On this point in particular, I believe the author is either dismissing or ignoring some other important possibilities. It isn't the fact that girls are girls which causes them to dish out their anger and aggression in an underhanded and indirect way, but the fact that girls value relationships more than boys. If boys are egotistical and behave in ways that alienate their peers, they aren't risking deep relationships or intimate connections. Most boys don't have deep bonds based on trust and intimate knowledge of one another at a young age. They tend to form relationships based on less personal bonds like sports or hobbies. If one boy acts too arrogantly or aggressively and this bothers his friends, they are far less likely to see it as an attempt to compete on a personal level and write it off as showing off in a generalized fashion. The thing that binds boys, common interests, isn’t likely to be broken by arrogance or jealousy.

In Ms. Simmons's view, girls are hamstrung in expressing their aggression because they have had a restrictive imprint made on them by society so they attack in whispers, glances, and with silence. In my view, girls do this because they tend to form more complex, deep, and intimate bonds than boys at a younger age and would prefer not to overtly alienate their peers. They learn to maintain deniability so they can keep their relationships intact in the event that their perceptions are wrong. Simply put, boys remain blissfully oblivious of the complex nature of relationships and value their own egos more than until a later age relative to girls. I don't believe this is a function of society's sexist imprinting as much as developmental differences between genders. In other words, the same thing that has girls shooting up and getting taller than boys also has them forming deeper relationships earlier.

Of course, I have no way of proving my theory. If I were to follow Ms. Simmons’s lead in Odd Girl Out, though, all I’d need to do is go around and ask the kind of questions that would elicit the answers I’d like to hear in order to support my theories at a statistically insignificant number and highly biased sampling of schools. I’d wager it’d be just as easy to support my theories by asking boys questions about the depth of their relationships (or the lack thereof).

While Odd Girl Out is a very interesting book, it exhibits tunnel vision in how it explores the topic of female aggression. In order for her theories to carry more weight, Ms. Simmons needs to broaden the range of girls she speaks with as well as explore the possibility of other explanations aside from the one she seems emotionally invested in.