Part two of Girls Just Want to Be Mean.
''Yeah, but in Girl World, that's currency,'' Wiseman
responded. ''It's like: Ooh, I have a dollar and now I'm
more powerful and I can use this if I want to. I can
further myself in the social hierarchy and bond with the
girl being gossiped about by setting up the conference call
so she can know about it, by telling her about the gossip
and then delivering the proof.''
In the classroom at Farquhar, eight girls are sitting in a
circle, eating chips and drinking sodas. All of them have
heard about the class and chosen to come. There's Jordi
Kauffman, who is wearing glasses, a fleece vest and
sneakers and who displays considerable scorn for socially
ambitious girls acting ''all slutty in tight clothes or all
snotty.'' Jordi is an honor student whose mother is a
teacher and whose father is the P.T.A. president. She's the
only one in the class with a moderately sarcastic take on
the culture of American girlhood. ''You're in a bad mood
one day, and you say you feel fat,'' she remarks, ''and
adults are like, 'Oh-oh, she's got poor self-esteem, she's
depressed, get her help!'''
Next to Jordi is her friend Jackie, who is winsome and
giggly and very pretty. Jackie seems more genuinely
troubled by the loss of a onetime friend who has been
twisting herself into an Alpha Girl. She will later tell us
that when she wrote a heartfelt e-mail message to this
former friend, asking her why she was ''locking her out,''
the girl's response was to print it out and show it around
at school.
On the other side of the room are Lauren and Daniela,
who've got boys on the brain, big time. They happily
identify with Wiseman's negative portrayal of ''Fruit-Cup
Girl,'' one who feigns helplessness -- in Wiseman's
example, by pretending to need a guy to open her pull-top
can of fruit cocktail -- to attract male attention. There's
Courtney, who will later say, when asked to write a letter
to herself about how she's doing socially, that she can't,
because she ''never says anything to myself about myself.''
And there's Kimberly, who will write such a letter
professing admiration for her own ''natural beauty.''
They have all heard of the kind of three-way call Wiseman
had told me about; all but two have done it or had it done
to them. I ask if they found the experience useful. ''Not
always,'' Jordi says, ''because sometimes there's something
you want to hear but you don't hear. You want to hear, 'Oh,
she's such a good person' or whatever, but instead you
hear, 'Oh, my God, she's such a bitch.'''
I ask if boys ever put together three-way calls like that.
''Nah,'' Jackie says. ''I don't think they're smart
enough.''
Once the class gets going, the discussion turns, as it
often does, to Jackie's former friend, the one who's been
clawing her way into the Alpha Girl clique. In a strange
twist, this girl has, as Daniela puts it, ''given up her
religion'' and brought a witch's spell book to school.
''That's weird,'' Wiseman says, ''because usually what
happens is that the girls who are attracted to that are
more outside-the-box types -- you know, the depressed girls
with the black fingernails who are always writing poetry --
because it gives them some amount of power. The girl you're
describing sounds unconfident; maybe she's looking for
something that makes her seem mysterious and powerful. If
you have enough social status, you can be a little bit
different. And that's where she's trying to go with this --
like, I am so in the box that I'm defining a new box.''
Jackie interjects, blushing, with another memory of her
lost friend. ''I used to tell her everything,'' she
laments, ''and now she just blackmails me with my
secrets.''
''Sounds like she's a Banker,'' Wiseman says. ''That means
that she collects information and uses it later to her
advantage.''
''Nobody really likes her,'' chimes in Jordi. ''She's like
a shadow of her new best friend, a total Wannabe. Her new
crowd's probably gonna be like, 'Take her back,
pulleeze!'''
''What really hurts,'' Jackie persists, ''is that it's like
you can't just drop a friend. You have to dump on them,
too.''
''Yeah, it's true,'' Jordi agrees matter-of-factly. ''You
have to make them really miserable before you leave.''
After class, when I concede that Wiseman was right about
the three-way calling, she laughs. ''Haven't I told you
girls are crafty?'' she asks. ''Haven't I told you girls
are evil?''
It may be that the people most likely to see such
machinations clearly are the former masters of them.
