In the girl's world painted in Odd Girl Out, small groups of girls are judging each other based on appearance, popularity, wealth, intelligence, and appeal to boys. When one girl has an abundance of anything and seems to recognize it, the other girls both want to be her friend and secretly hate her for a variety of perceived slights which are based (mainly) on jealousy and resentment about the power the lead girl has over others. Other girls want to both be her friend and take her down a peg. Ms. Simmons's concludes that girls have a set of ideal characteristics and anyone who isn't demure enough, doesn't put the needs of others first, or is too bright or athletic isn't going to fit with the feminine ideal and will be rejected. She concludes that female stereotypes hold back female aggression and that's why girls behave the way they do.
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.
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