“Forget the stereotypes of sugar and spice. Girls are mean…,” begins Amazon.com’s plug for Rosalind Wiseman’s hot new book, Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence, just one of a whole spate of books and articles about surviving the terrors of girlhood. Terrors so fierce that according to Rachel Simpson, author of Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, at least one girl in every group interview she conducted for her book admitted to wishing she’d been born a boy, because boys can just fight and “get it over with.”
Girls, say girls themselves, are not only mean, but have an aspect of evil that is not in boys. Girls are sneaky, deceitful, unforgiving, and manipulative. They know how to target your weaknesses and they destroy you from the inside out.
When I look back on my own adolescence, I find I’d rather avert my gaze. After spending seven idyllic years in cozy elementary schools, I experienced Westwood Junior High as a hellish shock. All of us girls despised the way cool boys with their rough, groping hands cornered us between rows of colorful lockers, grabbing at our breasts, at our jeans. Although we were also confused enough to think this attention was flattery, and we hoped it meant the boy of the moment might be about to ask us to “go with him.” But no one is confused enough to be flattered when she is tipped off by fits and howls of laughter that the note she forged for herself to get out of swimming (“Please excuse Jeannine from swimming today because she has her period and she is not allowed to use tampons”) was dropped on the school bus, and found by the worst of the boys. And who really wants to remember the revolving door of belonging to the “right” group of girls? Or, perhaps most dreadful of all, the guilty horror of participating in the shunning of someone else?
The worst case I recall happened to a tall blonde, “Carla,” who was a peripheral member of our “popular” group of girls and boys, but never at the center of the clique. Somehow someone started the rumor that Carla enjoyed putting her curling iron into her vagina. To this day I can see the shape of Carla’s face, the startling blue of her eyes, the lankiness of her thin body in the tight designer jeans of the day. Her image was burned on my brain in the days following the rumor, as she shrank and folded in on herself right before our eyes. We watched silently as she withdrew from us, stopped coming to school, and then appeared briefly escorted by her parents for a meeting with the principal and school counselor. Within a couple of weeks she left Westwood and I never saw her again. I’m ashamed I couldn’t reach out to Carla when she tumbled into the sudden hell of a psychic stoning. I remember acutely what prevented me from rallying for her, and it was the same thing that kept everyone else’s mouth shut, too: the fear—and knowledge—that what happened to Carla was contagious, and that getting too close to the precipice of her personal hell was a sure way to fall in with her.
So I’m no Pollyanna when it comes to girlhood. But I disagree that girls are mean. I would say, rather, that adolescence can be a very mean time, particularly for children warehoused in large, anonymous factory schools with little parental involvement and no safety net. Perhaps it’s not girls who are cruel, but a culture that confines them in environments in which, as Joan Ryan put it in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, they “wander anonymously along a path of least resistance and low expectations,” without the benefit of a positive relationship with even one adult at the school.
As school size increases, so does student alienation, and more than a decade’s worth of studies suggest that students fare better in smaller schools. Mary Anne Raywid, one of the foremost researchers in the field, says the superiority of smaller schools over larger, more impersonal settings has been established “with a clarity and a confidence rare in the annals of education.” Minneapolis, with the help of a $3 million grant from the McKnight Foundation, is transforming seven large high schools into more than 30 “Small Learning Communities,” and St. Paul is exploring a similar restructuring.
This could be great news for girls—and boys. Because in addition to shining the light on the worst of what’s wrong with modern adolescent culture, we have an obligation to ask why this is so and what we can do about it.
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