Wiseman's anthropological mapping of middle-school society
-- the way she notices and describes the intricate rituals
of exclusion and humiliation as if they were a Balinese
cockfight -- seems to come naturally to her because she
remembers more vividly than many people do what it was like
to be an adolescent insider or, as she puts it, ''a
pearls-and-tennis-skirt-wearing awful little snotty girl.''
It was different for me. When I was in junior high in the
70's -- a girl who was neither a picked-on girl nor an
Alpha Girl, just someone in the vast more-or-less dorky
middle at my big California public school -- the mean girls
were like celebrities whose exploits my friends and I
followed with interest but no savvy. I sort of figured that
their caste was conferred at birth when they landed in
Laurelwood -- the local hillside housing development
peopled by dentists and plastic surgeons -- and were given
names like Marcie and Tracie. I always noticed their pretty
clothes and haircuts and the smell of their green-apple gum
and cherry Lip Smackers and their absences from school for
glamorous afflictions like tennis elbow or skiing-related
sunburns. The real Queen Bees never spoke to you at all,
but the Wannabes would sometimes insult you as a passport
to popularity. There was a girl named Janine, for instance,
who used to preface every offensive remark with the phrase
''No offense,'' as in ''No offense, but you look like a
woofing dog.'' Sometimes it got her the nod from the Girl
World authorities and sometimes it didn't, and I could
never figure out why or why not.
Which is all to say that to an outsider, the Girl World's
hard-core social wars are fairly distant and opaque, and to
somebody like Wiseman, they are not. As a seventh grader at
a private school in Washington, she hooked up with ''a very
powerful, very scary group of girls who were very fun to be
with but who could turn on you like a dime.'' She became an
Alpha Girl, but she soon found it alienating. ''You know
you have these moments where you're like, 'I hate this
person I've become; I'm about to vomit on myself'? Because
I was really a piece of work. I was really snotty.''
When I ask Wiseman to give me an example of something
wicked that she did, she says: ''Whoa, I'm in such denial
about this. But O.K., here's one. When I was in eighth
grade, I spread around a lie about my best friend, Melissa.
I told all the girls we knew that she had gotten together,
made out or whatever, with this much older guy at a family
party at our house. I must have been jealous -- she was
pretty and getting all this attention from guys. And so I
made up something that made her sound slutty. She
confronted me about it, and I totally denied it.''
Wiseman escaped Girl World only when she headed off to
California for college and made friends with ''people who
didn't care what neighborhood I came from or what my
parents did for a living.'' After majoring in political
science, she moved back to Washington, where she helped
start an organization that taught self-defense to women and
girls. ''I was working with girls and listening to them,
and again and again, before it was stories about boys, it
was stories about girls and what they'd done to them. I'd
say talk to me about how you're controlling each other, and
I wrote this curriculum on cliques and popularity. That's
how it all got started.''
Wiseman's aim was to teach classes that would, by analyzing
the social hierarchy of school, help liberate girls from
it. Girls would learn to ''take responsibility for how they
treat each other,'' as Wiseman's handbook for the course
puts it, ''and to develop strategies to interrupt the cycle
of gossip, exclusivity and reputations.'' Instructors would
not let comments like ''we have groups but we all get
along'' stand; they would deconstruct them, using analytic
tools familiar from the sociology of privilege and from
academic discourse on racism. ''Most often, the 'popular'
students make these comments while the students who are not
as high in the social hierarchy disagree. The comments by
the popular students reveal how those who have privilege
are so accustomed to their power that they don't recognize
when they are dominating and silencing others.'' Teachers
would ''guide students to the realization that most girls
don't maliciously compete or exclude each other, but within
their social context, girls perceive that they must compete
with each other for status and power, thus maintaining the
status system that binds them all.''
The theory was sober and sociological, but in the hands of
Wiseman, the classes were dishy and confessional, enlivened
by role-playing that got the girls giggling and by
Wiseman's knowing references to Bebe jackets, Boardwalk
Fries and 'N Sync. It was a combination that soon put
Wiseman's services in high demand, especially at some of
the tonier private schools in the Washington area.
