Jezebel: sibling survivalries

Is There Something Extra-Special -- And Extra-Stressful -- Between Sisters?

Dodai — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:00:00 EDT

Much has been made about Margaret "Peggy" Seltzer, the writer whose gang violence memoir, Love and Consequences, turned out to be a fabrication. But, the New York Times asks today, what of Cyndi Hoffman, Peggy's older sister? Hoffman is the one who turned "tattletale" and blew the whistle on Peggy. Her own sister. "We have powerful expectations of loyalty from a sister," Marcia Millman, sociology professor and author of The Perfect Sister: What Draws Us Together, What Drives Us Apart tells the Times. "But along with the idealized image of sisters, that they are always close, there is a stereotype that sisters are very competitive. It's the two extremes." They say blood is thicker than water, but is the truth thicker than blood?

We've discussed sisterhood before; but mostly childhood hijinks and run-of-the-mill adolescent torture. Cyndi Hoffman is 47 years old; Peggy is 33. Are they proof that you're never too old for sibling conflict? What made Cyndi turn in her flesh and blood? Is it because, as author Vikki Stark (My Sister, My Self) said on the Today show this morning (see above clip), older sisters are the "caretakers"? Was Cyndi envious of Peggy? (It was a glowing profile in the Times that prompted Cyndi to phone Peggy's publisher and call bullshit on Peggy's claim that she was a half-white, half-Native American girl who grew up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers and ran drugs for the Bloods.)

Times columnist Tara Parker-Pope points out: "While we choose our friends and rely on our parents, siblings remain in our lives by neither choice nor necessity." As both Parker-Pope and Stark say: The relationship between sisters can powerfully influence the outcome of the womens' lives as adults. If your sister was on her way to becoming a best-selling author in a career built on a lie, would you turn her in? Or is it important to be loyal to your family, no matter what? What do you do when being a good person means being a bad sister?

In Sisters, Love and an Urge to Wring Her Neck, Siblings Behaving Badly, Sibling Battles [New York Times]
In Sisters, Love And An Urge To Wring Her Neck [NBC News]

Earlier: Are First-Borns More Successful Than Younger Siblings?
Older Sisters Are All A Bunch Of Hilarious Sadists
An Open Apology To Our Younger Sisters
Did Faux Memoirist Peggy Seltzer Reveal A Culture Of Narcissism Or Racism?
Female Gang-Banging Memoirist Is More Fiction Than Fact

The Younger Kardashian Sisters Are In-House Underminers

Anna — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:00:00 EDT

Last night, in honor of the temporarily-departed Tracie "Slut Machine" Egan, I checked out the season premiere of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. And I was kinda fascinated! The storyline was simple: Older sister Kourtney was suffering through a relationship blip with her boyfriend Scott, and her younger sisters, Kim and Khloe, were partly to blame. The two had gone through Scott's cellphone text messages looking for dirt, and, once they found it, were less than sympathetic to their older sister's conflicting emotions about her (maybe) cheating boyfriend. Khloe in particular, reminded me of the sort of underminer-y "best" friend who creates conflict and then tries to control the narrative once she's let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. By the end of the show, Scott and Kourtney had made up, but not before Khloe got a few words in edgewise. Clip above.

Are First-Borns More Successful Than Younger Siblings?

Dodai — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 17:30:00 EDT

You've probably heard the sterotype that first-born children are leaders and go-getters, whereas their younger siblings are spoiled troublemakers. Several scientific studies are finding that there's truth behind that thinking, reports the Wall Street Journal. The piece is a response to a larger story by Jeffrey Kluger in the new issue of Time, which asserts that birth order influences behavior in several ways:

Families bestow greater resources and attention on the first-born, and eldest children often adopt the role of caretaker toward younger siblings. A Philippine study found that later-born siblings weigh less than earlier-borns. According to a Norwegian study, the eldest child enjoys on average a three-point IQ advantage over the next eldest sibling, a gap attributed to the older kids' roles as mentors to the younger children. These advantages might explain why eldest children are overrepresented among board directors, M.B.A.s and surgeons.

The WSJ article by Robin Moroney also states that within families, the youngest children tend to have to struggle for attention — and in doing so resort to subversive behavior. Moroney notes that this isn't always to their disadvantage: "Some of the most famous satirists have been later-borns — Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain and Stephen Colbert." Later-borns are also more willing to take on risk, says Frank Sulloway, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. But when you throw fame into the mix, it creates a situation in which we do not know who is better off: Jessica or Ashlee Simpson? Kim Kardashian or her 9-year-old pole dancing sister? Paris or Nicky Hilton? Ben or Casey Affleck? Luke or Owen Wilson? Nick or Aaron Carter?

How Being an Older (or Younger) Sibling Affects Personality [WSJ]
Earlier: Older Sisters Are All A Bunch Of Hilarious Sadists