Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  The culture of indirection reflects a desire to have it both ways—to give girls the world but keep them on a leash. It is yes, but: yes, you may be anything you want, but only if you don't stray beyond the parameters of what is acceptable. Yes, girls can compete and win, but only while being modest, self-abnegating, and demure. Go too far, tip the scales, even without meaning to or knowing it, and you may be the next girl who thinks she's all that.

  The culture of indirection permeates every corner of girls' lives. Deceit is eroticized in the media, where we are titillated by the prospect of a prim facade concealing a truer, dangerous passion. Think of the mousy librarian who tucks up her hair and conceals breasts, hips, and eyes beneath dowdy dresses and chunky glasses. This is the girl who "works it," who appears sweet while suggesting the boil of sin beneath the surface. The sexually indirect girl milks the good girl/bad girl dichotomy to the bone.

  The sexiest among us, writes Elizabeth Wurtzel, is "the small town sweetheart who drips sugar and saccharine for all the world to see but is in fact full of lust and evil ... and malice and bad thoughts."50 The erotic value of this girl emanates directly from the layer of truth hidden beneath her false exterior. It is the very fact of her lie that arouses us. As the tagline for the film Sorority drawls, "When they're bad, they're very, very good."

  Manipulation, especially when it's sexual, is often shown to girls as the path to power. This woman can't get what she wants by earning it, so instead she deceives and manipulates everyone around her. The classic female villainess, Wurtzel argues, "rarely holds up a bank, and she gets to be seductive and sweet until that creepy moment when, suddenly, she just isn't. She is conniving and manipulative and tempting and treacherous."

  Glorifying female duplicity is not limited to Hollywood. A multi- billion-dollar market that has sprung up to cater to girls has also cashed in on the appeal of duplicity. In a July 2000 issue of Teen magazine, two photographs of the same young teenager were displayed: on the left, she was pierced and in leather, wearing heavy red and black makeup and a black tank top with lace bra. Her hands were clasped over her breasts, lips parted suggestively. On the right, the same girl was chastely clad in a cardigan, demurely hugging her schoolbooks, a Shirley Temple smile on her face. Above the racy photograph: "3:00—THE MALL." Above the other one: "3:15—FOR MOM." The product? Jane Cosmetics' makeup remover, promising to "clean up your act."

  Other advertisements portray indirection as a form of beauty. These images suggest that the ideal girl should be indirect or duplicitous. The ads help reinforce the culture's message that being too assertive is unattractive in girls. Some feminists have argued that the image of the sexual temptress is a sign of empowerment, since it allows women to call the shots by saying when and where they'll become intimate. However, the temptress suggests that female power is palatable only when it's used for sex, and even then when it's defined by insincere or manipulative acts.

  jealousy and competition

  The culture of indirection places a massive psychological burden on the girls who internalize it. When girls call each other "all that," they are showing us the friction produced by a culture that is confused, a world that at once prohibits and promotes a language of body and voice in which girls can be confident.

  Fifteen-year-old Tasha Keller told me about an attractive classmate who triggered her clique's anger because of her forthright behavior with boys. "You see her go up to the guys and it scares [the girls].... [In a movie] you see this girl going up to a guy and you've never been with a guy before. It's not like that. It never happens like that.

  "They say you're supposed to get the guy and stuff, but the one who's closest to getting it is the one who's actually trying. And you're not supposed to try.

  "Now that it's all about girls taking initiative and power and stuff, you get all these mixed messages. The media says girls should take control, like Nike ads," she continued. "The people on TV, they show you these scenarios, but they never show you how life is."

  And how is life? I asked her. "It's this whole competition," she replied wistfully. "At school you don't have this perfect world around you.... There's so much jealousy. There's so much insecurity."

  Two steps forward, one step back. It's not that we've done a bad job in teaching girls to reach for the stars. If they're privileged enough to enjoy a girl-positive school, American girls are overrun with a pastiche of powerful images past and present: Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth, Rigoberta Menchu, Lisa Leslie. They know women outnumber men in law school and college, that they are on the road to evening the scales in other fields. They ask, "Who will be the first woman president in my lifetime?"

