Mean Girls and Trouble-Free Boys
April 28, 2010
by Patricia Garrison
|The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.
As the mother of a teenage girl, I’ve heard the casual critique more than once by otherwise well-meaning friends or colleagues. “Oh, you have a girl,” they reply when I mention the gender of my child. “Girls are so mean.” Women with only sons paint the accusation with a broad brush; those with daughters see their girls as victims. Mean girls, it seems, are everywhere – just check the news. They’re cyberbullying without mercy, publicly humiliating their peers, and, in one Massachusetts town, driving a 15-year-old girl to take her own life.
I’d always been suspicious of the mean girl storyline, but never had the guts to challenge the off-handed proclamations of her guilt. On a personal level, I’d known many a parent who had his or her hands full with sons who had bullied or been bullied, had run-ins with the law, and struggled with violence and substance abuse. I knew that boys were no walk in the park, yet the collective conversation said otherwise. I should have checked the data. The latest crime statistics show that girls today are no more likely to report being in fights, being threatened or injured today than they were in 1970. Arrest rates for violent offenses dropped 32% for girls from 1995 to 2008. In fact, the latest research shows rates of bullying behavior are twice as high among boys as girls.
Like so many gender issues, the facts get kicked to the curb in favor of convenient stereotypes. The recent coverage of the Massachusetts tragedy focused on the ‘mean girl’ angle extensively, while failing to take a hard look at the actions of the mean boys, who were charged — along with the girls — with harassment, stalking and other crimes, and, additionally, statutory rape.
To be sure, girls can and do act out in troubling, aggressive ways. Girls who inflict pain and humiliation on a classmate should face the consequences of their actions. That said, this skewed societal view of teenage girls not only does females a disservice, it also hurts boys. Boy bullying is ubiquitous, and research shows it remains constant throughout adolescence, while girl peer-victimization begins to wane as girls get older. Recent suicides of boys, which have received less coverage, underscore their vulnerability to victimization. In fact, teenage boys are significantly more likely to commit suicide than girls. If we’re going to take seriously the issues facing our teenagers, than we need to challenge the oversimplified and sexist notions of mean girls and trouble-free boys. We need to take on the issue of bullying and peer-victimization in both genders. Our daughters, and our sons, deserve no less.
You have to factor in the use of technology that was not as easily available in the 70′s. Today these kids come equipped with cellphones and computers, spending hours on social networks that often leads to huge doses of “cyber bullying” that takes place outside the school itself. Both genders are heavily involved in this type of bullying so it would be difficult to isolate one from the other regarding the use. Texting has become the number one form of communication within this demographic and it is far more difficult for parents or authorities to be able to monitor what is being transmitted back and forth.
The primary solution would be to take back these cellphones, shut down the computers, and force kids into a more academic role than that of “who has the most friends on Facebook”. But in all reality, this is not going to happen. This is what passes for the “norm” in today’s society as far as socialization is concerned and as long as one can text without having to actually learn the rudimentaries of communication, cyber bullying will remain.
I don’t know. I mean, I agree that the hype out there is ridiculous. I agree that both boys and girls need to be protected from bullying and prevented from being bullies.
But relational aggression among girls is not fiction. In my opinion, it’s a symptom of living as part of an underclass. People who are oppressed are angry and lack the power to do much about it, so when they strike out, it is usually laterally. Boys have the luxury of striking out laterally Or downwards.
I was born in the early 80s and I have always been put in my place by the relational aggression of girls, starting in elementary school, and to this day in grad school. I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the bullied and I’ve been the mean girl. So while I agree with your overall conclusion, I don’t know how helpful it is to cast mean girls as a myth. They exist, and they hurt people. But they’re not the underlying problem- the comparative powerlessness of girls is.
BTW- if I remember my stats correctly, girls Attempt suicide more frequently, but boys Complete more frequently because their methods tend to be more surefire and violent (guns, hangings, vehicular accidents).
