Dreamer Easy

There is, in Tom Wolfe's sixties article "A Teenage London Society Girl", a two-page description of adolescent female social aggression so accurate and enraging I'm only going to inflict the very start of it on you:

"Sue happened to be on a train once with a lot of boarding-school girls who were coming back from an outing in the Lake Country. They all had on their little blue jackets. There were four of them in her compartment. One girl was the odd girl out, obviously. The other three kept doing things like forcing her to give her opinion on something and then ripping her to shreds for it. She couldn't cope with it. All she could figure out to do was to try and be correct, to give the right answers with the right accent, but of course they practically mocked her little pants off for that."

That ought to sound familiar to anyone who's weathered the nastier political discussions in fandom. I'll spare you the rest of Sue's observations, except for the description of the final look at the victim's face, "pure humiliation and terror and desolation".

(The essay is in The Mid-Atlantic Man, aka The Pump House Gang, a collection of pieces basically about status games in various loci of society, high and low - with the exception of "The Automated Hotel", which had me in tears of laughter. Actually, I read it just before going ga-ga. Maybe it's Wolfe's fault! Or maybe I Snow Crashed myself with all that Sumerian. Hey ho, he-zu-am.)