Mean Girls: Unfair Portrayal or Anthropological Classic?

There are meaningful phases through life, ones that require a death of the old and resurrection into the new, but modern life fails to initiate the young into adulthood with the rituals that it used to. Puberty used to be a rite of passage, but now its fraught with sexualization and not much else, and children dread the transition. To wit, it’s happening much too soon biologically, specifically for girls, and the change is too much, too soon for their young brains to handle.

For boys, initiation rites traditionally required a feat of strength to prove one’s passage to manhood. With girls, it has been a form of bonding, networking and tribal allegiance. The rites we see today are a corrupted version of the old, a borderline Machiavellian circuitry that is rife with manipulation, backstabbing and an obvious hierarchy.

Mean Girls is a work of fiction based on the book Queen Bees and Wannabes, a 2002 self-help book by Rosalind Wiseman that helps parents of teenage girls navigate the social landscape of American middle schools. It’s often been criticized for the negative portrayal of girls in that age group, but Wiseman’s observations are based on real-life stories of parents who want to save their daughters the unnecessary damage that comes from years of bullying by their peers. However, the parents can’t live their daughter’s lives for them, and the more vicious high school gets, the greater the need for young girls to gain the ability to pick the right group without compromising their selfhood.

Says Wiseman, “We all want to feel a sense of belonging. This isn’t a character flaw. It’s fundamental to the human experience. Our finest achievements are possible when people come together to work for a common cause. School spirit, the rightful pride we feel in our community, our heritage, our religion, and our families, all come from the value we place on belonging to a group.”

Mean Girls, written by Tina Fey, takes this basic premise of cliques and bullying from the book by Wiseman. The story is wholly original and an excellent example of how to adapt a non-fiction book into comedic satire, cobbled together from her own personal observations and experiences.

Good Girl, Mean World

Should you come across a female narcissist, your safest option is to get away quickly; that is, if you even have the discernment to spot her. Not all of them are perched comfortably at the top and can’t always be identified by rank. Regina George, though, is easy to identify and has many of the defining qualities. She focuses on Cady as the outsider, granting her the sense of belonging that every newcomer yearns for, elevating her to an exalted position, and then—through calculated duplicity—dismantling it, thereby initiating the revenge plot orchestrated by Cady’s eccentric art nerd friends.

Having never attended a school before, Cady was so green she didn’t realize she was being manipulated by two different groups who didn’t necessarily have her best interests at heart. Her first day is a lesson in the anarchic chaos of high school, a greater challenge to navigate than the wilderness of the savannahs she has left behind. Tina Fey couldn’t have written a better “good girl’ character than this one.

The Good Girl possesses precisely the sort of naivety that believes in the good in everyone and is horrified and deeply hurt when she finds out she is wrong. She is unable to relinquish her desire for belonging and affection, which renders her susceptible to manipulation. In doing so, she accepts crumb love, suppressing not only her instinct for self-preservation but also any potential for achievement. Though she harbours aspirations to gain the same privileges as the Queen Bee, she lacks the ruthlessness to attain such a position.

Cady’s parents are perhaps even more innocent of the complexities of high school than she is, sending her to school like a toddler off to kindergarten, packing her lunch, reminding her to drink her milk, anxiously asking her if she made any friends, and supporting her in any way they know how. Her new friends, the art nerds, draw out a literal map to help her navigate this confusing social landscape, and she holds on to them just for the security they bring her, almost as if she has no other choices.

Perks of Being a Narcissist

I assume Tina Fey had personal experience with at least one narcissist when she wrote Regina George’s character. Grandiosity, an overinflated sense of self-worth coupled with deep insecurity, self-serving empathy, sadistic pleasure in making others squirm, and the tendency to treat people like possessions—even after they have left one’s circle—are all typical definers. Her beauty, bolstered by her privileged upbringing, combined with her mother’s clear inability to nurture as well as her father’s absence, appears to have fostered the development of Queen Bee traits.