Well I am sort of ashamed to say that I read my teens texts when they were in the shower (the only time they didn’t have their phone on them) to keep up on what was happening in their lives that they didn’t talk about to me. This lead to me confiscating all phones at 10pm nightly since I realized they were talking all through the night to friends. I don’t think isolating them from modern technology is a good idea. They have to live in this world, not the world we grew up in and not a world we wished existed. My daughter has over 600 friends on face book. This includes two swim teams of over 100 kids each and two water polo groups which each probably have 50 members, also three different soccer teams, grade school, middle school and high school friends and kids she met at camp. I never was able to keep up with these sorts of acquaintances but I think this gives her a good network of people she can use for support. My son has a Facebook page but his friend list is limited (of course we all know men have long established networks of acquaintances to call on). He is the far more outgoing of the two. So I think girls are using these new media to stay linked and the outcome 10 years from now when they are business women should be interesting.
I am sick of all media stereotypes of women and especially girls. Do they really sell and to whom? Women need an alternative media because corporate media just doesn’t do it for us.
I’m one of 4 daughters and have 3 of my own-girls can be quite mean. Boys can too but we expect aggression from them and not from our draped-in-pink little girls so when we see it, it shocks…
But they can be quite mean; especially during adolescence—AND expecially girls whose only focus is getting the hot guys in school—
I have always thought that role modeling is at the base of mean girls’ demeanor…show me a mean girl and i’ll bet standing behind her—defending her actions, usually — is her mean mother…just sayin’
Bes: I am not quite sure what having “600 friends” is supposed to imply? How does one find the time to cultivate 600 friendships let alone “networking”? It would seem to me that this alone would take up quite a bit of one’s time. I mean, how much would she lose in life if this was happening 10 years ago and cellphones had not been so readily available?
My point is that so much of human contact – empathy, communication,actually getting to know someone face to face – has been replaced by technology which allows all of us to “communicate” from a position of anonymity. Name calling, bullying, threats, ridicule, are easily adopted as a form of harassment when done behind a screen name created to hide identities.
Bullying in itself is nothing new but the means to transport that behavior has found new roots in the upgrade of “communication tools” that are destined to heighten the process.
Thank you so much for this post — sexual harassment of girls by boys is the real storyline, but it’s never discussed outside of handwringing about the “political correctness” of calling their behavior out for what it is. And, as far as “cyber bullying” is concerned, if the Internet had been as pervasive in the 90′s when I was in high school, I would have been a lot less isolated. I could have met people who shared my interests and didn’t had preconceptions of me as a social untouchable. I could have found an environment where a nerdy written-language-oriented introvert could thrive, instead of waiting until college. My (mostly male) bullies, on the other hand, managed without technology to throw flour on me as I walked home from school, call me sexually demeaning names and threaten me with violence.
Olivia: I mean any form of communication is exactly what people make of it. No form is worse or better. Obviously there are different definitions of “friend” and the fact that a kid has 600 of them on Facebook does not mean they do not understand this. And I told you where the “friends” came from, mostly sports teams and since she swims those are very, very large teams. But all these people have some shared background and Facebook has many different settings that they can be put on. So for instance when another group started requesting her on Facebook whom she was uncomfortable with (My friends or Moms of her friends) she told me she was uncomfortable and asked me what to do. I said “then refuse them or put them on restricted access it is your account not theirs”, she chose restricted access. All these “friends” were picked up while moving through life.
So in my life I have not managed to keep track of camp friends, of course there were no girls sport teams I could join, And I maintain one grade school friend and one high school friend due to dificulty in communicating with large gorups. My daughter keeps track of many people with shared experience easily on Facebook and the network pays off for her when she chose a college far from home she had about 6 people she knew through her contacts and that helped her adjust. I might add my daughter is a shy girl. My son who doesn’t understand the concept of shy and could chat up a brick wall barely has a Facebook account.
Any way any form of communication can be used for good or bad, networking or bullying. While bullying exists kids need to be resistant to it in all forms of communication. And it is true that bullies often have partens who model and encourage the behavior.
Mean girls are a fact and many of them continue as bullies in adulthood, bringing misery to other women in their workplaces and in their families. They are the reason why many women don’t want to work for other women. In the workplace, women bullies usually strike out at women laterally and below them in the business hierarchy. They avoid attacking men and authority figures, male or female, because they’ve learned that most men and most authority figures won’t intercede if the bullying doesn’t affect them personally. That’s what made the Prince suicide possible.