''I was just enthralled by her,'' says Camilla Vitullo, who
as a headmistress at the National Cathedral School in 1994
was among the first to hire Wiseman. ''And the girls
gobbled up everything she had to say.'' (Vitullo, who is
now at the Spence School in Manhattan, plans to bring
Wiseman there.) Soon Wiseman's Empower Program, which also
teaches courses on subjects like date rape, was getting big
grants from the Liz Claiborne Foundation and attracting the
attention of Oprah Winfrey, who had Wiseman on her show
last spring.
Wiseman has been willing to immerse herself in Girl World,
and it has paid off. (Out of professional necessity, she
has watched ''every movie with Kirsten Dunst or Freddie
Prinze Jr.'' and innumerable shows on the WB network.) But
even if it weren't her job, you get the feeling she would
still know more about all that than most adults do. She
senses immediately, for example, that when the girls in her
Farquhar class give her a bottle of lotion as a thank-you
present, she is supposed to open it on the spot and pass it
around and let everybody slather some on. (''Ooh, is it
smelly? Smelly in a good way?'') When Wiseman catches sight
of you approaching, she knows how to do a little
side-to-side wave, with her elbow pressed to her hip, that
is disarmingly girlish. She says ''totally'' and ''omigod''
and ''don't stress'' and ''chill'' a lot and refers to
people who are ''hotties'' or ''have it goin' on.'' And
none of it sounds foolish on her yet, maybe because she
still looks a little like a groovy high-schooler with her
trim boyish build and her short, shiny black hair and her
wardrobe -- picked out by her 17-year-old sister, Zoe --
with its preponderance of boots and turtlenecks and flared
jeans.
Zoe. Ah, Zoe. Zoe is a bit of a problem for the whole
Reform of Girl World project, a bit of a fly in the
ointment. For years, Wiseman has been working on her, with
scant results. Zoe, a beauty who is now a senior at
Georgetown Day School, clearly adores her older sister but
also remains skeptical of her enterprise. ''She's always
telling me to look inside myself and be true to myself --
things I can't do right now because I'm too shallow and
superficial'' is how Zoe, in all her Zoe-ness, sums up
their differences.
Once I witnessed the two sisters conversing about a party
Zoe had given, at which she was outraged by the appearance
of freshman girls -- and not ugly, dorky ones, either!
Pretty ones!''
''And what exactly was the problem with that?'' Wiseman
asked.
''If you're gonna be in high school,'' Zoe replied, with an
attempt at patience, ''you have to stay in your place. A
freshman girl cannot show up at a junior party; disgusting
14-year-old girls with their boobs in the air cannot show
up at your party going'' -- her voice turned breathy -- Uh,
hi, where's the beer?''
Wiseman wanted to know why Zoe couldn't show a little
empathy for the younger girls.
''No matter what you say in your talks and your little
motivational speeches, Ros, you are not going to change how
I feel when little girls show up in their little outfits at
my party. I mean, I don't always get mad. Usually I don't
care enough about freshmen to even know their names.''
Wiseman rolled her eyes.
''Why would I know their names?
Would I go out of my way to help freshmen? Should I be
saying, 'Hey, I just want you to know that I'm there for
you'? Would that make ya happy, Ros? Maybe in some perfect
Montessori-esque, P.C. world, we'd all get along. But there
are certain rules of the school system that have been set
forth from time immemorial or whatever.''
''This,'' said Wiseman, ''is definitely a source of tension
between us.''
A little over a month after the last class at Farquhar, I
go back to the school to have lunch with Jordi and Jackie.
I want to know what they've remembered from the class, how
it might have affected their lives. Wiseman has told me
that she will sometimes get e-mail messages from girls at
schools where she has taught complaining of recidivism:
''Help, you have to come back! We're all being mean again''
-- that kind of thing.
The lunchroom at Farquhar is low-ceilinged, crowded and
loud and smells like frying food and damp sweaters. The two
teachers on duty are communicating through walkie-talkies.
I join Jordi in line, where she selects for her lunch a
small plate of fried potato discs and nothing to drink.
Lunch lasts from 11:28 to 11:55, and Jordi always sits at
the same table with Jackie (who bounds in late today,
holding the little bag of popcorn that is her lunch) and
several other girls.
