Learning All Too Well

Newcastle Herald

Wednesday April 23, 2008

Joanne McCarthy

THE end of civilisation as we know it occurred yesterday, shortly after breakfast.

It took just one local newspaper story in Queensland to have every second counsellor and welfare officer in the country gnashing their teeth, and half the country's media outlets salivating.

Girls have gone feral in some banana-bending town up north, and with that little factoid we had a full-on national outcry about The State of Young People in Australia Today.

Shocking stuff.

Now I might have some of the details of the story a little bit . . . sensationalised, particularly after hearing a couple of breathless radio reports, but the facts or the pieces of information that could bear some passing resemblence to facts once the rumours and hearsay are extracted, but who wants to do that because it would wreck a good story? are these.

Apparently some girls in a Queensland school have formed a club and rate themselves against each other, making sure to inform those not in the club that there is a club and they aren't part of it, otherwise what's the point of having a club?

Entry to Club 21 or Big 21, depending on which breathless radio report you listened to relates to prettiness, thinness and popularity with male students.

So far, so good.

The school is Catholic, and described as "exclusive", which comes as no surprise to anyone who's ever attended a Catholic girls' high school, where the thin veneer of respectability so hoped-for by parents can be panted away with just a single view of the lads from the adjoining Catholic boys' high school taking off their shirts after a bracing game of rugger bugger.

But enough of memories. Back to the feral girls.

By lunchtime yesterday the stories about Club 21 had escalated so that members weren't just rating each other from 1 to 21 in terms of prettiness/thinness/popularity and overall desirability, but they were also "sleeping around, binge drinking and drug taking".

By mid-afternoon the conspiracy theorists had weighed in, with a newspaper blog revealing Club 21 wasn't so-named because it had 21 members rated 1 to 21, but because it was a code. (And doesn't the Da Vinci Code have a lot to answer for?)

According to the blogger, insiders apparently know the 2 and the 1 in 21 are supposed to be added together to make 3, hence the club actually promotes threesomes. The blogger also reported an alien landing that left a crop circle. Just thought you'd like to know.

A child and adolescent psychologist gave his opinion, saying club members were displaying "classic teenage girl behaviour" which, if I remember my youth correctly, involves a lot of threats, bullying and intimidation, coupled with occasional bouts of pouting and air kisses.

"What we've generally found is these groups operate like little platoons," said the psychologist, who didn't actually speak to the girls. "There's a chain of command and at no other time in your life is the desire to belong to such a group so strong.

"These girls are really quite unique in that they have got themselves into this highly stratified social system and they exist merely to exclude other people."

Now I'm going to have to take the psychologist up on a few points there, starting with the idea that tribalism is confined to adolescence.

Has the man ever watched men's sport on TV? Like, hello. (And note how I've adopted feral girl lingo in defence of my tribe.)

Stand outside any sports complex where a Saturday afternoon game of league is playing, and you'll see tribalism at its most bold and beautiful. Go to a pub a few hours later wearing the colours of the wrong tribe, and you could end up flat on your back on the footpath for no other reason than that you strayed into enemy territory.

And for a "highly stratified social system", look no further than the neighbourhoods around you, the places where you do your socialising, the restricted clubs that operate in Newcastle, and Club 21 is just a bunch of teenagers practising for the real world.

We've had the rise and rise of exclusive, gated, locked and security-conscious communities that, while not necessarily existing "merely to exclude other people", at least do a very good job of screening out undesirables.

The kids aren't just doing what we say. They're doing what we do.

jmccarthy@theherald.com.au

© 2008 Newcastle Herald

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