American Girls (21 page)

“Oh my God, I'm just kidding,” Alex said, putting down her phone. “I would never do that.”

Hannah tossed her head. Her face was flushed. “I shouldn't have told you anything,” she said, grabbing her bag off her chair. “I knew I shouldn't have told you.” She stormed out of the pizza place.

“What an overreaction,” Alex said. “I was just kidding. Anyway, I bet she's lying. He's not her boyfriend.”

“Alex, if you're going to act like a bitch, then you have to expect to be treated like one,” said Zora, standing up and leaving the restaurant.

According to popular opinion, “girls are mean.” Over the two and a half years I spent reporting on girls, people often asked me, “Why are girls so mean?” A Google search for “girls are mean” results in more than 295 million links: “Why mean girls are mean.” “Little girls can be mean.” “Are mean girls getting meaner?”

It's a fairly recent trope, and one which bears examining at a time when cyberbullying is such a big issue in the lives of girls, and one often dismissed as “normal,” if regrettable, girl behavior. There has always been the suspicion that women harbor evil within their breasts, beginning with Eve. Western culture has long trafficked in Madonna-whore-based stereotypes of women who are either pristinely good or sinfully bad. But the idea that “girls are mean” arose at the beginning of the twenty-first century in America with the publication of a couple of books making this claim with virtually nothing substantive in the way of evidence. It's interesting to look at the trends at work when this all came about, and to ask why this myth was so embraced by the media and popular culture.

The notable book about girls just prior to the “mean girls” craze made a good case that girls were, in fact, under attack. It was 1994's
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
by Mary Pipher. Pipher, a clinical psychologist based in Lincoln, Nebraska, had become concerned about the rise in self-destructive behaviors she saw in her practice through the 1980s and '90s—problems still very much plaguing girls today—including body dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-mutilation, drug and alcohol abuse, suicide attempts, and suicidal ideation. Based on her conversations with hundreds of girls, Pipher came to believe that these problems could be traced to girls' experiences of sexism and sexual violence. She posited that at the onset of adolescence, girls' confidence levels drop as they begin to become aware of their own objectification and sexualization in the wider world. “They lose their resiliency and optimism and become less curious and inclined to take risks,” Pipher wrote. “They lose their assertive, energetic and ‘tomboyish' personalities and become more deferential, self-critical and depressed. They report great unhappiness with their own bodies.”

Reviving Ophelia
became a subject of national discussion in an atmosphere of renewed interest in feminism in the early '90s. In 1991, women throughout the country had become incensed at Anita Hill's treatment by a panel of all white male senators when she testified in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Nineteen-ninety-two was deemed the Year of the Woman after the election of four women to the Senate. Susan Faludi's
Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women
was a best seller in 1991, raising awareness of how the women's movement had met with opposition in almost every sector of the American media and politics, virtually since its inception.

Third-wave feminism was emerging and broadening the focus of feminism to include an understanding of the connections among race, class, and gender. In the Pacific Northwest, Riot Grrrl, the feminist hard-core punk rock movement, was having a wide-ranging influence. In pop culture, there was Madonna, challenging accepted notions of female sexuality. And
Thelma and Louise
(1991), a movie about two women who flee the law after one kills a man who has attempted to rape the other, was provoking “table-pounding discussions between men and women,” said
Time.

The early '90s also saw a number of studies contending that American public education was disadvantaging girls. In 1991, the American Association of University Women published a nationwide study reporting that girls ages nine to fifteen suffered lower self-esteem, were less willing to voice their ideas, and had lower interest in math and science than boys as a result of how they were treated in classrooms—for example, by being called upon less and encouraged less than male students. In 1994, American University professors Myra Sadker and David Sadker echoed these findings in a report based on a three-year national study,
Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls.

