When Mean Girls Grow Up, They Become… Mean Women?
Our esteemed colleagues Pat Wingert and Barbara Kantrowitz write today about recent examples of very public girl-on-girl, or, in these cases, woman-on-woman meanness, including Carly Fiorina’s “oh my God her hair is so last season” comment; Meg Whitman’s rumored shoving of a female subordinate; and, of course, the Real Housewives of New York City, who are pretty much mean to each other 24/7.
They talk to Rosalind Wiseman, the author of Queen Bees and Wannabes, about the grown-up lady meanness, who said:
“In our culture we get rewarded for mean-girl behavior, so we see adults behaving in ways that we typically assign to teens … Getting attention is the most important thing.”
It’s unsettling because it’s totally true. Ugh.
But it’s not all bleak. There’s something we can do:
But Wiseman says that paying attention to bad behavior just reinforces the idea that even successful women are superficial. “When you are being entertained, your defenses go down,” she says, and “you’re absorbing the message that women are stupid and inconsequential.” Not only does it “dumb us all down,” she says, “but, more importantly, it makes us expect less from others and expect less from ourselves, and allows this kind of behavior to be normalized.”
So, ladies, let’s try not to be amused by intra-female meanness, k? Tks.
