Posted on 03/06/2006 9:51:00 PM PST by tbird5
It happens to the best of women. Here's Rosalind Wiseman, who has spent her entire working life teaching girls to treat each other decently. The script for the movie Mean Girls was based on her 2002 best-selling Queen Bees & Wannabes, a book that helps parents understand the drama and danger in the adolescent girl world. She knows the minefields that lie in gossip, jealousy, disloyalty and cruel judgments, and offers solid prescriptions for changing bad behaviour.
Yet despite her experience, she recently found herself sizing up two mothers who came to see her.
In her view, the women paid too much attention to their appearance, especially their hair. They seemed catty in their conversation, were micromanaging their kids' lives, and were silly.
"All these things came into my head. Why? They are antithetical to what I teach and believe," Wiseman says. "I was still judging these women."
Where does this nastiness come from?
Wiseman thinks it exists because it's supposed to exist. Being nasty to each other is one of the unspoken rules about how girls and women are supposed to behave; one of the rigidly enforced North American standards of what constitutes femininity.
"It's everything you know but haven't been sat down and taught," as Wiseman puts it.
When she judged the two women so harshly, it was as if she was acting out one of the observations she made in her book — that girls and women can be their own worst enemies.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
What is especially sad is that teen girls today enjoy acting like this to each other. It's cool to be a bi***. I've heard conversations about how proud they were to put another down, listened to tears and sobbing because girls were mean, then a week later heard a story about how sobbing girl turned around and did the same to someone else. If you aren't tough and mean, you're weak.
What's especially ironic is that the movie "Mean Girls" apparently had the exact opposite effect that the book it was based on intended. Teen girls I know LOVE that movie. Kind of like "Heathers." It's very cool.
Interesting article! I see mean women all the time. I've worked for mean women, as well. And let me tell you, working for a woman supervisor can be the toughest job. I've had some great nursing supervisors, but there have been that couple who are terrible, vindictive, spiteful, etc. Female principals are pretty much the same...most, anyway!
Obvious _ I _ C _ ping. I could not resist. Call me weak and obvious.
I have only seen the trailer for this film, but man alive, it seems pretty violent; not beheadings or knifings, just endless face-slappings and punching. Didn't appeal to me much.
Of course, these women really get it when they try such catiness with us guys. I remember, years ago, receiving a nasty email from the head of my bank's legal department, which she copied to my boss. I replied that she could shove her comments up her fat a-s.
I personally love seeing sorority girls try to act all high and mighty around guys who aren't in Frats. They aren't used to having a guy telling them what they really think of how they are acting. They are used to getting to act like they are better than everyone and not having anyone bust them back down. It's a beautiful sight.
Horse Hockey.
It is the synergistic effects of bad behavior, female ease with practicing flagrant duplicity, and the dissonance that comes from outright refusal to accept responsibility for ones actions despite all evidence.
Pinging the Alpha Mean Grrrrl.
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Someone should have told Charlie Brown about that in re Lucy.
I knew it had to be in there somewhere.
What was not advertised about this course is that it included fieldtrips to sewage treatment plants, landfills and mine.
My best memory of university is the sorority girls at the sewage treatment plant. It wasn't invented yet, but I would have killed for a camcorder. "Like oh. my. god. I am not going in there"
I would have taken that course five times given the chance.
Just damn. Where can I sign up for that one ? I'd pay money to see that.
In my engineering school we had the antithesis of that... take one social studies elective. One guess what it was. Oh yea. Women's studies. God. I'd have taken the sewers and landfills any day over that...
Oh crapola. "North American standard"? Then I suppose 4000000 BC years ago, there was North America...
Women-bashing ping.
It's just bullying, in a less violent form.
Not bashing, just observations of the all too common cattiness that I'm sure bothers you as much if not more than men.
Yep. We're all exactly like that. Every one of us is the same.
:eyeroll: It amazes me how many woman-haters I have met. I often wonder if that hatred is compensation for something lacking or if it's bitterness remaining from that pretty high school girl who turned them down for the prom...
I sure don't get it, though. thank goodness I know plenty of men who are secure in themselves, act decently and don't have all these "issues."
Oh, I can't stand catty, jealous women. (Plus, I'd rather go to an NFL game than go {shudder!} shopping.)
It's the sweeping generalizations being made by some (not all) on this thread that are somewhat disturbing.
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