Girls Just Want to Be Mean [part one]
February 24, 2002
By MARGARET TALBOT
Today is Apologies Day in Rosalind Wiseman's class -- so,
naturally, when class lets out, the girls are crying. Not
all 12 of them, but a good half. They stand around in the
corridor, snuffling quietly but persistently, interrogating
one another. ''Why didn't you apologize to me?'' one girl
demands. ''Are you stressed right now?'' says another. ''I
am so stressed.'' Inside the classroom, which is at the
National Cathedral School, a private girls' school in
Washington, Wiseman is locked in conversation with one of
the sixth graders who has stayed behind to discuss why her
newly popular best friend is now scorning her.
''You've got to let her go through this,'' Wiseman
instructs. ''You can't make someone be your best friend.
And it's gonna be hard for her too, because if she doesn't
do what they want her to do, the popular girls are gonna
chuck her out, and they're gonna spread rumors about her or
tell people stuff she told them.'' The girl's ponytail bobs
as she nods and thanks Wiseman, but her expression is
baleful.
Wiseman's class is about gossip and cliques and ostracism
and just plain meanness among girls. But perhaps the
simplest way to describe its goals would be to say that it
tries to make middle-school girls be nice to one another.
This is a far trickier project than you might imagine, and
Apologies Day is a case in point. The girls whom Wiseman
variously calls the Alpha Girls, the R.M.G.'s (Really Mean
Girls) or the Queen Bees are the ones who are supposed to
own up to having back-stabbed or dumped a friend, but they
are also the most resistant to the exercise and the most
self-justifying. The girls who are their habitual victims
or hangers-on -- the Wannabes and Messengers in Wiseman's
lingo -- are always apologizing anyway.
But Wiseman, who runs a nonprofit organization called the
Empower Program, is a cheerfully unyielding presence. And
in the end, her students usually do what she wants: they
take out their gel pens or their glittery feather-topped
pens and write something, fold it over and over again into
origami and then hide behind their hair when it's read
aloud. Often as not, it contains a hidden or a
not-so-hidden barb. To wit: ''I used to be best friends
with two girls. We weren't popular, we weren't that pretty,
but we had fun together. When we came to this school, we
were placed in different classes. I stopped being friends
with them and left them to be popular. They despise me now,
and I'm sorry for what I did. I haven't apologized because
I don't really want to be friends any longer and am afraid
if I apologize, then that's how it will result. We are now
in completely different leagues.'' Or: ''Dear B. I'm sorry
for excluding you and ignoring you. Also, I have said a
bunch of bad things about you. I have also run away from
you just because I didn't like you. A.'' Then there are the
apologies that rehash the original offense in a way sure to
embarrass the offended party all over again, as in: ''I'm
sorry I told everybody you had an American Girl doll. It
really burned your reputation.'' Or: ''Dear 'Friend,' I'm
sorry that I talked about you behind your back. I once even
compared your forehead/face to a minefield (only 2 1 person
though.) I'm really sorry I said these things even though I
might still believe them.''
Wiseman, who is 32 and hip and girlish herself, has taught
this class at many different schools, and it is fair to say
that although she loves girls, she does not cling to
sentimental notions about them. She is a feminist, but not
the sort likely to ascribe greater inherent compassion to
women or girls as a group than to men or boys. More her
style is the analysis of the feminist historian Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, who has observed that ''those who have
experienced dismissal by the junior-high-school girls'
clique could hardly, with a straight face, claim generosity
and nurture as a natural attribute of women.'' Together,
Wiseman and I once watched the movie ''Heathers,'' the 1989
black comedy about a triad of vicious Queen Bees who get
their comeuppance, and she found it ''pretty true to
life.'' The line uttered by Winona Ryder as Veronica, the
disaffected non-Heather of the group, struck her as
particularly apt: ''I don't really like my friends. It's
just like they're people I work with and our job is being
popular.''
Wiseman's reaction to the crying girls is accordingly
complex. ''I hate to make girls cry,'' she says. ''I really
do hate it when their faces get all splotchy, and everyone
in gym class or whatever knows they've been crying.'' At
the same time, she notes: ''The tears are a funny thing.
Because it's not usually the victims who cry; it's the
aggressors, the girls who have something to apologize for.
And sometimes, yes, it's relief on their part, but it's
also somewhat manipulative, because if they've done
something crappy, the person they've done it to can't get
that mad at them if they're crying. Plus, a lot of the time
they're using the apology to dump on somebody all over
again.''