The “girl power” movement of the '90s was in part a response to a growing awareness of an emotional and educational crisis among girls. There were multi-agency government initiatives addressing the inequity in girls' education, as mandated by Title IX in 1972 and the Women's Educational Equity Act of 1974. In pop culture,
Sassy
magazine gave girls a feminist alternative to
Seventeen.
The entertainment industry responded with an avalanche of TV shows featuring strong female characters:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, My So-Called Life, Moesha,
and more.

But as Susan Faludi noted in
Backlash,
feminist movements and moments are typically met with resistance. The backlash to “girl power” was a media wave announcing “girls are mean.” Rachel Simmons's best-selling
Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls,
published in 2002, declared it was time to expose the “hidden culture of girls' aggression in which bullying is epidemic, distinctive, and destructive.” In the world of girls, Simmons wrote, “friendship is a weapon, and the sting of a shout pales in comparison to a day of someone's silence. There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.” It was a serious claim for a book about girls which never mentioned the sexual harassment of girls by boys or men, and devoted less than a full page to girls' experiences of sexual abuse or sexual violence.

Simmons, who began her book with an account of her own experience being bullied by another girl when she was eight—and in it later confessed, “I count myself among the many women and girls who have demonized the girl bullies in their lives”—presented scads of anecdotal examples of girls being pitilessly bullied by other girls; she gave little indication of girls having negative interactions with boys or men. She didn't go into the influence of the media, advertising, or other cultural forces on girls' behavior. In a book about children and meanness, you might have expected at least a mention of the much-remarked-upon increase in meanness in American public life in the 1980s and '90s, as seen in the cultures of Wall Street and Washington and in the rising violence of popular entertainment, and discussed, for example, in 1997's
The Triumph of Meanness: America's War Against Its Better Self,
by Nicolaus Mills.

The underpinning of Simmons's thesis lay in studies done in the early '90s on “relational aggression,” a term used by researchers led by a Finnish professor, Kaj Björkqvist, to describe aggression that is covert rather than overt and targets a person's reputation or social status. What the Finnish findings actually said was that girls are equally as aggressive as boys, but in different ways, not more aggressive. Recent research suggests, however, that “contrary to popular perceptions, higher levels of relational aggression [are] more common among boys than girls.” This is according to StopBullying.gov—a website with content on bullying and cyberbullying provided by the Justice Department, the CDC, and other government agencies, and which in 2015 published an article titled “The Myth of ‘Mean Girls.' ”

“In the past two decades,” the article says, “relational aggression has received an abundance of media attention. Books, movies, and websites have portrayed girls as being cruel to one another, thus creating and reinforcing the stereotype of ‘mean girls.' However, this popular perception of girls being meaner than boys is not always supported by research…Several large cross-cultural studies and meta-analyses have found no gender differences in relational aggression.” But one 2014 study did. The Healthy Teens Longitudinal Study by researchers at the University of Georgia, which followed a group of adolescents for seven years in the 2000s, found “significantly more” relational aggression in boys than in girls in middle school.

In 2002, however, “relational aggression” was a media buzzword and “mean girls” were a hot topic. “Girls Just Want to Be Mean,” said a cover story in
The
New York Times Magazine.
Rachel Simmons and Rosalind Wiseman appeared on
The Oprah Winfrey Show
to discuss it. Wiseman is the author of 2002's best-selling
Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World,
the other book at the center of the “mean girls” media blitz; her book described a rigid hierarchy and pecking order in a place she called “Girl World,” in which girls are constantly at odds with one another, jockeying for position and generally being mean.

There's even less in Wiseman's book in the way of evidence from psychologists, sociologists, or other researchers; there's none. Wiseman doesn't say how many girls she interviewed or where. Her book isn't really an investigation but rather a parenting guide. Prior to writing it, she taught self-defense to girls and young women. Her book became the basis for the hit movie
Mean Girls,
which came out in 2004, further popularizing this new idea of “mean girls.”

