Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  Danielle, a sophomore at Linden, met me over lunch to tell me about how controlling she was of two girlfriends between third and seventh grade. She struggled to describe her behavior. "I don't know how to ... explain it," she said haltingly. "I wanted to control them and who they hung out with. I wanted to make sure they were never closer to the other girls than I was. And that they never did stuff with them when I wasn't there."

  Danielle wanted to be the girls' only friend, although she allowed herself as many friends as she wanted. She was afraid the other girls would be more liked than she was. "I think that's basically why I did it," she said, remembering Jessica in a low, strained voice that sounded far older than her fifteen years. "She was really nice and everyone loved her. I guess I wanted to have control over that."

  Later on in our interview, which was filled with increasingly long periods of awkward silence, Danielle admitted that Emma also made her jealous. "I remember when we'd just be hanging out and people would be like, 'Oh my God, I love your hair.' I was so jealous. And I used to be like, 'That's so annoying.'"

  Mostly, however, Danielle remembered her need for control. "I never wanted her to do things. I wanted to be with her doing things, like going out. I didn't want her to have a sleepover somewhere and me not be there. That's the main thing," she said. That way, she explained, "I would have someone to fall back on, who would always be there for me and never be like, 'Oh, I'm doing something with someone else.'"

  Danielle lived with her parents, both professionals, in an affluent Northeastern community. Her mother and father were invested in her social life, and her dad was especially interested. She told me, "I always feel like he wants me to live through him and be more—I'm definitely more outgoing than both of my parents. So I guess they feel like, um, they always make sure that I have tons of friends and that I'm happy."

  After a long pause, she added, "I don't tell my dad when I'm having problems with friends because I think he would be disappointed in me. I'm just afraid he's going to look down on me, like why are you having problems? Or if I'm not friends with someone anymore."

  I had never known Danielle, normally exuberant, to be this quiet. "I look back on it now and I realize it was so mean and cruel," she said. And then, somewhere after sixth grade, she said her personality did a "complete change." It was as simple as understanding that control isn't the right way to make friends. "I should gain my friends by being nice rather than..." She didn't finish. She could hardly imagine herself behaving in those ways today, and it was hard to remember the other times.

  Listening to Danielle, we are returned again to the centrality of relationship and connection in girls' lives. As the fear of isolation has fueled some girls' decisions to stay in bad friendships, here it inspired Danielle's controlling behavior. Adrienne Rich has written that a person who does not tell the truth "lives in fear of losing control. She cannot even desire a relationship without manipulation, since to be vulnerable to another person means for her the loss of control."58 A fear of isolation or abandonment, then, may be key to understanding some alternative aggressions.

  the wages of repression

  "When my parents divorced, I was mad a lot," said Molly, who was sitting opposite me on the yellowed grass in the sun outside her junior high. Pale and lanky, she had a mop of brown hair, green eyes, braces, and the awkward, slightly stretched features of a girl on the cusp of a growth spurt. "I was mad at my friends," she explained, "because, you know, everybody has two parents and I don't."

  Molly was in eighth grade and living in Ridgewood with her mother, who has a degenerative disease. Although her mother was not wheelchair bound, her walking was impaired and she was in chronic pain. Molly's father, whom Molly saw every other weekend, lived in another town. Her mother's illness made her father's absence even more difficult.

  Molly thought her friends often bragged about their nuclear families. They talked about going to the mall with their mothers, a trip Molly's mom had never been well enough to make. Recently, a friend had a birthday party and invited all the girls and their mothers to shop together. Molly couldn't go. When her friends asked why Molly's mother did not volunteer at church, or mother-daughter activities, Molly felt embarrassed and left out. "I'm like, 'Well, that's kind of hard for me,' and they're like, 'Well, I can't help it,' and I'm like, 'Well, I can't either.'" Molly looked at me. "It's not fair. It's like they're laughin' at you or something."

  I asked Molly if they have laughed about it to her face.

  "I don't think they exactly laugh at me," she said slowly, thinking. "I'm sure most people feel sorry for me. I just think that maybe when I say stuff like that, they kind of look at each other, look around, just try to get off the subject or something. And that really hurts my feelings."

  When she gets angry, Molly said, she tries to ignore it and stop thinking about it. "I try to look on the bright side," she said, "and think, at least I have a mother, some people don't have a mother." She listed a few things that could be worse. But sometimes, when she can't ignore the anger, she feels it inside all day "till it drives me crazy." Then she cries. During those times, she said, her father is not around when she needs him, so she may get angry at her friends or their parents. "It's not their fault," she said, "but the anger has to go somewhere so it goes to whoever I'm around."

