When it first hit bookshelves, Odd Girl Out sparked a national debate on girls and bullying. Ten years later, girl expert (and Equality Myth girlcrush) Rachel Simmons talks about the updated text—and what drives today’s girl aggression.
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.
Salon: The Tina Fey Backlash and Feminists as ‘Mean Girls’
Amen to Rebecca Traister at Salon, who writes today about the Tina Fey backlash, most-recently prompted by her “pathetic single girl” skit on last week’s SNL. Fey has been called all kinds of things, but this week, the ladybloggers of the world took it to a whole new level, questioning what the single woman trope was “really trying to say,” whether Fey secretly resented single women, attacking her brand of feminism, and then, of course, speculating “who her husband’s been dicking.”
As Traister puts it:
I have quietly wondered whether the level of acclaim she’s received has rendered her ever so slightly overrated. But the swift and high-pitched pile-on, in which considered appraisals of the attitudes reflected in Fey’s work quickly descended into her ejection from feminism, guessing games about the imagined tedium of her marriage, and the suggestion that her husband is “dicking” someone else, resembles nothing so much as the cafeteria from “Mean Girls.”
As Traister points out, Fey is a comedian, not a a professional feminist. Isn’t all the finger-pointing a potentially divisive waste of time?
