Volume CXXXIII, Number 18 March 1, 2002 f

The "Mean Girl" complex hurts
GENEVIVE CREEDON

For four months, I have been coaching a fifth and sixth grade girls' basketball team, and my first thought when I was asked to do that particular age group was about how unsympathetic and harsh girls that age can be-a premonition validated by Margaret Talbot in her article "Mean Girls" in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine. When I called the girls for the first time to tell them about practices, I was met with overwhelmingly apathetic voices on the other end. Frankly, I was scared.

As it turned out, I got really lucky with the nine girls on my team. None of them even remotely resembled a mean girl. However, at one of our games, a girls' parents did inform me that there was a girl on the other team who incessantly harasses her daughter.

By the end of the game, she had been elbowed in the face and scratched in several places. The problem between these two girls was apparently ongoing, and though Lisa had gone to see teachers and the principal at her school about her problem, no one was doing anything.

When I was a sophomore, I knew a girl who was harassed by another girl best described as "mean." Finally, after two years, the counselor at my school sat a group of us down, and when the bully found that the group disagreed with her actions, her attacks slowly waned.

There is something inherent in our culture that builds a certain hierarchy among girls-one that can be very detrimental, especially as its subtleties become more pronounced when girls get older.

As we get older, the mean girl complex becomes an integral part of our competitive identity during a pivotal stage in our lives. Though the boundaries of distinction are nowhere near as clear any more, and the cliques are not as preponderant, I think we continue to judge each other by the mean girl scale, if I may call it that.

It is about popularity and social value. Girls are tough judges, maybe because it's not enough to be held to a certain outside standard set by the media; we have to create an even harsher system of interplay from within. We're judged by how well we live up to both, and there really aren't that many alternatives.

I've always believed that individual girls can be wonderful people, but as a group, they're not so great. This is why-with girls even more so than with boys-there is an overwhelming need to create what Morrie Schwartz refers to in Tuesdays with Morrie as our own "sub-culture," which doesn't necessarily disregard everything around us but simply transcends it.

The ironic part is that we actually need the mean girls to teach us that we don't want to follow their path; we need them to create our own set of values and standards that free us from the ever-judgmental gaze that surrounds us. Only with that freedom can we understand the wisdom in the words of the poet W.H. Auden: "Love each other or perish."