Is dumping on a friend really such a serious problem? Do
mean girls wield that much power? Wiseman thinks so. In
May, Crown will publish her book-length analysis of
girl-on-girl nastiness, ''Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping
Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and other
Realities of Adolescence.'' And her seminars, which she
teaches in schools around the country, are ambitious
attempts to tame what some psychologists are now calling
''relational aggression'' -- by which they mean the
constellation of ''Heathers''-like manipulations and
exclusions and gossip-mongering that most of us remember
from middle school and through which girls, more often than
boys, tend to channel their hostilities.
''My life is full of these ridiculous little slips of
paper,'' says Wiseman, pointing to the basket of apologies
and questions at her feet. ''I have read thousands of these
slips of paper. And 95 percent of them are the same. 'Why
are these girls being mean to me?' 'Why am I being
excluded?' 'I don't want to be part of this popular group
anymore. I don't like what they're doing.' There are lots
of girls out there who are getting this incredible lesson
that they are not inherently worthy, and from someone -- a
friend, another girl -- who was so intimately bonded with
them. To a large extent, their definitions of intimacy are
going to be based on the stuff they're going through in
sixth and seventh grade. And that stuff isn't pretty.''
This focus on the cruelty of girls is, of course, something
new. For years, psychologists who studied aggression among
schoolchildren looked only at its physical and overt
manifestations and concluded that girls were less
aggressive than boys. That consensus began to change in the
early 90's, after a team of researchers led by a Finnish
professor named Kaj Bjorkqvist started interviewing 11- and
12-year-old girls about their behavior toward one another.
The team's conclusion was that girls were, in fact, just as
aggressive as boys, though in a different way. They were
not as likely to engage in physical fights, for example,
but their superior social intelligence enabled them to wage
complicated battles with other girls aimed at damaging
relationships or reputations -- leaving nasty messages by
cellphone or spreading scurrilous rumors by e-mail, making
friends with one girl as revenge against another, gossiping
about someone just loudly enough to be overheard. Turning
the notion of women's greater empathy on its head,
Bjorkqvist focused on the destructive uses to which such
emotional attunement could be put. ''Girls can better
understand how other girls feel,'' as he puts it, ''so they
know better how to harm them.''
Researchers following in Bjorkqvist's footsteps noted that
up to the age of 4 girls tend to be aggressive at the same
rates and in the same ways as boys -- grabbing toys,
pushing, hitting. Later on, however, social expectations
force their hostilities underground, where their assaults
on one another are more indirect, less physical and less
visible to adults. Secrets they share in one context, for
example, can sometimes be used against them in another. As
Marion Underwood, a professor of psychology at the
University of Texas at Dallas, puts it: ''Girls very much
value intimacy, which makes them excellent friends and
terrible enemies. They share so much information when they
are friends that they never run out of ammunition if they
turn on one another.''
In the last few years, a group of young psychologists,
including Underwood and Nicki Crick at the University of
Minnesota, has pushed this work much further, observing
girls in ''naturalistic'' settings, exploring the
psychological foundations for nastiness and asking adults
to take relational aggression -- especially in the sixth
and seventh grades, when it tends to be worst -- as
seriously as they do more familiar forms of bullying. While
some of these researchers have emphasized bonding as a
motivation, others have seen something closer to a hunger
for power, even a Darwinian drive. One Australian
researcher, Laurence Owens, found that the 15-year-old
girls he interviewed about their girl-pack predation were
bestirred primarily by its entertainment value. The girls
treated their own lives like the soaps, hoarding drama,
constantly rehashing trivia. Owens's studies contain some
of the more vivid anecdotes in the earnest academic
literature on relational aggression. His subjects tell him
about ingenious tactics like leaving the following message
on a girl's answering machine -- Hello, it's me. Have you
gotten your pregnancy test back yet?'' -- knowing that her
parents will be the first to hear it. They talk about
standing in ''huddles'' and giving other girls ''deaths''
-- stares of withering condescension -- and of calling one
another ''dyke,'' ''slut'' and ''fat'' and of enlisting
boys to do their dirty work.
Relational aggression is finding its chroniclers among more
popular writers, too. In addition to Wiseman's book, this
spring will bring Rachel Simmons's ''Odd Girl Out: The
Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls,'' Emily White's
''Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut'' and
Phyllis Chesler's ''Woman's Inhumanity to Woman.''
In her book, the 27-year-old Simmons offers a plaintive
definition of relational aggression: ''Unlike boys, who
tend to bully acquaintances or strangers, girls frequently
attack within tightly knit friendship networks, making
aggression harder to identify and intensifying the damage
to the victims. Within the hidden culture of aggression,
girls fight with body language and relationships instead of
fists and knives. In this world, 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.'' Now, Simmons insists, is the
time to pull up the rock and really look at this seething
underside of American girlhood. ''Beneath a facade of
female intimacy,'' she writes, ''lies a terrain traveled in
secret, marked with anguish and nourished by silence.''
