Frenemies -this word in an Amazon Books blog entry by Lauren Nemroff was a new one on me. It is used in connection with Cayla Kluver, a 14 year old who is becoming a genuine writer. She is now 16 and continues to write. She is from Wisconsin, naturally.
As soon as I saw the word “frenemies”, I recognized the idea of friends who are also enemies and enemies who are friends. (It’s not all that new. There are over 180,000 references to it that Google links to.) It struck me as the right note to capture girls and their shifting contests, rivalries, alliances and friendships. But then I thought about the phenomenon that often seems to amuse women and girls: guys in a physical fight who wind up being friends, sometimes immediately after the last blow is struck.
I learned much from “Fighting for Life” by Walter Ong, a Jesuit scholar known worldwide for his insights into the effects on humans and their societies of the invention, spread and use of writing. We tend to take for granted that writing, and the ability to decode it, are part of being an educated human but of course, most of the time there have been humans, they did without writing. Even speech is not all that old.
But in this book, Ong focused on the development in the West of the levels of education we now think of as high school and college. Historically, those developments were pretty well limited to males, for various reasons. Ong does an unequaled job at showing how typical characteristics of young males relate to educational ideas and procedures. The subtitle of his book is “Contest, Sexuality and Consciousness” and that first word ‘contest’ hits the target.
Ong says that all subjects were taught at Harvard, Princeton, Yale and such schools in the 1700’s by means of the procedure we recognize today in our courtrooms, basically a contest between opposing sides. In the old days, the instructor might put a thesis on the board: ‘Darwin’s ideas are incorrect’ or maybe ‘Men are emotionally insensitive’ or whatever. The class was divided into affirmative and negative teams who then set to work supporting their mission and attacking that of the other side.
I think it is part of the humanness of our natures to recognize that some of those people in the opposing group are pretty smart. We may well go away from such a debate with the opposing points reverberating in our brain. We are then developing frenemies.
I watched a mommy change a reluctant little spinach eater into a rapid consumer of the leaves by merely offering a challenge that she could finish her portion before he did his. Sometimes, I see little girls merely look at a mommy in wonder upon hearing such a challenge. There may be a genuine difference but both groups have “frenemies”.
