life lessons from mean girls
Title: Life Lessons from Mean Girls.
Subtitle: You are learning the wrong ones .. apparently.
So this has come up twice, and I will describe both incidents:
1) My partner’s mother came over to visit. We were sitting in the living room watching Mean Girls. She turned to her two sons, and said:
“.. It’s so true, teen aged girls are exactly like this. They’re so cruel and manipulative! I work at a high school, and you would just be amazed at the kinds of things that we see. Girls that age are just horrible.”
(.. I’m sure there’s no connection between (a) you saying shit like this, and (b) your sons tending to break into misogynistic tirades to the effect of “all girls are idiots” … right? Definitely no connection.)
2) Yesterday at work, Mean Girls came up in a conversation between three of my co-workers, and they started saying exactly the same shit. (And yes, I will clarify why I’m calling it ‘shit’.) I have to say it caught me off guard. I am talking about three people – two cis females, and one cis drag queen who is flamboyantly, proudly gay – I have a lot of respect for him; I love him; he’s one of my close friends. The two cis females would undoubtedly consider themselves allies to the queer community – and possibly feminist, although that is a word that many people refuse to claim (for a variety of reasons ranging from the ignorant to the extremely important) ..
What is my point? I’m just saying it caught me off guard. I aspire to go through life without indulging in too many gender-essentialist statements, and it shocks me when people toss them off without a second fucking thought. How ….? What?? Sometimes I get a glimpse of heterosexual attitudes in all their naked shining glory and it makes me recoil a little. I cannot imagine living in that world. I realize this is coming off as a little holier-than-thou, but I think this is an important and truthful statement on my part: I don’t understand straight. Sometimes straight is painful to see. Hopefully you know what I’m talking about.
So this is a PSA: YOU ARE LEARNING THE WRONG LESSONS.
I will start with a little example, and I wish I had a link for this, but I can’t remember whose blog it was on:
It was an article about how many, many female gamers play under male identities – not “they play male avatars”, but “they have to tell other gamers that they’re male in order to be able to play without ungodly fucking amounts of harassment“.
And there was this one particular quote that struck me: a girl saying “When I used to lead raids, if things didn’t work out, you know, people would be like ‘Oh SHIT, the raid leader’s mad’. Now since they found out I’m a girl, people are just like … whatever.”
Because … women “are” emotional; therefore their emotions have no real meaning. Yeah? Is that not what we seem to think? (Read it.) Whereas men “are” rational, and their emotions are prompted by situations, situationally-appropriate, and meaningful. It is a weird sort of situation we have going on.
I can remember being told again and again – as a child, perceived-female – that my brothers could harass me, and my job was to “not encourage them by responding. They’re just doing it to get a reaction”. My anger meant nothing. My brother, on the other hand, only needed to raise his voice; everyone fell into line. And my parents empowered his bullying. And I ask myself Was I ever scared of getting my mom angry? Nope. Do I still have anxiety attacks at the thought of my father’s anger? Yep. His emotions are to-be-taken-seriously and hers are to-be-dismissed. A very clear message.
(Please contribute your anecdotal evidence!)
Point: To the extent that teen aged girls might be “more cruel/manipulative/backstabbing/bullying/evil” than teen aged boys – and that is a huge fucking IF: remember we are talking about fictional behavior occurring in a movie - it’s not a function of maleness or femaleness. It’s a function of power and powerlessness. What you are seeing is strategies that emerge as alternative methods to accomplish things. We are talking guerrilla warfare versus gunboat diplomacy: having to sneak around versus merely being able to flex.
Emily was at a café the other day when a guy came up and sat down at her table. “My heart started pounding the minute he sat down. I could tell he was going to do something.” With that kind of power, does that guy need to display ANY emotion at all? Or say a single word? Umm no. But he proceeded to try to mock her and her friend and then retreated behind “What? I was just trying to have a conversation with you girls”.
PS: The fuck you were! You were looking for people to dominate :)
Is this clear? It’s late. I can’t tell.
I ask myself Was I ever scared of getting my mom angry? Nope. Do I still have anxiety attacks at the thought of my father’s anger? Yep. His emotions are to-be-taken-seriously and hers are to-be-dismissed
I ask myself the same thing. I can totally relate to this.
yourgueule
October 13, 2010
my parents were the same way.
