Confessions of a Former Girl

Independent Women's Forum ^ | Summer, 2002 | Charlotte Hays

[Utah Girl]

As a former girl, I must take issue with much of Rachel Simmons' best-selling Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, wherein Simmons interviews far too many adult women who are still bitter about having been victims of bullying girls, circa K-12.

"Today, in counseling, Janet feels certain that resolving her feelings about Cheryl will help her cope with lifelong feelings of low self-esteem," is a typical Simmons sentence. Cheryl, you see, had dropped Janet, now in her forties (!), when they were in, um, junior high.

Simmons defines the "hidden culture of aggression in girls" as "relational aggression"-that is, they don't push and shove like boys might but rather they manipulate. They may drop a girl socially, make fun of her shoes, or be nice to her sometimes but not at other times. Girls resort to this rather than direct aggression because they have been raised to be "caregivers."

"The culture derides aggression in girls as unfeminine," writes Simmons. "?Bitch,' ?lesbian,' ?frigid,' and ?manly' are just a few of the names an assertive girl hears. Each epithet points out the violation of her prescribed role as caregiver."

A Newsweek article on Odd Girl and other recent "mean girl" books, most notably Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees and Wannabees, placed these in the tradition of a previous "wave of troubled-girl books" such as Reviving Ophelia. "Like these [earlier] ?studies,' these new ones capitalize on parental dread, portraying school, especially junior high, as littered with beaten-down and backstabbed girls."

Girls can be cruel-I know that-but the bullying is nothing like the epidemic Simmons claims. "These books go way beyond what we have data on," Newsweek quotes William Damon of the Stanford Center on Adolescence as saying.

Indeed, Simmons, in her chilling picture of life among schoolgirls, several times invokes the movie Heathers, an eighties film about popular girls, all calling themselves Heather, which contains such memorable lines as, "She's my best friend. God, I hate her," and includes a faked suicide. Simmons seems to regard this as reporting.

Newsweek suggests that there are girls who thrive, despite not being the most popular "alpha girls." "Jen" in the article personified these "gamma girls," who are resilient and apparently quite nice. She once wore a huge orthodontic contraption, which-gasp!-some girl bullies stole and hid from her during lunch. Jen seems not to have been permanently scarred by this episode of bullying: "I was such a nerd," she says cheerfully, thereby indicating that she is not a candidate for a bitter session with Ms. Simmons.

Simmons reports that girls from ethnic and poor backgrounds haven't absorbed the "nice girl" ethos that paradoxically makes girls not so nice. "Like the middle-class girls who use emotional alliances, these girls make pacts to defend each other physically." Alas, however, "Because it is linked to their marginalization, their directness cannot serve as a model for overcoming girls' sense of powerlessness." Come again?

As a former girl, I know that high school is hell (and also heaven), and I'd never belittle the difficulties of being a teenager or pretend that there aren't female bullies-a dozen girls in my prep school were sent home for an incredibly cruel act of bullying. But I'd suggest that we ought to do the very thing Simmons doesn't want us to do-demand that girls try to be decent people. Nice people, in other words.

"Nice" is anathema to Simmons-for her, the word, frequently ridiculed in Odd Girl, reinforces the "caregiver" mentality that created all the problems. But helping adolescents to become nice and decent-to be ladies, in other words, or gentlemen, if boys-is the only thing that can keep them from turning junior high into Lord of the Flies. Herewith I thank my mother for trying, often in vain, to make me be nice to a lot of dorky people. And I repent of hurling "Knutsonballs" (wadded up, wet toilet paper) into the dorm room of a girl of that name for nights on end in the ninth grade. Lordy, I'm glad that Simmons didn't find her, though she's probably a CEO somewhere. Note to Simmons: Many former girls chose to become adults.

[Utah Girl]

Good article. Girls can be mean, cruel, and catty in junior high and high school. The key is to make sure to tell them to be nice and kind to others so that the behavior doesn't persist. Some get it, others don't.

[NatureGirl]

I'm currently reading Odd Girl Out. I find the author to be terribly repetitious - it's like being back in a classroom where one or two people just don't get it, and the teacher repeats it over and over.

But as to the subject matter, I was appalled at some of the examples she's used in the book. I know that kids can be cruel, but I didn't think it was ever quite that b*tchy. When I see girls acting up like this, I have to wonder just what their mothers are like, how they treat other women in and around their families.

If it's a learned behaviour, then I guess we'd have an explanation for why no one is telling them not to behave that way.

[Utah Girl]

I've noticed that girls seem to go through a phase in 7th and 8th grade (12, 13, 14 years old) where they pick on one girl for awhile, exclude her, say mean things about her, etc. And then suddenly, she is part of the group, and they've chosen another poor soul to pick on. I think the girls just need to be taught and shown that sort of behavior is not acceptable, and that sooner or later, what goes around comes around.