  The problem is with the means to get there. So fiercely have we focused on winning girls the right to dream that we have overlooked the cruder reality of what it will take to get them from point A to B and make their dreams come true. We have, in effect, put the cart before the horse.

  What do I mean by this? The fear of being called "all that" and the demonization of girls who appear assertive or self-satisfied force underground the very behaviors girls need to become successful. Confidence and competition are critical tools for success, yet they break the rules of femininity. Openly competitive behavior undermines the "good girl" personality. Consider, for example, how competitive people aren't "nice" and oriented to others. Competition suggests a desire to be better than others. Competition and winning are about denying others what you wish to take for yourself.

  As a result, being competitive, a sixth grader told me, becomes "a silent battle between the two girls. They don't say to their friends, 'I'm better' or 'I am competing with so-and-so,' but they kind of challenge each other, like 'beat this' through looks and actions.... They do it all in front of their competitor. That way the other person will see how great they are." Do you want to pinpoint the popular girls at school? The ones who shrug, "There is no popular group," or insist that "everybody's friends with each other" are your popular girls. As with aggression, as with conceit, competition violates the terms of femininity and so must be carefully shielded from others.51

  The same goes for jealousy. To be jealous is to desire more than we have been given, to wish to take rather than to give. Jealousy is unbridled desire. Jealousy transforms friends into mere objects, as girls obsess over whatever part of them—body, hair, boyfriend, skin—they want for themselves. A group of ninth graders talked to me about sitting around comparing bodies during free time at school. "If we're not doing anything," one said, "we're like, 'I want her legs,' and 'I like her height' and 'I love her hair.'"

  Girls are loosely aware of the way feeling jealous violates the expectation that they must be both perfect and self-sacrificing. One-on-one jealousy "bothers us," a Ridgewood ninth grader told me. "If we're jealous of somebody, I think it's because they're admirable, and maybe they have physical features that we like or something like that, and we don't want people to think that we don't accept ourselves." For some girls, jealousy is selfish, a refusal to embrace the care giving qualities of a grown woman. "Well, I feel immature [when I'm jealous]," a ninth grader told me. "You feel like a little—you're not supposed to feel like that. You're acting like a baby."

  As with aggression, girls learn to mute feelings of jealousy and competition. As with aggression, jealousy and competition do not disappear but instead morph into "acceptable" forms. And as with aggression, to remain steadfastly "good" and "nice," girls must re-sort to hidden codes. They learn, in other words, to express competition and jealousy indirectly.

  "All that" is the hub of a hidden code that allows girls to displace feelings of competition, jealousy, anger, and desire. "Sometimes," a ninth grader told me, "I'll get angry about some little thing, and then," she said, switching to a fake-crying voice, "I'm like, 'I'm just jealous of you!'" A classmate offered, "I mean, you don't go around saying, 'She's so pretty.' Instead you say something bad to make you feel better."

  speaking in code

  Code words, I found, are sca
ttered all over girls' lives. They are often used to set standards of behavior. "All that," for example, inscribes a border around girls' assertiveness. It is a social red zone used to telegraph to girls they have drifted beyond what is acceptably feminine, a vehicle allowing girls to police each other into passivity when they become too much of something—when, in other words, they become too assertive.

  The remarks that earn you the title "all that" are often not even explicit: "You like my shoes?" can be perceived by the listener as bragging. "I don't know which party to go to this weekend!" is heard as conceit. "Do you like my hair?" or "Are my nails okay?"—even frequent checks of makeup or hair combing are taken as signs the girl thinks she's thin or pretty. There are cruder signs, too: the girl who thinks she's all that may dare to suggest she thinks she's pretty. She may not speak to and smile at everyone throughout the day. She may attract and flirt with boys, even the ones already spoken for.