Not so much silence, anymore, actually. For many school
principals and counselors across the country, relational
aggression is becoming a certified social problem and the
need to curb it an accepted mandate. A small industry of
interveners has grown up to meet the demand. In Austin,
Tex., an organization called GENaustin now sends counselors
into schools to teach a course on relational aggression
called Girls as Friends, Girls as Foes. In Erie, Pa., the
Ophelia Project offers a similar curriculum, taught by
high-school-aged mentors, that explores ''how girls hurt
each other'' and how they can stop. A private Catholic
school in Akron, Ohio, and a public-school district near
Portland, Ore., have introduced programs aimed at rooting
out girl meanness. And Wiseman and her Empower Program
colleagues have taught their Owning Up class at 60 schools.
''We are currently looking at relational aggression like
domestic violence 20 years ago,'' says Holly Nishimura, the
assistant director of the Ophelia Project. ''Though it's
not on the same scale, we believe that with relational
aggression, the trajectory of awareness, knowledge and
demand for change will follow the same track.''
Whether this new hypervigilance about a phenomenon that has
existed for as long as most of us can remember will
actually do anything to squelch it is, of course, another
question. Should adults be paying as much attention to this
stuff as kids do or will we just get hopelessly tangled up
in it ourselves? Are we approaching frothy adolescent
bitchery with undue gravity or just giving it its due in
girls' lives? On the one hand, it is kind of satisfying to
think that girls might be, after their own fashion, as
aggressive as boys. It's an idea that offers some relief
from the specter of the meek and mopey, ''silenced'' and
self-loathing girl the popular psychology of girlhood has
given us in recent years. But it is also true that the new
attention to girls as relational aggressors may well take
us into a different intellectual cul-de-sac, where it
becomes too easy to assume that girls do not use their
fists (some do), that all girls are covert in their
cruelties, that all girls care deeply about the ways of the
clique -- and that what they do in their ''relational''
lives takes precedence over all other aspects of their
emerging selves.
After her class at the National Cathedral School, Wiseman
and I chat for a while in her car. She has to turn down the
India Arie CD that's blaring on her stereo so we can hear
each other. The girl she had stayed to talk with after
class is still on her mind, partly because she represents
the social type for whom Wiseman seems to feel the
profoundest sympathy: the girl left behind by a newly
popular, newly dismissive friend. ''See, at a certain point
it becomes cool to be boy crazy,'' she explains. ''That
happens in sixth grade, and it gives you so much social
status, particularly in an all-girls school, if you can go
up and talk to boys.
''But often, an Alpha Girl has an old friend, the
best-friend-forever elementary-school friend, who is left
behind because she's not boy crazy yet,'' Wiseman goes on,
pressing the accelerator with her red snakeskin boot. ''And
what she can't figure out is: why does my old friend want
to be better friends with a girl who talks behind her back
and is mean to her than with me, who is a good friend and
who wouldn't do that?''
The subtlety of the maneuvers still amazes Wiseman, though
she has seen them time and again. ''What happens,'' she
goes on, ''is that the newly popular girl -- let's call her
Darcy -- is hanging out with Molly and some other Alpha
Girls in the back courtyard, and the old friend, let's call
her Kristin, comes up to them. And what's going to happen
is Molly's going to throw her arms around Darcy and talk
about things that Kristin doesn't know anything about and
be totally physically affectionate with Darcy so that she
looks like the shining jewel. And Kristin is, like, I don't
exist. She doesn't want to be friends with the new version
of Darcy -- she wants the old one back, but it's too late
for that.''
So to whom, I ask Wiseman, does Kristin turn in her
loneliness? Wiseman heaves a sigh as though she's sorry to
be the one to tell me an obvious but unpleasant truth.
''The other girls can be like sharks -- it's like blood in
the water, and they see it and they go, 'Now I can be
closer to Kristin because she's being dumped by Darcy.'
When I say stuff like this, I know I sound horrible, I know
it. But it's what they do.''
Hanging out with Wiseman, you get used to this kind of
disquisition on the craftiness of middle-school girls, but
I'll admit that when my mind balks at something she has
told me, when I can't quite believe girls have thought up
some scheme or another, I devise little tests for her -- I
ask her to pick out seventh-grade Queen Bees in a crowd
outside a school or to predict what the girls in the class
will say about someone who isn't there that day or to guess
which boys a preening group of girls is preening for. I
have yet to catch her out.
Once, Wiseman mentions a girl she knows whose clique of
seven is governed by actual, enumerated rules and suggests
I talk with this girl to get a sense of what reformers like
her are up against. Jessica Travis, explains Wiseman,
shaking her head in aggravated bemusement at the mere
thought of her, is a junior at a suburban Maryland high
school and a member of the Girls' Advisory Board that is
part of Wiseman's organization. She is also, it occurs to
me when I meet her, a curious but not atypical social type
-- an amalgam of old-style Queen Bee-ism and new-style
girl's empowerment, brimming over with righteous
self-esteem and cheerful cattiness. Tall and strapping,
with long russet hair and blue eye shadow, she's like a
Powerpuff Girl come to life.
