navigate their conflicts. 

              Ms. Simmons contends that “incidents of bullying could be avoided if girls were encouraged to assert their negative feelings more directly.”  She believes this would empower them to negotiate conflicts and to define relationships in “new and healthier ways.”  Parents, she says, should show their daughters that conflict-free relationships don't exist.  Instead of thinking conflict ends relationships, girls would then learn that they can't survive without it and would not let fear control them. “I believe our task now,” writes Ms. Simmons in her book, “is to give every girl, every parent, and every teacher a shared, public language to address girls’ conflicts and relationships.”

Also the author of Odd Girl Speaks Out: Girls Write about Bullies, Cliques, Popularity and Jealousy, Simmons’ latest book is The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence. An exploration of the fact that girls today still pressure themselves to conform to the old, narrow paradigm of being a people-pleasing “good girl,” Ms. Simmons shares the factors that have contributed to girls today placing more importance on being liked than on being an individual.

Through countless interviews, Ms. Simmons constructs a sometimes disheartening narrative of contemporary female relationships in America. On the one hand, she says, the influence of feminism has raised the bar for women, allowing and expecting them to assert themselves, to be strong and aggressive.  On the other hand, as Ms. Simmons’ interviews and research show, girls are brought up to find these very qualities undesirable and even antithetical to their own ideas of femininity. Girls feel pressure to please everyone, to always appear carefree and to look perfect.

Ms. Simmons is a Vassar College graduate who has worked for Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and New York’s senior Senator Charles E. Schumer.  She won a Rhodes Scholarship and attended Oxford University, where she began studying female aggression.