Why Are Female Friendships Written So Hot and Bothered While Male Friendships = Bromance?
This article originally appears in the June 2016 issue of ELLE.
"Girl meets girl. Girl loves girl, maybe," Robin Wasserman writes in her new novel, Girls on Fire (Harper). "Girls link fingers on a dark night and whisper their secret selves, girls swear a blood oath of loyalty and silence." This summer, two hotly anticipated novels-Emma Cline's The Girls (Random House; it sold for a rumored seven figures at auction and Scott Rudin has acquired the film rights) and Girls on Fire (in development at Warner Bros. TV)-push youthful female friendships to bloody extremes. Girls on Fire follows the alternating viewpoints of quiet Hannah and manipulative Lacey, who grow close in the months following their high school classmate's mysterious suicide. The Girls is heavily influenced by the Manson Family killings and centers on the fictional relationship between the narrator, Evie, and the older, teenage cult member Suzanne, whom she befriends. In both pairings, the girls are drawn together by the secrets, mundane and otherwise, that they share with each other; for Hannah and Evie, the friendships become all-consuming. In both books, unspeakable violence is committed, both physical and emotional.
Intense friendship between girls and women is well-charted territory in literature and film-from Toni Morrison's Sula (1973) to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (2011–2015). The 1990s alone were a mother lode for the genre on the big screen-Thelma & Louise (1991), Single White Female (1992), Heavenly Creatures (1994), and Girl, Interrupted (1999). So here's an observation: While many renditions of feminine friendship are fraught with sexual tension, or violence, or both, most contemporary male friendships are portrayed as buddy comedies. Bromances: love with nary a seriousdeviant tinge.
While many renditions of feminine friendship are fraught with sexual tension, or violence, or both, most contemporary male friendships are portrayed as buddy comedies.
That noted, both of this summer's Girls novels have an undeniably dark, voyeuristic appeal: We get to watch universal emotions manifest with extreme outward ferocity. Whether we were a Suzanne or an Evie, a capricious leader or a stable follower, who among us didn't have a friend who completed what we lacked, who we wanted on some level not just to be with, but to become? (Elena in Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend is consumed to the point of near debilitation with jealousy and love for her friend Lila, who tests Elena's devotion by playing hot and cold.) These books are deliciously digestible because they give respect to those raw, early friendships that first taught us how another human can be an extension of who we are-and what love story is more compelling and complicated than the one that we're in with ourselves? This is not to say that male friendships can't be as deep and twisty as female ones, but there's some science to explain the girl-on-girl intensity: A 2003 study of children ages 10 to 15, published in the journal Child Development, revealed that best friendships between girls were both more fragile than those between boys and more devastating when they ended. Researchers posited that as female friendships occur more often in isolation than male friendships (stereotypically, a group of boys meets up to play basketball; girls stay up late whispering secrets in the dark), intimacybetween girls is more vulnerable. "How happy I was for any news of her interior," Evie muses about Suzanne, "a secret meant for me alone."
Researchers posited that as female friendships occur more often in isolation than male friendships, intimacy between girls is more vulnerable.
The friends of Girls on Fire and The Girls are early iterations of the often-explored vengeful wife-Gone Girl's Amy Dunne or Fates and Furies' Mathilde Satterwhite-and I can't find an instance of their husbands competing with the intensity of female intellect. In The Girls, men are described as "all hair and wet animal eyes"; in Girls on Fire, a boy is "this animal thing, wet and clumsy, bones and meat." There are predatory older strangers, boys who are dull and groping, and father figures by turns sadistic, skeevy, or absent. "No one had ever looked at me before Suzanne, not really," says Evie, "so she had become my definition." Before we learn to love men, we often learn to love a girl.
