Lots of emails and discussions about not only the current Hot Mess plot line, but also my about my post which tied current sexting trends together with peer pressure and the entertainment industry (we do personally answer as many emails as we can!). A lot of readers made a lot of great points about bullying, sexting, girl-on-girl violence (and yes, emotional violence still counts as violence), and the role that popular culture and electronics have to play in all of the above.
The truth is, we’re not talking about easy black or white subjects. These things are all tied together in complex, subtle ways, and for most of us a lot of these attitudes and fears that we have start to form at a very, very young age. Luckily Jodi Wing, author of the groundbreaking book, The Art of Social War, reminded me about an essay she wrote that really sheds some light on the subject and put it in a very different context:
No Girl Left Behind:
Hollywood, and more specifically the entertainment industry, is a battlefield of a very specific sort. There is a logic to the work and corresponding social life here, but it is a logic that would be illogical anywhere else (except for maybe that other famed ‘company town,’ Washington DC.) It is a terrain filled with very unusual freedoms, restrictions and advantages, and I wrote 100,000 words about them all in my debut novel, The Art of Social War (HarperCollins). In fact, I was interviewed by my esteemed friend Diana Falzone multiple times, for the satire is based on Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and is essentially about (I like to say) Very Bad Behavior & Girl-on-Girl Crime.
This is a fantastic 