  All of this is not to say the "all that" girls aren't actually conceited. Plenty of them may be. But "all that" is less a fixed identity than it is a hidden repository in which girls can store uncomfortable feelings of anger, jealousy, and competitiveness. Quite often the distance between "all that" and jealousy is really a matter of degrees.

  Indeed, the girls who get ostracized are usually the ones who have what most girls are expected to want: looks, the guy, money, and cool clothes. When I ask girls what they get jealous of, a Mississippi freshman summed it up: "Who they go out with, what they wear, how much money they have, who likes them, who hangs out with them, and in some cases the grades they get." What is "all that," really, but acting like you've got some or all of these things instead of just quietly owning them, in an aw-shucks sort of way.

  Jacqueline, a sophomore, explained that a girl who thinks she's all that "flaunts everything. Like if she's smart, you know, she always has the answers around the teachers. She knows she always gets praise or whatever." When I asked why it bothers girls so much, she said, "Because if you have a lot of stuff, you have it.... My mother always told me nobody's better than anybody." I pressed harder. Why does it make girls so insecure? "Because we want that and we don't like the fact that she has it. We want to be like that.... You don't have to show the whole world you have good grades. That makes other people feel bad."

  Another code word between girls is "flirt." You might think girls aspire to be attractive to guys, but calling someone a flirt is rarely a compliment. Many girls think flirting with a guy is tantamount to being physically intimate with him, and if a girl happens to be seen flirting with a guy who's already spoken for, her social life may be in danger.

  The trouble is that no one can say for sure exactly what flirting is. Like "all that," just about anything qualifies, as long as it's with a guy. As Stephanie discovered, a girl could be talking to a guy, looking at him, working with him, responding to him, writing him a note, instant messaging with him, playing around—or she could be seen doing any of these things. The definition of flirting depends not on the doer, but the viewer. A ninth grader illustrated the murkiness of "flirt" in a story she told.

  "This girl in our school, she was liking this boy. He was always coming up and talking to me. I didn't like him like that. He was my friend. One day I was talking to him and he grabbed my waist and pushed me back and pulled me and I'm screaming and she was thinking that I was flirting with him and then the next day at school she put White-Out in my hair. I asked her why she did that and she said, 'Because you're flirting with my dude.' I was like, 'No.' She went and asked him and he was like, 'No, we're just friends.' And then she apologized."

  Needless to say, it is a short walk from "flirt" to "slut." Although most adults believe a slut is a promiscuous girl, often the opposite is true. The accused girl is often only assertive, not active; because she wears tight-fitting clothes and approaches boys fearlessly, she is labeled a slut. It is not her sexual behavior that earns ire, but her departure from the norms of feminine sexual modesty.

  A girl who refuses to be "nice" all the time and to everyone may also get called a slut. She may flirt with a guy who is dating someone else or have a crush on a boy who is already spoken for. As Lyn Mikel Brown observed in her study of girls' anger, "a 'slut' is not someone who is sexually active per se, but rather someone who is disconnected from her partner or from other girls."52 Psychologist Deborah Tolman writes that "the fact of girls' sexual activity is explained in terms of relationships: girls have sex in the service of relationships."53 When a girl's sexuality becomes indiscriminate, performed to entertain or pleasure only herself, it has broken the rules.

  In Mississippi, girls often used the word "skank" in a similar way. Like a slut, a skank is sexually brash, but she's also conceited. "[A skank] talks about [herself] more than anything else," a ninth grader said, imitating her: "'Well, I can do this. I can get any person.'" A skank may sit with her legs open, wearing baggy, skater clothes, or she may wear wear skintight, "slutty" clothes. She may talk in slang, not use proper language, or get into fights; or she might be excessively sexual with her boyfriend in public.

