Photo credit: AlohaMama

I just read a fascinating thought from Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic this month about why teenage girls read:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

I so related to this — as a teen I read every romantic novel from every century. And I’ve always wondered why as an adult I enjoy reading very much but don’t seem to need it as much as in my youth. This explains it.

But it also set me to thinking, could this be part of the attraction of video games for boys? Are they perhaps working out their place in a competitive world, in a secret, safe way?