Why are girls so crazy?

A longstanding topic for boys -- why are girls so crazy? -- is one that often persists well beyond the age of youth. And it probably goes back to the time of the first humans. Ogg couldn't figure for the life of him why Lilg said she loved him but treated him like dirt so often. Why she nutty as cuckoo? Ogg wondered. 

That's just typical battle of the sexes, boys being dopey stuff. Well, it used to be. Now I think girls have even more reasons to be crazy. Many such reasons exist in the modern era, such as social media, cyberbullying, and teen magazines. But we also have to count books, specifically books targeted at female readers. Here are three books that, while fake, provide representations of the kind of books I mean. 

Sweet but clumsy Hillary Hippo has a number of
silly misadventures when she goes shopping.

Besties Aisha and Tammy, who love detective stories, get on the case
when a dognapping ring steals Aisha's standard poodle, Miss Curlz. 

Book 5 of the Bluud and Thuunder series finds vamp tramp Katey Damian at odds with her lover Stormi Winds when the Sistahhood suffers a new attack by Rothschilde and his enforcer, Clerisy Bitchop. Can the Sistahs kill their way through their enemies and find a place to be free at last?

I know children change quickly -- but seriously, who could handle going from one to the other in six years? At least half of the teen girls' books I've seen lately aren't even girl-meets-boy books; they're girl-meets-girl books, and the males are at best useless and more likely evil. In the last decade it's gotten even worse than I could imagine, and I'm a catastrophizer. 

This is an important thing to note: Books marketed to women are not like the books made for teen girls. Certainly there are some, the kind that get made into movies with dark shadows and washed-out colors, but far more are typical love stories, more Hallmark than hellion, including mysteries called cozies and even a thriving subgenre of Amish romance books. 

So the next time a teenage girl is driving you crazy, bear in mind that it's not just hormones, it's not just peer pressure, and it's not just social issues -- it's also a mindset in the publishing world designed to make them angry and eager to reject everything.