  Some code words have multiple meanings. "I'm so fat" is a common lament with at least three separate translations. When I first started meeting with girls, middle-class students complained constantly of peers who overused the phrase. In fact, in a study called "Fat Talk," researchers noted that most girls who said "I'm so fat" weren't fat at all.54

  First, "I'm so fat" is used as a tool of indirect one-upping. "Girls ask each other if they are fat, and that is a way of competing with each other," an eighth grader explained to me. "If they are skinny and ask themselves if they are fat, what does that say about me? It's a passive aggressive way of saying the other person's not skinny." In "Fat Talk," girls described "how their friends practically 'accused' them of being thin, 'as if it were my fault or something.'"

  "I'm so fat" is also used as a roundabout way to seek positive re- inforcement from a peer. "'I'm so fat' is fishing for compliments," thirteen-year-old Nicole said. "[Girls] want attention." The researchers confirmed that "for many girls, the motivation in saying 'I'm so fat' is to gauge what other people think about them. Girls are really competitive but they don't make it seem that way," Mary Duke explained. "Like, 'I'm so fat.' When they say that it's because they want attention."

  Finally, girls use "I'm so fat" to short-circuit the possibility of getting labeled "all that." The researchers found that if a girl didn't say she thought she was fat, she would imply that she was perfect. "In other words, saying she doesn't need to diet would be an admission that she didn't need to work on herself—that she was satisfied." Instead, they found, the "good girl" must put herself down, and so wind her way to the compliment she is seeking.

  Another code word is the accusation of "copying." At Marymount, an eighth-grade girl threw out her shorts in tears after Lisa, a popular girl, was enraged by her wearing the same pair that Lisa had purchased at a special outlet. After alliances were built and the whole grade was talking, the "copier" wrote Lisa an anguished note and barricaded herself in the guidance counselor's office. I am astonished by the fever-pitch rage that flies across cliques when one girl is copying the look or behavior of another. Whether they're eight or in the eighth grade, the response is clearly disproportionate, suggesting "copying" has a hidden meaning.

  Like "all that," "copying" is an accusation in which girls sometimes hide competition and jealousy. Often girls will say they detest copiers because they want to have their own unique style. Press a little harder, and you hear this: "If she copied me, people would think she looked better than me." A sixth grader explained over e-mail that "it feels like they're stealing my ideas.... I guess because we kind of compete with each other." The copying accusation takes a girl from being on the defensive, feeling discomfort about jealousy and competition, and changes the terms of the conflict. Now, righteously indignant, the copied one can deflect attention from the messier feelings fueling her reaction, directing her anger toward someone else
.

  What about the popular girl who gets angry that a wanna-be is dressing like her? The copying accusation is extremely effective. "Copying" gives the popular girl a concrete fault to attack. It deflects attention from the real issue: the wanna-be's attempt to get into the popular clique. Because being accused of copying can be such a heavy blow to a girl's social status, the popular girl manages to defuse the threat entirely and isolate the wanna-be from the group.

  girl passive

  Girls are expected to be passive and powerful at the same time. I never understood this more clearly than during an afternoon I spent at a leadership workshop for girls. The twenty-eight girls were between thirteen and seventeen; one quarter were nonwhite. Standing before a pad perched on a wooden easel, watched by fourteen pairs of eyes, I began.

  "Caroline"—I pointed over to a younger counselor—"is going to be Vanna White." They giggled. "I want you guys to call out the qualities you think the ideal or perfect girl has. Then I want you to tell me who the anti-girl is—the girl no one wants to be. Think of a girl you know, or one you see represented in the media." I nodded at Caroline, who uncapped a red marker. And here is what they said (boldface added):

  IDEAL GIRL ANTI-GIRL

  Very thin Mean

  Pretty Ugly

  Blond Excessively cheerful

  Fake Athletic

  Stupid Brainy

  Tall Opinionated

  Blue eyes Pushy

  Big boobs Dark features

  Fit Not skinny

  Expensive clothes Imperfections

  Unproportional Promiscuity (slut)

  Naked Professional

  Trendy Insecure

  Popular Dorky