A narcissist’s ability to win someone’s trust cannot be faulted. Regina persuades Cady to reveal her feelings for Aaron Samuels, Regina’s former boyfriend, under the guise of helping as an intermediary. In a rather well-executed act of deception, put on display for Cady’s consumption, Regina sells Aaron an alternate version of Cady, turning her into a desperate weirdo. Within the same five minutes, she pulls Aaron back into her thrall, gaslighting him into thinking that she had never dumped him, then kisses him, turning Cady into a blubbering mess of rage.

Narcissists can be quite shameless, and the people around them find it almost impossible to resist being pulled into their vortex.

Studies show that most adolescents are self-involved, often displaying negative traits as they separate from their parents and form new attachments with peers, but they typically outgrow these narcissistic tendencies with age. Not everyone has actual Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), an overused term to describe anyone with a tendency to objectify people for their personal comfort or gain. Real NPD has been deemed incurable.

Regina George receives her comeuppance and channels her energy into sports and so is apparently cured, but it’s the only part of the movie I’m not buying. I believe Regina embodies the kind of Queen Bee traits that often persist into adulthood. Her narcissism is far too pronounced to fall into the curable category—which is precisely what makes her eventual downfall so satisfying to watch. Recently, I’ve come across several YouTube videos that celebrate her Machiavellian rise to the top of the high school food chain, but portraying her as a ‘boss girl’ role model for young audiences, misguides more than it inspires.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

The narcissist’s foot soldiers, or 'army of skanks', play a crucial role in maintaining their reign. Often referred to—informally but widely—as 'Flying Monkeys,' these individuals carry out the narcissist’s grunt work, particularly spreading rumours and engaging in third-party gaslighting. A good example of this is Gretchen Wieners’ non-apology to Cady on behalf of Regina after the Aaron Samuels fiasco.

Flying Monkeys have figured out at some point that it’s better to stand in the shade of the narcissist’s umbrella than be a target, to side with the predator rather than be a nobody or a victim. There are social perks that come with the position: popularity (of course), power, visibility and protection (for a while, anyway).

No matter how despicable the narcissist’s behaviour gets, the Flying Monkey remains a loyal follower, aiding and abetting the narcissist’s systematic takedown of anyone who threatens their social standing or, in times of peace, maintaining the ecosystem for the narcissist to thrive in. While they benefit from the narcissist’s power, they avoid encroaching on her territory—a boundary Cady crossed when she fell for Regina’s ex.

How to Lose Friends and Alienate People

Some reviews call Janis a Mean Girl, and when you look at her calculated destruction of everything Regina holds dear, using Cady as her pawn, she starts to feel like a covert, goth version of Regina George herself. Nursing a grievance against Regina since middle school, Janis pushes Cady to take advantage of the limited invitation and infiltrate the Plastics clique.

Janis is the antithesis of the Mean Girl; she tends to be raw and confrontational. The rumour Regina spread in middle school may have contained some truth: Janis was trying to hold on to her while Regina was using beauty, artifice, and manipulation to climb the social ladder. For Janis, such superficiality would have felt like a betrayal that her artist’s soul couldn’t bear.

Janis is emotional and brash and feels things very deeply. Her habitual dismissal of any form of intimacy is a defence mechanism. She’s unpredictable and holds others to high moral standards and is quite blind to her own failings. She is, in a way, as emotional and easily wounded as any teen her age and not, IMO, a Mean Girl.

A Mean Girl is special because she possesses the ability to use people and keep them close at the same time. Cady experiences the magic of the Mean Girl’s powers, albeit for a short time, when she’s able to manipulate everyone around her to her benefit. The high that comes with being at the top is hard to relinquish.

Boy Drama

To quote Rosalind Wiseman, “For most teenage girls, guys are everything. Boys validate their existence; they define who they are and where they stand in the world, because although we have told girls that they’re as smart and as competent as boys, they still get conscious and unconscious messages that they need a man to validate their self-worth and that, to get the man in the first place, they have to present themselves in a nonthreatening (read feminine) manner.”

