Mean girls

I apologize if posting has been sporadic and weird lately. I have an ugly cold and everything is coming through a filter of Medicine Head.

Anyway, we watched the movie Mean Girls last night and thought it was pretty funny, especially considering how it made the hacking, coughing sick ward made up of myself and my boyfriend laugh through our hacking and coughing. (Ah, romance.) As bona fide Gen-X'ers we are required to say that we didn't think it was as good as Heathers or any of the treacle that John Hughes put out, but I'm afraid that we failed out generation. For one thing, it's time we all looked deep down inside and realized that John Hughes mostly released a bunch of crap, Ferris Bueller's Day Off excepted. For another thing, it's a waste of time to compare other movies to Heathers, which is pretty much in a class of its own--any movie that you can justify comparing it to is probably just a rip-off anyway.

From what I understand, the movie is based on a non-fiction book called Queen Bees and Wannabes and probably also that NY Times story from some time ago detailing what evil little bitches (apologies to des femmes) teenage girls can be. I am inclined to read the book now, but am still hesistant because I don't have much desire to relive the ugly pain of adolescence where nearly all the girls in high school were at each others' throats, all while playing nice with each other. Even then I saw that being "popular" in high school meant having no such thing as real friends, but the ugly truth is that this back-biting, gossipy, passive-aggressive evil behavior is something that infects the lives of almost all teenage girls. To this day, I could still tell you stories--like having a girl friend "forget" to pick me up for a party when she said she would because there was a boy there she liked who liked me.

For some reason, teenage girls are led to believe that life is a zero sum game and that if some other girl has good looks or a boyfriend or whatever then someone else is losing out. And that the best way to get good looks, etc. is to just denigrate everyone else, a point this movie clobbers you over the head with. The higher you moved up the totem pole, the more pressure was put on you to be perfect--it wasn't the nerds and geeks in high school who developed bulemia, but the already-adored princesses.

A few of the reviewers I saw on IMDB and Amazon complained that this movie and book were full of stereotypes--well, the ugly truth is that teenage kids stereotype themselves. Cliques are a fact of life in the insular world of high school. The clique of girls that bands together to set the social rules that only they know how to follow and then disparage everyone else for falling short of is called the Plastics in this movie, and I'll bet to this day most people you'll meet could tell you what their school's nickname was for that clique. We called them the Bowheads because they all wore bows in their hair that were color-coordinated for the day of the week.

I hated those girls in high school, thought they were shallow and mean, which I guess they pretty much were. But now that I'm older and know what it's like to both hate being judged by your looks but desperately afraid of not being considered attractive, I have some more sympathy for them. It's damn near impossible to avoid being catty when you are called upon to be in constant competition with all other women while also being unable to just be openly aggressive because that's unfeminine and a sure way to lose.