Review: ‘The Social Sex’ is an entertaining but uneven history of female friendships

For those of us privileged to live in the relative comfort of the Western world, this is a golden age for women’s friendships. Ladies are no longer expected to confine themselves strictly to their families for companionship or abandon their peers for the exclusive attention of their husbands. Their platonic relationships are not presumed to be inferior to the supposedly heroic alliances of their male counterparts, nor are they discouraged as socially incendiary or morally suspect. Instead, female friendship is regularly celebrated, from female-driven buddy movies to chipper Instagram hashtags.

But as scholar Marilyn Yalom, writing with author Theresa Donovan Brown, reveals in the entertaining but maddeningly uneven history “The Social Sex,” the camaraderie that so many of us — male and female, gay and straight — enjoy today with the women in our lives hasn’t always been so pervasive. You gotta fight for your right to bachelorette party.

Describing friendship as “the birthright of all American women today,” Yalom posits that “popular wisdom tells us that women are basically more sociable … more ‘friendly,’” before attempting to cover the evolving nature of female relations over more than 2,000 years of Western history. Along the way, she explores the changing definition of friendship itself, from a masculine “shoulder to shoulder” enterprise of action in which Jesus and the apostles represent “the archetype of today’s bromances” to the more feminine “face to face” notion of contemporary friendship.

Yalom, the author of “A History of the Breast,” “A History of the Wife” and “How the French Invented Love,” is well within her wheelhouse when she’s exploring the past. After considering the early — and exclusively male — interpretations of friendship, she hits her stride once the age of female literacy arrives, clearly relishing the detailed accounts of early nuns like Hildegard von Bingen and the intimate letters of the elegant ladies of the European salons.

She’s adept at illuminating how certain periods and places — the forging of the American Colonies, the rise of industrialization — lent themselves to powerful turning points in female community and collaboration. And she wisely acknowledges the relative lack of diversity in her view of history (those four smiling white females on the cover are no accident) even while gamely attempting to include those women whose race or lack of privilege has kept them largely invisible in history. Hers is an admittedly ambitious but by no means globally or culturally encompassing examination.

Where the book stumbles is when it begins to pull up into the modern era. Yalom makes all the perfunctory references to “Sex and the City,” “Mean Girls” and “When Harry Met Sally,” but there’s no sense here of the obvious relish she bears for historical figures like Abigail Adams or Adele Schopenhauer. She seems deeply unsure of what to make of the role of social media and appears visibly flailing when she tries to interpret modern work friendships or notes that “Countless all-women groups meet weekly or monthly for tennis or bicycling, basketball or yoga.”

Worse, Yalom describes contemporary feminism with the observation that “Having lost its militant, anti-male stance, sisterhood may be more pervasive today than it was fifty years ago, and, in its own way, more powerful.” She goes on to note, “There are plenty of girls, who, given the chance, can design and code with the smartest of the boys.” As she moves from the spiritual alliances of early nuns to the vigorous and lively friendships of modern women, the academic dryness of her prose becomes more noticeable.

Despite its sometimes glaring shortcomings, the book is worthwhile for its clear-headed understanding and appreciation of the deep bonds that women form, without the temptation to judge or label them. Yalom devotes a great deal of “The Social Sex’s” attention to the often “romantic” friendships of women, women who lived and loved each other in societies that lacked a vocabulary for sexual orientation. She investigates the intimate correspondences of society ladies as well as the “Boston marriages” of working women in the context of their eras, sensibly suggesting that these relationships likely encompassed “a continuum” of expressions.

Yalom explores the inner lives of women both famous and obscure, recognizing that “the friendships of women … have usually not merely been unsung, but mocked, belittled, and falsely interpreted.” But over the centuries, it’s women who have changed the ideals of friendship, and it’s women who have given friendship its own profound emotional intensity. No wonder Yalom says that, in many ways, “True friendship is not so different from true love.”

“The Social Sex” is a flawed work, but it’s nonetheless a compelling one — an unabashedly affectionate chronicle of what is for many of us, gay and straight, male and female, among the defining relationships of our lives — the one we have with our girlfriends.

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The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship

Marilyn Yalom with Theresa Donovan Brown
Harper Perennial: 366 pp., $15.99 paper

Williams is a senior writer for Salon.com and author of the forthcoming memoir “A Series of Catastrophes & Miracles.”