Mean Girls,
one of the most beloved films for girls of the last decade, written by Tina Fey and starring Lindsay Lohan, is ostensibly a critique of meanness—Tina Fey's character, a high school teacher, tells the girls in her school, “You have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores.” But the movie arguably does just that, making fun of the sluttiness of the girls, and offering such a glamorous vision of their sluttiness and meanness, a girl just might wannabe them. In the movie, the girls of the Plastics clique, all age sixteen, move down the halls of school in short-short skirts and heels, breasts bouncing in slow-mo. “Being with the Plastics was like being famous,” Lindsay Lohan's character says dreamily in voice-over. The Plastics do a burlesque-ish rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock” wearing sexy Santa suits. In
Mean Girls,
meanness is sexualized. “A movie you masturbate to,” says an entry about the film on Urban Dictionary.

The ten-plus years since
Mean Girls
premiered have seen a deluge of mean girl–themed TV shows—
Gossip Girl, Bad Girls Club, Pretty Little Liars, America's Next Top Model,
and more. “But it's all a stereotype,” said a fourteen-year-old girl in New York. “Stereotypes on TV always show girls being mean. You never see a girl who's nice and smart—she's either bitchy and mean, or smart and a nerd.” “That's true,” said her friend, another fourteen-year-old girl. “Those are the two archetypes—the really mean pretty girl and the ugly serious girl. Oh, and the slut. You never see a girl who's normal and nice and, like, gets B-pluses.”

And while America was watching girls being mean on their screens, the media, in 2006, was awash in reports of how it was actually boys who were “in crisis.” In 2004, the U.S. Department of Education had published research suggesting that girls and women had closed some existing gender gaps and even surpassed boys and men in many markers of academic achievement. As this information filtered into the media, op-eds and articles started to sound the alarm that boys were allegedly falling behind because of their mistreatment by the American education system.
The New Republic
and
Esquire
ran features, and
Newsweek
did an explosive cover story, “The Boy Crisis,” which charged that “by almost every benchmark, boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind.” Once again,
Newsweek
blamed feminism.

“Some scholars,” said the magazine, “notably Christina Hoff Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, charge that misguided feminism is what's been hurting boys. In the 1990s, she says…feminist educators portrayed [girls] as disadvantaged and lavished them with support and attention. Boys, meanwhile, whose rates of achievement had begun to falter, were ignored and their problems allowed to fester.”
Newsweek
didn't let its readers know that Sommers was the author of the antifeminist polemic
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men,
published in 2000; her best-selling book had also alleged that it was boys who were in crisis, not girls, and all because of the successes of feminism.

“There have always been societies that favored boys over girls,” Sommers wrote. “Ours may be the first to deliberately throw the gender switch. If we continue on our present course, boys will, indeed, be tomorrow's second sex”—an outlandish appropriation of the thesis of Simone de Beauvoir's feminist manifesto
The Second Sex.

But the so-called boy crisis turns out to be a myth as well. The idea has become so deeply rooted in the national consciousness that it's rarely questioned. A 2015 op-ed in
The New York Times
on men's shrinking job opportunities said, “The male malaise starts in the classroom,” without a reference to any data. “Girls have overtaken boys at every stage of education,” the op-ed went on, “with higher grades from the early years through high school and college.”

This appears to be only partially correct; it is true that some girls are getting better grades than boys, but they've hardly “overtaken” them “at every stage of education.” In 2006, the Education Sector, an independent education think tank, now a part of the American Institute for Research, published a report titled
The Evidence Suggests Otherwise: The Truth About Boys and Girls.
When the author, analyst Sara Mead, reviewed the Department of Education's own National Assessment of Education Progress reports since the 1970s, she found that this data “[did] not support the notion that boys' academic achievement is falling.” Instead, these national report cards showed that there hadn't been any dramatic change in boys' academic performance. Meanwhile, “men are actually enrolling in college in greater numbers than ever before and at historically high rates,” Mead wrote. “But girls have just improved their performance on some measures even faster. As a result, girls have narrowed or even closed some academic gaps that previously favored boys, while other long-standing gaps that favored girls have widened, leading to the belief that boys are falling behind.”