I ask Jackie what she remembers best about Wiseman's class,
and she smiles fondly and says it was the ''in and out of
the box thing -- who's cool and who's not and why.''
I ask Jordi if she thought she would use a technique
Wiseman had recommended for confronting a friend who had
weaseled out of plans with her in favor of a more popular
girl's invitation. Wiseman had suggested sitting the old
friend down alone at some later date, ''affirming'' the
friendship and telling her clearly what she wanted from
her. Jordi had loved it when the class acted out the scene,
everybody hooting and booing at the behavior of the
diva-girl as she dissed her social inferiors in a showdown
at the food court. But now, she tells me that she found the
exercise ''kind of corny.'' She explains: ''Not many people
at my school would do it that way. We'd be more likely just
to battle it out on the Internet when we got home.'' (Most
of her friends feverishly instant-message after school each
afternoon.) Both girls agree that the class was fun,
though, and had taught them a lot about popularity.
Which, unfortunately, wasn't exactly the point. Wiseman
told me once that one hazard of her trade is that girls
will occasionally go home and tell their moms that they
were in a class where they learned how to be popular. ''I
think they're smarter than that, and they must just be
telling their moms that,'' she said. ''But they're such
concrete thinkers at this age that some could get
confused.''
I think Wiseman's right -- most girls do understand what
she's getting at. But it is also true that in paying such
close attention to the cliques, in taking Queen Bees so
very seriously, the relational-aggression movement seems to
grant them a legitimacy and a stature they did not have
when they ruled a world that was beneath adult radar.
Nowadays, adults, particularly in the upper middle classes,
are less laissez-faire about children's social lives. They
are more vigilant, more likely to have read books about
surviving the popularity wars of middle school or dealing
with cliques, more likely to have heard a talk or gone to a
workshop on those topics. Not long ago, I found myself at a
lecture by the best-selling author Michael Thompson on
''Understanding the Social Lives of our Children.'' It was
held inside the National Cathedral on a chilly Tuesday
evening in January, and there were hundreds of people in
attendance -- attractive late-40's mothers in cashmere
turtlenecks and interesting scarves and expensive haircuts,
and graying but fit fathers -- all taking notes and lining
up to ask eager, anxious questions about how best to ensure
their children's social happiness. ''As long as education
is mandatory,'' Thompson said from the pulpit, ''we have a
huge obligation to make it socially safe,'' and heads
nodded all around me. He made a list of ''the top three
reasons for a fourth-grade girl to be popular,'' and
parents in my pew wrote it down in handsome little leather
notebooks or on the inside cover of Thompson's latest book,
''Best Friends, Worst Enemies.'' A red-haired woman with a
fervent, tremulous voice and an elegant navy blue suit said
that she worried our children were socially handicapped by
''a lack of opportunities for unstructured cooperative
play'' and mentioned that she had her 2-year-old in a
science class. A serious-looking woman took the microphone
to say that she was troubled by the fact that her daughter
liked a girl ''who is mean and controlling and once wrote
the word murder on the bathroom mirror -- and this is in a
private school!''
I would never counsel blithe ignorance on such matters --
some children are truly miserable at school for social
reasons, truly persecuted and friendless and in need of
adult help. But sometimes we do seem in danger of
micromanaging children's social lives, peering a little too
closely. Priding ourselves on honesty in our relationships,
as baby-boomer parents often do, we expect to know
everything about our children's friendships, to be hip to
their social travails in a way our own parents, we thought,
were not. But maybe this attention to the details can
backfire, giving children the impression that the transient
social anxieties and allegiances of middle school are
weightier and more immutable than they really are. And if
that is the result, it seems particularly unfortunate for
girls, who are already more mired in the minutiae of
relationships than boys are, who may already lack, as
Christopher Lasch once put it, ''any sense of an impersonal
order that exists independently of their wishes and
anxieties'' and of the ''vicissitudes of relationships.''
I think I would have found it dismaying if my middle school
had offered a class that taught us about the wiles of
Marcie and Tracie: if adults studied their folkways, maybe
they were more important than I thought, or hoped. For me,
the best antidote to the caste system of middle school was
the premonition that adults did not usually play by the
same rigid and peculiar rules -- and that someday,
somewhere, I would find a whole different mattering map, a
whole crowd of people who read the same books I did and
wouldn't shun me if I didn't have a particular brand of
shoes. When I went to college, I found it, and I have never
really looked back.
