News of an all-girls adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies has, naturally, sparked a fair bit of upset. Deadline reports that Scott McGehee and David Siegel (yes, you may have noticed by now, they are indeed both men) have signed a deal with Warner Bros for a remake that will see girls stranded on the island instead of boys. Now, I’m not 100 per cent sure, but I think there’s every chance that neither of these men has ever read Lord of the Flies. Or they have, but they didn’t quite get it.

Siegel said “we want to do a very faithful but contemporised adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys”, while as far as reasoning goes, McGehee added that they were “taking the opportunity to tell it in a way it hasn’t been told before, with girls rather than boys, which shifts things in a way that might help people see the story anew.” Lord of the Flies is, as we all learned in GCSE English, about a group of boys who try to self-govern when they become stranded on an island. Naturally, as boys are wont to do, they end up hurting and killing each other when their civilisation breaks down. The point Golding is making is one about government, mankind, and ultimately, toxic masculinity and the violence that comes with it.

Siegel and McGehee missed that class, though. They also missed Golding saying that “a group of little boys are more like scaled down society than a group of little girls will be” and that “one thing you can not do with them is take a bunch of them and boil them down into a set of little girls who would then become a kind of image of civilisation, or society”.

McGehee said that their version will “break away from some of the conventions, the ways we think of boys and aggression...it is a great adventure story, real entertainment, but it has a lot of meaning embedded in it as well”. I personally wouldn’t call a book where boys resort to murdering their friends a “great adventure story”, but I am intrigued to see just what two adult men know about preadolescent female aggression. Women aren’t perfectly sweet all the time, but were it true to my experience of what happens when young women are left to govern alone, the girls would just trade passive aggressive barbs on Myspace and then empty each other’s schoolbags on the floor before apologising and making up. But we’ll see, won’t we, I guess. If we have to.