I’ve dealt with one miserable example of this for 10 years and she just succeeded in forcing me from my job, so spare me the “mean girl as myth” routine.
i’m with ellis on this one—-have several examples myself beginning years ago as brand new RN whose boss felt threatened cuz the new RN was peretty sharp….To just recently-5 years ago when a woman joined forces to oust me from my magazine that she was going to take over….except i wouldn’t go..instead i hung in, produced solid work and then the bastards…when it settled in my favor and i deposited their ‘apology’ into my bak account, this gal was all over me like white on rice…trying to ‘friend’ me big timenow….
But zebras don’t change their stripes and neither do bitchy women & men…
Sorry ladies, love what this site represents but i’m too old to follow anybody’s party line about female solidarity and/or to sugar a sad fact about our gender….Eons ago & long before any form of feminism rooted into our culture, a woman’s goal was to attract the best catch…and most ALL other women were the enemy….For some women, nothing’s changed…Queen Bee rules…not for all but for some that’s for frickin sure in my humble….
love the discussion, thanks
sorry for sloppy writing i meant ‘sue the bastards’ and ‘bank account’…i’m multi tasking here…not doing it so well, evidently…another myth busted! not all women are good multi-taskers…:)
I wonder, though, if the point of this article is that society focuses more on the mean girls and ignores the mean boys. Women can be just as horrid to their own gender as I have seen in 2008, but society should not focus on one gender in regard to meanness.
Karen, that’s exactly how I took the article. Sure girls can be mean as can boys. But I find it odd when I hear parents complaining about “mean girls”. A few months ago a parent of two young boys commented on my daughter and one other girl about how cute they were and how cute it must be to dress them and how at times she wishes she had a girl cause they are just so darn cute. But then she added “Nah, I’m glad I don’t have girls because girls are just so mean.” With all the mean and cruel things that some boys grow up to do I thought this was very odd to just highlight the girls. I think the cultural perception is that girls are mean by choice and boys are just out of control so we don’t hold them responsible.
Well of course there are mean girls, you are not imagining it. There are also mean boys. Meanness is a sorry human trait. All you can do as a parent (or if you are an adult do it for your self) is try to teach children how to deal with bullies without wasting too much time on them.
I also agree that there are some women who are chronically competing for the best mate, that is their reason for being, and that drives a lot of their bullying. I did send my fairly bully proof daughter to an all girls High School and when there are no men to waste your energy on for most of the day good habits of female friendship can flourish.
I asked my Daughter about feeling bullied and she readily supplied an example of a girl who has been plaguing her since first grade soccer team. She felt that a person has more control over communications that occur over Facebook than in real life. She seems to have friends from many different groups and that seems a good protection from bullying because she can always escape the context of any bullying. There is probably no way to control bullies what can be controlled is your response to them.
Corporate Media is run by men and a few women who are willing to play their game. They only present women and girls as simplistic stereotypes and “mean girls” is one of their favorites. This becomes a problem because there is not a majority of authentic images of women and girls to put these stereotypes in perspective.
There is this myth that I believe has been perpetuated by the patriarchy and that is girls are harder to raise than boys. I believe that both are difficult for different reasons. We just don’t hold the boys responsible for their bad behavior as we do the girls. This is the primary reason men grow up feeling entitled to opportunities and advantageous that they would never allow a woman to have.
In a world where girls are inundated with images and expectations that constantly reinforces a bad self image because they are expected to live up to impossible standards, I’m not surprised that we are witnessing this kind of behavior in girls. As a rule, boys are given much more support by family and society and have much lower standards to live up to than girls do, yet, they tend to bully on a much larger scale than girls do. Boys get away with this kind of behavior because the focus is primarily on the girls. No wonder the world is on the verge of WWIII. What can you do? It’s just boys being boys!
kathleen
appreciate your insight, thank you. you nailed it, we have different standards…gees, did i witness this time and again raising 3 little girls…expectations and tolerance for behavior was – and probably still is to some degree – different.
marla,
Have you ever wondered how much the world has missed out on because women are held back and pushed down by a patriarchy that just won’t tolerate a woman being recognized for anything? Why is that? That’s selfish squared to protect a man’s ego!