And the Queen Bees? Well, some grow out of their girly
sense of entitlement on their own, surely; some channel it
in more productive directions. Martha Stewart must have
been a Q.B. Same with Madonna. At least one of the Q.B.'s
from my youth -- albeit the nicest and smartest one -- has
become a pediatrician on the faculty of a prominent medical
school, I noticed when I looked her up the other day. And
some Queen Bees have people who love them -- dare I say it?
-- just as they are, a truth that would have astounded me
in my own school days but that seems perfectly natural now.
On a Sunday afternoon, I have lunch with Jessica Travis and
her mother, Robin, who turns out to be an outgoing,
transplanted New Yorker -- born in Brighton Beach, raised
in Sheepshead Bay.'' Over white pizza, pasta, cannoli and
Diet Cokes, I ask Robin what Jessica was like as a child.
''I was fabulous,'' Jessica says.
''She was,'' her mother
agrees. ''She was blond, extremely happy, endlessly curious
and always the leader of the pack. She didn't sleep because
she didn't want to miss anything. She was just a bright,
shiny kid. She's still a bright, shiny kid.''
After Jessica takes a call on her pumpkin-colored
cellphone, we talk for a while about Jessica's room, which
they both describe as magnificent. ''I have lived in
apartments smaller than her majesty's two-bedroom suite,''
Robin snorts. ''Not many single parents can do for their
children what I have done for this one. This is a child who
asked for a pony and got two. I tell her this is the top of
the food chain. The only place you can go from here is the
royal family.''
I ask if anything about Jessica's clique bothers her. She
says no -- because what she calls ''Jess's band of merry
men'' doesn't ''define itself by its opponents. They're not
a threat to anyone. Besides, it's not like they're an
A-list clique.''
''Uh, Mom,'' Jessica corrects. ''We are definitely an
A-list clique. We are totally A-list. You are giving out
incorrect information.''
''Soooorry,'' Robin says. ''I'd fire myself, but there's no
one else lining up for the job of being your mom.''
Jessica spends a little time bringing her mother and me up
to date on the elaborate social structure at her high
school. The cheerleaders' clique, it seems, is not the same
as the pom-pom girls' clique, though both are A-list. All
sports cliques are A-list, in fact, except -- of course''
-- the swimmers. There is a separate A-list clique for cute
preppy girls who ''could play sports but don't.'' There is
''the white people who pretend to be black clique'' and the
drama clique, which would be ''C list,'' except that, as
Jessica puts it, ''they're not even on the list.''
''So what you are saying is that your high school is
littered with all these groups that have their own separate
physical and mental space?'' Robin says, shaking her head
in wonderment.
When they think about it, Jessica and her mom agree that
the business with the rules -- what you can wear on a given
day of the week and all that -- comes from Jessica's
fondness for structure. As a child, her mom says she made
up games with ''such elaborate rules I'd be lost halfway
through her explanation of them.'' Besides, there was a
good deal of upheaval in her early life. Robin left her
''goofy artist husband'' when Jessica was 3, and after that
they moved a lot. And when Robin went to work for Oracle,
she ''was traveling all the time, getting home late. When I
was on the road, I'd call her every night at 8 and say:
'Sweet Dreams. I love you. Good Night.'''
''Always in that order,'' Jessica says. ''Always at 8. I
don't like a lot of change.''
Toward the end of our lunch, Jessica's mother -- who says
she herself was more a nerd than a Queen Bee in school --
returns to the subject of cliques. She wants, it seems, to
put something to rest. ''You know I realize there are
people who stay with the same friends, the same kind of
people, all their life, who never look beyond that,'' she
says. ''I wouldn't want that for my daughter. I want my
daughter to be one of those people who lives in the world.
I know she's got these kind of narrow rules in her personal
life right now. But I still think, I really believe, that
she will be a bigger person, a person who spends her life
in the world.'' Jessica's mother smiles. Then she gives her
daughter's hair an urgent little tug, as if it were the rip
cord of a parachute and Jessica were about to float away
from her.
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