How Popular Culture Feeds The Cheeky Charm Of Brazen Mean Girls
When will it be payback time for the obnoxious mean girl?
I woke up yesterday to bad news. Elon Musk has banned us from posting Substack links on Twitter. My friend
shared the news here.While this seems damaging for newsletter owners on the face of it, we may be reassured in knowing we are on the right newsletter platform. I mean since Musk thinks Substack is a rival to Twitter and all that.
Twitter’s mean move got me thinking about meanness in general. And mean girls in particular.
You may like them or hate them but you cannot avoid mean girls.
They seem omnipotent.
As a former easy target of especially mean girls, I can vouch for that. Mean girl bullying is subtle aggression that gets everyone to conform. If you do, you may be lucky (or unlucky) enough to join the mean girl’s clique. If not, you can take refuge in being a wannabe. The option left if you don’t conform seems to be to become an outcast & a target (oh the horror!).
If you’ve been a target for as long as I have, you would have probably thought toxic thoughts like “why do we feed the mean girl myth though it is clearly wrong to bully”?
Maybe we cannot choose to ignore that popular culture feeds the myth.
Mean girl movies have always been around. And then came Mean Girls, the movie, the meanest of them all. Hell on heels Regina George was born. She is the quintessential mean girl- sassy, cunning, sharp, stylish, ambitious, giving a damn about anyone’s feelings but her own.
Movies could be feeding the mean girl myth blatantly because it sells. I’ve seen popular culture packaging the mean girl myth in so many different ways:
Dramatic
Popular culture shows the mean girls at the center of all the drama because they create it. Billion-dollar movies revolve around the ‘mean girls’ phenomenon, so drama is a need.
Confident
Confidence is captivating. Think about how popular movies portray mean girls as confident & desirable. It is probably easy to pass them off as confident since they seem to thrive in ditching the niceties.
Exclusive
Mean girls in the movies are exclusive. Rich /pretty/ athletic & sometimes all three. Everyone wants to belong in the mean girl gang. It seems like an unhealthy obsession, this wanting the mean girls’ attention.
They bring out the mean in others.
Notice how when the mean girls in the movies find a target to bully, they bring out the ‘mean’ in everyone else? The target becomes fair target of the community.
They drive popular opinion.
What mean girls accept seems to become popular. What they reject is shunned. They dictate what to wear, where to hang out & whom to bully.
They think on their feet.
I wonder why the movies seem to equate slyness with thinking on the feet? They portray mean girls as witty & sly while seeming to insinuate that it is cool to not be caught at the mean act.
Dangerous
The very danger in their meanness is shown as attractive. Movies seem to tell us that all men want to date the dangerous mean girl.
I was bullied.
I was first bullied when I was 9 by mean girls who ganged up on me. Then again at 11, when I changed schools. The schools were different, the girls were different, but the meanness was the same.
I was never pretty or popular, well at least not back in school. So I envied, loved, loathed, glorified, wanted to be & at the same time wanted to kill the mean girls.
As I grew up my curiosity turned to obsession, so I studied the mean girls phenomenon in earnest. This is what I gather from the little I’ve studied.
I find them a far cry from what is portrayed in the movies.
Mean girls may not be necessarily rich or pretty, confident or exclusive. Nor are they probably dangerous.
The illusions help them control people could be. In reality, they are probably commonplace not exclusive. You could call them bullies & cowards, lacking people skills. You could say that when they step out of the haloed environment of school or college, they will be unsuccessful. But a sadder truth may be that they are low in confidence. Insecurity drives them to behave the way they do. Insecurity makes them pick easy targets.
By all means let’s stop glamorizing ‘mean girls’ culture. But let us also burst the bubble to help those labelled ‘mean girls’ find their bearings. The more I know how tough it is to be human while living as a human, the more I feel for the mean girls. And to be honest, I’d rather use extraordinary kindness than meanness to neutralize my former enemies.
As always Thank you for being here with me on the journey.