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Emily White shines a light on the dark side of women  By Traci
Vogel  EMILY WHITE'S BOOK Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the
Myth of the Slut (Scribner) has been lumped in with the Mean
Girls trend. But rather than treat girl culture as an amorphous
whole, White details one aspect: the power of an insult to shape
girls' self-esteem and consequent life stories. White was
inundated with these stories after placing an ad in Dan Savage's
sex column "Savage Love" requesting responses from women who
were labeled the slut of their high school class, whether they
"earned the reputation or not." Based on interviews with over
150 women of all ages and social strata, White distills this
aspect of female experience into a rigorous and vivid study.  To
what do you attribute the recent bubble-up of academic and media
interest in "girl culture"? Why all the books simultaneously? I
realize I might as w