When I ask Jessica to explain the rules her clique lives
by, she doesn't hesitate. ''O.K.,'' she says happily. ''No
1: clothes. You cannot wear jeans any day but Friday, and
you cannot wear a ponytail or sneakers more than once a
week. Monday is fancy day -- like black pants or maybe you
bust out with a skirt. You want to remind people how cute
you are in case they forgot over the weekend. O.K., 2:
parties. Of course, we sit down together and discuss which
ones we're going to go to, because there's no point in
getting all dressed up for a party that's going to be lame.
No getting smacked at a party, because how would it look
for the rest of us if you're drunk and acting like a total
fool? And if you do hook up with somebody at the party,
please try to limit it to one. Otherwise you look like a
slut and that reflects badly on all of us. Kids are not
that smart; they're not going to make the distinctions
between us. And the rules apply to all of us -- you can't
be like, 'Oh, I'm having my period; I'm wearing jeans all
week.'''
She pauses for a millisecond. ''Like, we had a lot of
problems with this one girl. She came to school on a Monday
in jeans. So I asked her, 'Why you wearing jeans today?'
She said, 'Because I felt like it.' 'Because you felt like
it? Did you forget it was a Monday?' 'No.' She says she
just doesn't like the confinement. She doesn't want to do
this anymore. She's the rebel of the group, and we had to
suspend her a couple of times; she wasn't allowed to sit
with us at lunch. On that first Monday, she didn't even
try; she didn't even catch my eye -- she knew better. But
eventually she came back to us, and she was, like, 'I know,
I deserved it.'''
Each member of Jessica's group is allowed to invite an
outside person to sit at their table in the lunch room
several times a month, but they have to meet at the lockers
to O.K. it with the other members first, and they cannot
exceed their limit. ''We don't want other people at our
table more than a couple of times a week because we want to
bond, and the bonding is endless,'' Jessica says.
''Besides, let's say you want to tell your girls about some
total fool thing you did, like locking your hair in the car
door. I mean, my God, you're not going to tell some
stranger that.''
For all their policing of their borders, they are fiercely
loyal to those who stay within them. If a boy treats one of
them badly, they all snub him. And Jessica offers another
example: ''One day, another friend came to school in this
skirt from Express -- ugliest skirt I've ever seen -- red
and brown plaid, O.K.? But she felt really fabulous. She
was like, Isn't this skirt cute? And she's my friend, so of
course I'm like, Damn straight, sister! Lookin' good! But
then, this other girl who was in the group for a while
comes up and she says to her: 'Oh, my God, you look so
stupid! You look like a giant argyle sock!' I was like,
'What is wrong with you?'''
Jessica gets good grades, belongs to the B'nai B'rith Youth
Organization and would like, for no particular reason, to
go to Temple University. She plays polo and figure-skates,
has a standing appointment for a once-a-month massage and
''cried from the beginning of 'Pearl Harbor' till I got
home that night.'' She lives alone with her 52-year-old
mother, who was until January a consultant for Oracle. She
is lively and loquacious and she has, as she puts it, ''the
highest self-esteem in the world.'' Maybe that's why she
finds it so easy to issue dictums like: ''You cannot go out
with an underclassman. You just cannot -- end of story.'' I
keep thinking, when I listen to Jessica talk about her
clique, that she must be doing some kind of self-conscious
parody. But I'm fairly sure she's not.
On a bleary December afternoon, I attend one of Wiseman's
after-school classes in the Maryland suburbs. A public
middle school called William H. Farquhar has requested the
services of the Empower Program. Soon after joining the
class, I ask the students about a practice Wiseman has told
me about that I find a little hard to fathom or even to
believe. She had mentioned it in passing -- You know how
the girls use three-way calling'' -- and when I professed
puzzlement, explained: ''O.K., so Alison and Kathy call up
Mary, but only Kathy talks and Alison is just lurking there
quietly so Mary doesn't know she's on the line. And Kathy
says to Mary, 'So what do you think of Alison?' And of
course there's some reason at the moment why Mary doesn't
like Alison, and she says, Oh, my God, all these nasty
things about Alison -- you know, 'I can't believe how she
throws herself at guys, she thinks she's all that, blah,
blah, blah.' And Alison hears all this.''
Not for the first time with Wiseman, I came up with one of
my lame comparisons with adult life: ''But under normal
circumstances, repeating nasty gossip about one friend to
another is not actually going to get you that far with your
friends.''
[continued....] |
