“A memoir might conveniently free Flanagan from one of her fiercest hostilities — her resistance to empirical data or any evidence at all.”

The pay at online journals being what it is, I’m pretty sure Irin Carmon isn’t getting paid nearly enough to justify consuming 200+ pages of Caitlin Flanagan in a narrow time frame.   But fortunately for us, we get an excellent takedown out of the deal.   On the phenomenon described in the post title, I loved this:

Flanagan mocks, for example, the suggestion on a Planned Parenthood site that abstinence-only education is linked to the rise of previously exotic forms of sexual activity (read: oral and anal) for teens who want to stay “virgins.” She concedes the existence of a Columbia University study that found that abstinence pledgers were far more likely to have those forms of sex, but sniffs, “I would hardly count Columbia as the go-to source for information on the hearts and minds of evangelical teenagers.” Yes, what do those wine-sniffing Upper West Side liberals know — except that the study, published in a peer-reviewed journal, actually drew on longitudinal data of 12,000 teenagers. This is rich coming from an author whose most decisively cited sources include “a friend who attended a leadership conference for girls” and “every woman I’ve known.”

But what’s particularly striking about Flanagan is not only that she seems to think entirely in terms of one-dimensional essentialist stereotypes, but these stereotypes often fail even to plausibly describe any known partial or contingent reality. My favorite example:

Roll your eyes all you want, and I did, at declarations like “one of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that a boy does not fetishize the tokens of his childhood.”

I….Jesus. Right, The Phantom Menace took in nearly a billion dollars because young men everywhere were inherently hankering for a horribly written and acted 2 and a half hour movie about an intergalactic trade dispute or something. And maybe after Flanagan has looked into that she can google “Judd Apatow.”