I’m not sure if the way I and my siblings were treated reflected that or not though. My emotions weren’t just ignored, they were punished constantly.. My brother kind of withdrew into himself and therefore did not require much attention from my parents, and my sister was taken somewhat seriously only because she reacted very strongly to everything and left home/got into trouble. hm…
Laura
October 14, 2010
Anecdotal evidence?! Could I give my life story?
But seriously. Most of my life before the last couple of years was spent in gender trials. I was involved in the music program in middle and high school. These programs were saturated in misogyny. And all throughout my youth, I was pretty boyish (not necessarily masculine), so that made it even harder. If you weren’t willing to act stupid and dress the right way, you were put through rigorous hazing. I endured at the hands of my fellow musicians and sometimes even friends horribly dehumanizing ridicule when I wasn’t being ignored. And if I ever spoke up against the jokes, I was “just being a woman.” It took me years to figure this one out: They would make jokes to upset me to test me to see whether or not I got upset, and if I did, I was proving to them that women are too emotional and definitely not cool enough to hang out with the guys.
The other key point is… I was not allowed to identify myself. They had to control how I talked about myself and what I could or couldn’t do or say. And they did it through bullying and “coaching.”
I remember specifically one day I called myself a woman, and a male classmate cut me off to correct me. “You’re a girl,” he said. “Not a woman.”
I never self-identified as a girl. I still don’t. I don’t identify as a woman, either. I’m pretty much just a person. But this male classmate took away my power to identify my gender how I wanted. Generally speaking, I don’t really want identify my gender. I call myself on my info page a “wombn” because A) I think it’s awesome; B) the only thing that indicates to anyone what my gender is is my body, and I very strongly identify with my body; and C) I think it’s kind of hilarious. And D) I like the cultural paradox of a sexually-empowered womb.
Even though a lot of this is in my past, I still get a lot of shit from people. Just now, I’m lucky enough to have a social group that is concerned with gender in a vastly different way.
kangent
October 13, 2010
WOMBN! that’s excellent!
Laura
October 14, 2010
I only recently discovered that a number of (decidedly male) people were interested in me, in high school. They waited until after I was safely engaged to tell me. I don’t know what to make of this. I did not act like a woman, and I did not think of myself as a woman, and I had no signs that anyone thought of me as a woman, because I was ‘different’ and examined (and unfortunately pedestalised) on my own merits.
Apparently, some six or seven people actually did think of me as a sexualised entity. And they never acted on it. Was that some sort of intuitive pheremonal understanding, or did my lack of basic gender standards really make courtship seem that intimidating?
Then again, they could have been trying to ‘protect’ my ‘innocence’ — a frequent theme with my male friends. I can still remember sitting in a circle of almost a dozen boys and one other girl while they discussed whether or not I should be told what a ‘dildo’ was, after the term came up in vulgar conversation. (They were shocked when I actually knew what it was, from studying folklore, even though I didn’t know the term. I just called them ‘cucumbers’, you know?)
Still, I never noticed any repressive tendencies, there. I must have missed something.
I like folk etymologies like ‘Wombn’. I am probably the only person I know who still absorbs that word as a compound meaning ‘grown female human’ (wif-mann) instead of reinterpreting mann (a human being) as wer (a male human, preferably heroic). But I have had several people try to tell me that the etymology is ‘womb-man’ as though women are just a man with an added womb, like some sort of internal appendage. Which is has unfortunate implications.
Women like those in Mean Girls do exist, and I know several, but I generally tend to blame it on their being too shallow to adapt media culture to fit their own needs, instead of vice versa. Furthermore, I would suggest that they are no more representative of nor more normalized within actual American culture, on the ground, than Gankuro were of Japanese culture, in the nineties.
Scolaidhe
October 16, 2010
“PS: The fuck you were! You were looking for people to dominate”
Awesome. This so hits home. A guy I know has been uber aggressive/interrogative in his approach to speaking with me, when I tell him he makes me uncomfortable and he needs to back off, he counters that I am just over-reacting, he simply wants to get to know me.
I wish I had your quote then ;)
Keller Holmes
February 17, 2011