Kids These Days : Facts and Fictions About Today's Youth (9781461638513) by Sternheimer Karen

Author:Sternheimer, Karen [Sternheimer, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781461638513
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc
Published: 2013-06-27T04:00:00+00:00

MEAN GIRLS?

The stereotype of the conniving, cat-fighting, competitive female is revived frequently in the press and popular culture. Rumors of female costars who seethe at another’s success are a tabloid staple. The mean girl is a teen movie villain: one-dimensional, beautiful, popular, and all-powerful. She lays waste to all those in her path only to get her much-deserved comeuppance and humiliation at the end. This caricature furthers the idea that girls are uniquely mean, especially if they are beautiful and powerful.

Yes, girls can be both overtly and covertly mean at times. But the mythology of the mean girl who torments her victim relentlessly until she herself is emotionally destroyed encourages us to ignore why a girl may abuse what power she has. This abuse of power is linked to broader systems of gender and inequality, and is not simply created by each new generation. When girls grow up receiving messages that being female is inferior (by hearing, for instance, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s insult that the state legislature is full of “girlie men”), they strike out against each other in the ultimate act of self-loathing.

For example, in 2003 an off-campus “powder puff” football game with Glenbrook North High School students got out of hand in a suburb of Chicago. The game had been a twenty-year-old tradition between female juniors and seniors. Junior girls expected to be smeared with paint and mustard by the senior girls, but not with excrement and pig intestines as they were.17 They also did not expect to be choked and beaten, or forced to put paint thinner and raw meat in their mouths. The hazing incident was recorded on video and circulated on cable news talk-shows for several weeks. The incident led to stitches, a broken ankle, and the suspension of twenty-eight students; fifteen students were later charged with misdemeanor battery.18 Perhaps most significantly, this incident put hazing and mean kids in the headlines—when it’s caught on tape, hazing makes for dramatic newsmagazine footage.

CNN anchor Kyra Phillips described this incident as a “case of girls behaving badly.”19 Both television and press coverage repeatedly highlighted that the primary participants were girls—the words girls or females were used over and over again in both print and television. This incident also highlighted contradictions in femininity. By referring to the girls’ football game as “powder puff,” we have an expectation that the game will be gentle and nonviolent, though football, a traditionally male sport, is anything but gentle. And by highlighting that it was girls who committed these brutal acts of violence, the media framed the girls’ assaults as not just violations against other students, but as violations against femininity itself. Punishment for participation in this incident involved being barred from graduation ceremonies and from the prom, a highlight of American teen girlhood.

An in-depth Chicago Sun-Times story that explored this and other female hazing incidents claimed that this incident was “par for the course” in many organizations with young women.20 “There are many things college girls will do for attention,”

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