If you bring up Yellowjackets, you will be shot dead

PROMPT: Would Lord of the Flies have the same outcome if it were a plane of girls who crashed on the island rather than boys?

ISLAND
  THINGS TO CONSIDER
    INHERENT DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALES AND FEMALES (?)
      The obvious: females and males have distinct external genitals.  Before puberty, sexual dimorphism is not prominent.  The predominant male sex hormone is testosterone.  The predominant female sex hormone is estrogen.  Both sexes have both hormones, but there is a marked difference in quantity.  Males generally have more muscle mass, and females generally have more subcutaneous fat.
      This is relevant because the characters in this novel are pubescent or younger.  Getting older, for females, has a different sociological connotation, which will be touched upon later.  Physically, females menstruate when they get older.    
      
    SOCIOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MALES AND FEMALES
      A thing I needed to hear directly: the body in which one is born has no bearing on personality.  You can argue about natural drives, but liking the colour pink or being quick at maths has nothing to do with biological sex.  The desire to shave, the desire to put on makeup rather than warpaint, the desire to be thin is not inherently womanly.  There is no womanly soul.  Woman is a title given to a type of body.  
      That being said, society associates shaving, makeup, and thinness with women - that's why more women shave, that's why more women wear makeup, that's why more women strive to be thin.  These expectations originate from the idea that women should be decorative, and it's perpetuated not only by the opposite sex, but it's perpetuated by women themselves, typically with no conscious malice.  Instead, the expectation IS in fact seen as inherent to women, and any nonconformers are seen as unnatural when precisely the opposite is true.  It also must be said that there is no inherent wrong in something being unnatural.  
      
    GIVEN THE ABOVE
      IN THE SCENARIO GIRLS WERE TREATED THE SAME SOCIETALLY AS BOYS 
        Some argue that girls are biologically kinder.  I've heard arguments for women being biologically more average - they bear the offspring, so they cannot afford to be extreme.  Males, on the other hand, are nature's test dummies, so they tend to fall on the extremes more often.  I'd embed a link to where I got this, but I can't do that in a .txt file, so here it is: https://darwinawards.com/rules/rules.testosterone.html ("You take the Darwin Awards as a reliable source?"  Well let's not take this too seriously now.)
        Regardless of socialisaton (and in many cases, due to socialisation), girls are not nice.  Children are not nice.  They are often unhygienic, unempathetic, and tactless.  A female-only group would not be strife-free.  Would there be as many physical rows?  The thing is - physical violence is normalised in this time period through war and corporal punishment.  In a world where boys are proud of their country and their military fathers, who's to say women would be different from men, given that their interests in war and the prospect of being important on a large scale were not scrutinised?  This scenario also brings up another question - would males be as interested in fighting and physicality if they hadn't been socialised, somehow, to like it?  Fleabag (the show) theorises that men invent wars and sports to externalise their emotions, so the question is this: had males been socialised to verbalise their emotions rather than express them physically, would it have spiralled into the morbid scenario it did?  Fleabag also says this: women keep it all inside...  This cannot be a claim about female biology.  Women aren't treated the same as men - that's the point.  Since society supresses both females and males in the same way in this scenario, women Could use violence.  Perhaps in both scenarios, they would descend into verbal chaos.  However, violence affects everyone - this is the point the novel makes.  It's implicit in society... so I'm not opposed to the idea that things would play out the exact same way.
        
 
      IN THE SCENARIO CONSIDERING SOCIALISATION
        I hate to turn a perfectly good story into a commentary about female socialisation.  There's a catch - Lord of the Flies is also a commentary about male socialisation.  Golding admitted that had it been boys and girls, it would be a completely different 
        
AN ANALAGOUS STORY
       May I explain the Rite of Spring?  I'm going to explain it anyway.  So, up until 1913, ballet was this very refined, elegant art.  Well, it started out as a way for servant's children to entertain their guests, but then their guests liked the peasant children, and the nobles couldn't have that.  The tutus and tights are expressley to show the human form.  The high leaps and stretches push the limits of the human body.  In comes Igor Stravinsky, and he's bored of that shit.  Rite of Spring is a ballet where the girls are fully clothed, perhaps excessively so.  They move inelegantly, "primitively".  This wa  
              
THE RESULT AFTERWARD
  MY PRE-EXISTING IDEAS
    Jack has AIDS.  Well.  Alright that's a start.
    
CONTENTIONS
  WHY SPECULATE ON THE SEX LIVES OF CHILDREN?
    Well.  I'm not.  Children grow up.  Every adult that has had sex was once a child.  Speculation in fiction is an entirely different ballpark because every version of a story exists in ideas, whether officially written down or not.


Created 1716 18 September 2025
Last updated 25 September 2025