Women’s extraordinary contributions to society have been excluded from the history books, which are written by men, of course! For example, when I was studying high school history, I remember there were several pages honoring Paul Revere’s ride warning the towns that “the British are coming, the British are coming!”, but there was barely a footnote for the work done by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton for the work they did in helping women achieve the vote. Or what about “Rosie the Riveter”, who stepped in to build the ships, airplanes, bombs, guns, etc., which resulted in a higher productivity than when the men were doing the job, and which probably made the difference in our winning the war or losing it? Never read about these extraordinary women!
I’m just tired of society focusing all of their anger at young girls who aren’t living up to impossible standards while excusing the boys, and then totally ignoring the life changing contributions women have made to society.
It’s a lose-lose situation for the boys as well as the girls, which exists primarily because of the male ego and nothing more. Women need to tear off these psychological burkas. They have proven to be just as debilitating and unjust as the physical one’s worn by those poor, unfortunate women in the Mideast.
If you don’t believe conditioning is a powerful influence on how one reacts to injustice, then please explain to me how Susan Rice could sit quietly while the U.N. voted to include Iran as one of the countries on the Commission on the Status of Women?! She should have been screaming at the top of her lungs in protest and would have been justified in doing so.
The problems and injustices being imposed on the world isn’t a result of young girls being mean, it’s a result of young boys being given a free pass.
Kathleen-
“tear off these psychological burkas”–a mouthful and the title of an essay perhaps? really vivid image!
i couldn’t agree more re: boys getting a free pass– COULD not – but then we have to look carefully at who in this society is supporting their free pass..
check out their moms…
As one VERY successful lawyer said to me back in 1986-i will never forget it-we stood in my living room, our 4 little ones making noise-her 2 boys, my 2 girls-
“I am so glad I had boys because all I have to do is point them in the right direction and watch them go!”
Her 2 boys were so unruly so often i had to minimize time spent becuase I did not want my girls around such unchecked chaos.
I have a ga-zillion of these stories-ok, maybe not that many-BUT plenty to support my observation that women support this inequity and moms of boys in PARTICULAR.
“If I can’t have keys to the kingdom, my son will let me in” is how I think that one goes….
marla,
I agree that Moms are a big part of the problem with letting their boys get away with things they would NEVER let their daughters get away with!
Unfortunately, Moms have been conditioned just like the rest of us women to give their sons a pass. Southern women are the worse because the “good ‘ol boy” network is still so prevalent here and the women are put on a pedastal (actually it’s really being chained to an image of what men expect of them) and their role is to always support their husbands and their sons, no matter what the circumstances are. It’s so engrained in their psychologial make-up that it’s more like the “Stockholm Syndrom” that people get with their kidnappers, in order to survive! Patty Hurst comes to mind.
It’s hard to break out of these pchysological burkas because women still do not have enough of the power that makes change possible. We can scream all we want about how bad things are for women, but as long as we fall for the patriarchy’s “divide and conquer” mindset that women have for each other, we will never achieve the kind of parity necessary to free us from these stereogypes.
It’s human nature to attack those with the least amount of power, which I am sure is why both men AND women blame and then attack the woman over the man. However, I remember this quote from the movie, the “African Queen”, in which Katharine Hepburn tells Humphrey Bogart “nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we were put on this earth to rise above!” If women could just recognize that we need one another and that supporting each other does not mean we hate men; otherwise, men have been hating women for a very, very long time and for no reason other than we are women! Therein lies the real problem with society.
Just wanted to say how much I valued these responses to the blog. The issue is indeed complex, and not altogether one-sided. As a feminist mother of boys once told me…”we can’t after all, put all of the blame on men. It is women, of course, who raise them.”
That said, we raise our daughters too, and the fact that everyone who commented is aware and thinking about these issues gives me hope that we can help shake up and dismantle a damaging stereotype.
Pat,
I love ‘dismantle a damaging stereotype’…yep. we have to do it and yep, we have to take inventory on how we have maintained it in this system that has historically/culturally favored women birthing boys….thanks to all.
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