Girls have never had any trouble being mean. Even back when they were all considered nice and sweet and polite, they could backstab each other under their breath with the most vituperative hurtful viciousness. Yet somehow, after the feminist movement, it became fashionable to encourage little girls to speak up, as if they had never before had anything to say. In fact, girls have always had a lead over boys in verbal arenas such as taunts and abuse. The feminist movement itself ended up having a major problem with verbal bashing by one faction over another.
As the mother of two boys, I found that my sons were always on the wrong side of the empowerment divide. Girls were encouraged to be bitches, and boys were encouraged to shut up. Girls could be mean with no consequences at all. In fourth grade, my son created a very fragile science experiment with a sign "Do Not Shake." Of course he was asking for it. A little pixie fluttered by practicing her dance moves and knocked the whole thing over. He was beside himself. When I talked to the teacher, he wouldn't even consider that such a sweet little girl would do something like this on purpose. She just kept passing by the scene of the crime, gloating, as my son picked up the pieces.
My older son was very shy and very handsome. The girls in his class had big mouths and were very loud and aggressive. They constantly harassed and harangued him, to his great humiliation. They were exaggerating friendliness which added up to meanness.
Then one day, in fifth grade, I got a call from one of the mothers of a girl who especially relentlessly sparred with my son. She said he called her fat and girls have body image issues. I said the girl called my son fat and that boys have the same issues. My son thought he was fat.
He and this girl were the two smartest kids in the class. They both went to the University of Chicago by chance. They were best friends all four years. Everyone stopped being mean. Why couldn't that have happened in grade school? Maybe it was because the mothers fueling the fires were now absent. Those grown-up mean girls.
5 comments:
Somebody else (Storm, I think) commented recently about how your "querulous squirrel" image seems so perfectly suited to you. When I watch the squirrels on the deck outside our kitchen (which I can do freely if I'm not having to hide them from The Territorial Pooch (who perhaps needs a blog of her own)), I've always liked the way they behave like little sleight-of-hand artists, with their forepaws wringing nervously, repeatedly before them (hmm, almost like OCD hand-washing...). All of a sudden they've got a fragment of an acorn or pecan gripped there and I think, What the hell pocket did you pull THAT out of?!? (Their beady eyes glitter. Squirrels grin with their eyes, y'know.)
The last paragraph of this post is one of those deft little tidbits. Nice!
I do feel like a squirrel and they are sleight of hand artists and I'm flattered. We had a juvenile squirrel stuck in our house for a couple of days one winter and it definitely moved faster than the speed of light. It was impossible to follow it bouncing off the furniture with your eyes. Even the cats couldn't keep up. Oh, God, those mothers! Private school entitlement. Such Bitches. I got a few nasty "compliments" on my clothes I'll never forget.
Ahh yes the grown up mean girls. I'm glad that my supervisor at work is a man, because the ONE woman that's in a managerial position is impossible to work for.
It's unrelated, but when we were going through the drama over the switch-boards at work, the receptionist told me that at her last job they had a little stuffed crab... the Beanie baby variety, and as a joke they would leave it on the desk of the person being the crabbiest that day. Something to encourage them to lighten up. She confided to me that there were days she wished we had something like that in our department, but understood that we had a couple of "ultra-sensitive" people that would be upset about receiving it. I laughed and told her we didn't need a crab. We needed a cat.
I recall all too well how vicious girls were. We used to have a pack leader in my class at school, who would decide each morning which of us was to be ignored and abused for the day. Looking back now I can scarcely believe that we couldn't stand up for ourselves against her, but we couldn't. Everyone went along like sheep. Now my son has his first girlfriend and I'm slightly concerned that she's a mean one. I saw her for the first time at a school parents' evening, and was met by a blast of attitude. Ah well, he will learn a tough lesson, I guess. And I still feel cravenly that I hope I don't have to deal with her much myself. I'd still run a mile from a mean girl.
Storm: Cats are too cute and cuddly at times. A Bear?
Litlove: I've only had experience with one girlfriend who I adored and was exactly like me, but unfortunately that ended and now I'll have to wait and see what's next. My sister has had mean mothers of her son's wives. That can be almost as bad, with competition over the grandchildren for holidays etc. My neice was expected to fly to California from New York with her one-week old for example.
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