Let’s be honest, Aaron Samuels gets off easy. While he’s portrayed as authentic, he is oblivious of Regina’s superficial overtures or Cady’s moony looks. Sure, he’s friendly and unproblematic, but he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty by stepping into girl world’s complicated dynamic or bother with how much they must sacrifice just to be with him. It’s pretty much male privilege to be shielded from all the drama and be respected regardless of what decision one makes. He is the male version of the trophy girlfriend who ends up with a nerd, but in this case— he ends up with a 'regulation hottie'.

Takeaways

A 2013 study by Joyce F. Benenson, The Development of Human Female Competition: Allies and Adversaries (via Julia Cha), examines the behavior of girls across cultures and age groups. It shows that girls tend to acquire social graces earlier than boys and quickly learn to use diplomacy in relationships beyond their families.

To examine this further, this diplomacy often serves to help rivals or non-competitive peers save face, but when too much is left unsaid, it can devolve into a toxic cycle of innuendo, passive-aggressiveness, and buried resentment. If you’ve ever found yourself in such a clique, your survival training likely began long before the relationship itself did.

It also says, “When possible, disguising competition is safer than competing overtly [60]. In same-sex conversations, compared with boys, girls use half as many assertive or dominating speech acts designed to control a same-sex peer’s behaviour.” (italics mine) In short, inclusivity is good, but competitiveness is deemed as ‘not nice’ by girls in the same age group, and so, girls who want to excel must do so covertly and cover up any signs of ambitiousness. It seems everything linked to peer group dynamic, for girls, is about survival.

It's also a double blow because patriarchy demands that women dumb themselves down and not outcompete men, and in addition to that, women and girls use subversive tactics, including marianismo, to keep their female peers under control. What we thought was a pervasive patriarchy is also an inside job, so to speak.

Patriarchy is self-serving and prioritizes men, no matter how weak or loathsome, but it is only half the problem. In my observation, young women and girls often fall into a pecking order in mixed-gender spaces, where the majority pressures their female peers not to stand out unless they are deemed, through subconscious bias, 'high-status'. By this, I mean upper-class, wealthy, and conventionally attractive girls, who are granted the freedom to dominate without appearing domineering, to explore their sexuality without being slut-shamed, and to remain as part of the group. Those circumstances are about as rare as the number of conventionally beautiful, upper-class girls that are aware of their social privilege. The overt ones, like Regina, will bask in the attention of being visibly on top, but the covert ones, the real winners, will straddle the contradiction of being worshipped and being part of the team at the same time.

I've studied in a girl's school and the hero-worship skewed in favour of good-looks is more than obvious. In fact, the good looking ones are often given the responsibility of being perceived as good, responsible and mature, without having to actually work for it, and have to live up to the position on their pedestal after is is handed to them. Many of them know how to maintain their position through artifice, and I suppose that's where pretty privilege comes in.

I might have assumed this was normal if not for a group of outsiders from another girls’ school, who valued friendship and authenticity over pretence and fawning. Their dynamic showed me that everything depends on the kind of support a group fosters: they lifted each other up in hard times and celebrated each other’s successes. What I mean is, not all girls behave this way..and if you’re done with this farce, you can choose the kind of group you want to belong to.

It’s the ending of Mean Girls, the solution that suits everyone, that made me suspicious. Regina George is not the only ambitious, selfish and manipulative girl who is humbled; Cady Heron is too, although the humbling leaves her coming out on top. She goes from wannabe to Queen Bee to disgraced monarch and then back to being elected Spring Fling Queen and, as a bonus, being part of the Mathletes winning team. It’s the perfect combination of humility, teamwork and likeability that can make someone the most popular girl in school, without resorting to the narcissist’s terror tactics. A new brood of junior Plastics is metaphorically destroyed when they're run over by a bus. It's what society in general, and Fey, obviously, is trying to teach through this movie. Be a team player; don’t try to stand out. The message ends up reinforcing what society expects from girls anyway.

However, I will give the movie its due for having visually conveyed not only girl world’s complicated relationships without resorting to stereotypes but also its diversity of secondary and tertiary characters that provide their own originality and entertainment. To add, it has single-handedly managed to create so many quotable phrases that have withstood the test of time, that it deserves to be upheld as a classic teen film.