mean girls

A recent editorial in the Times alleges that the media's current obsession with a so-called epidemic of bullying among American girls is unfounded because actual statistics demonstrate that girl violence has actually decreased in recent years.

This seems misguided to me on two counts. First, girls can be universally and heartbreakingly cruel to each other without resorting to violence, so wielding statistics on violence doesn't mean much in this context. Second, girls have been mean to each other for years, for decades, possibly for centuries: there is no epidemic, there is just a constant.

The story of Phoebe Prince's suicide earlier this year is particularly horrible in the way it ultimately played out, but the early stages of this story play out somewhere, in some way, every day.

When I was in third grade I had two best friends. Mandy Morabito and Bethany Lindner. I only ever played with one of them at a time, but we had the best times together after school or on weekends. During school, however, neither of them would talk to me because I wasn't popular and acknowledging my friendship would destroy their own credibility with the popular crowd. Even worse, they were actively mean to me because they specifically didn't want the other one to know she was my friend.

There was never any hair-pulling, never any stealing of the lunch money, never any smacking or thwacking or violence of any sort. And yet there were days that I worried myself sick over their shenanigans, their little girl games, to the point where I couldn't go to school.

There is a ring to the term "mean girls," and an indisputable honesty in it (otherwise how to explain the popularity of Lindsay Lohan's break-out role?).

I have never been a big fan of Margaret Atwood, but there was a line from her 1988 novel Cat's Eye that even now, decades after parting ways with my personal mean girls, gives me the feeling of nails on a blackboard:

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.