  She had "blown up" only once at her mother for the ways her disease constrains Molly's life, and especially for not having a boyfriend. "I didn't mean to," Molly said, twisting a clump of grass into rope. "Now I'm just kind of sorry I did." After Molly yelled, her mother was silent for a long time. "She goes, 'Well, I can't help it. I'm disabled. Nobody wants me, you know.'" Surely there was someone out there, Molly pleaded. "And she just sort of looked at me funny." The conflict "sort of blew away," she said, because they never spoke of the subject, or the fight, again.

  In general, Molly tried to keep her mother at arm's length. Molly was always having to take down posters in her room when they offended her mother's fervent Baptist beliefs, even the Backstreet Boys pictures. Her mother wouldn't buy her rock-and-roll music and preferred to hear Christian music in their home. Out with her friends once, Molly mentioned her mother didn't like her browsing through the rock posters. "They look at me like I'm crazy. And that makes me mad because I'm like, y'all, it's just the way she is, I can't say anything about it."

  Molly said she has made fUn of girls over the years: "Their clothes, hair, just anything that came to mind." Afterward she'd feel bad and try unsuccessfully to be friends. Other times she's gotten in fights. "I was so mad," she explained, "and I wanted to start a fight." She threatened a girl, so they went outside, but nothing happened. Like the conflict with her mother, "it sort of blew off."

  I asked Molly what it feels like to be angry. "You feel hatred toward somebody and you try not to, but it's like they've been pulling on you and it's kind of hard to stop yourself when someone's pulling," she said. "You keep thinking about it and the more you think about it, the worse it makes you feel." When she finally decides to act, "Going after somebody, you have the intention to tear into them. You build all these emotions up into this steam like you want to run that person over. And you feel hateful, you feel hate towards them, and a lot of times you want to go at them. A lot of times you can't stop yourself. You want to but you can't stop yourself. It's hard to stop yourself once you start." Like the aggression Anne Campbell observed in women, Molly's aggression emerges only unpredictably, when she no longer has the strength to resist it.

  Molly cherished her best friend, but lately there had been a lot of tension between them. "She gets mad at me and I'll do anything to be her friend again. I'll do anything," she said urgently. But Kate has rarely said why she was angry at Molly, so Molly has asked, waited patiently, written "nice letters." Then, she explained, "just one day, the next day, she'll start talking to me, and we'll start talking, and it just all goes away. I don't think about it anymore."

  "I can't say anything about it": these words, Moll
y's own, were the story of her life. On her plate were more restriction, more stress, than most reasonable adults could handle. Divorce, disability, economic hardship, religious restrictions—the list went on and on. Molly was, against the odds, trying to be a "good girl," to "look at the bright side," to care for her ailing mother, to swallow life without an attentive father, to be understanding of the disease that debilitated her mother and bridled her own life, a disease that made even things like car pooling and play dates and clothes shopping embarrassing.

  Like so many girls, Molly lets go only when she can't stop herself, when the anger pops, although most times, as she said, the conflict "blows away." Her passive tone belies the truth she feels: that in fact she is not entitled to conflict, to anger, to expressing her intense emotions. Her mother, who asks Molly to empathize and nurture, cannot bear the burden of her frustration. Nor can her father, whose rare company must be treasured, whom she must please. Under these circumstances, aggression will seep through only the most permeable wall, and it is likely Molly feels most herself, and least restricted, when she is with her friends.

  Molly is as passionate and fierce as graffiti, telling me hurriedly that she wants to be better than others, to be the best student, the prettiest, and "all that stuff." She has run for class president and homecoming queen (this last one is frustrating; she never wins because she isn't popular at all). Even as she told me of her penchant to cut people down who compete with her, to make fun of girls' families and friends, to spread rumors and talk behind people's backs, she told me, "I try to be nice to everyone. I just want to be everyone's friend. I want everyone to like me, and if I do anything to hurt somebody's feelings I want them to know that I didn't mean to do it or anything."

  Perhaps more than anyone else I interviewed, Molly exemplifies the girl who has been taught not to know aggression, and yet is incapable of not knowing it. That she is clearly not a conventional bully makes her story a powerful example of how keeping girls away from natural feelings of anger can lead them to cruel or inappropriate acts. For Molly, anger is both foreign and central to her self, and the combination leaves her at once blinded and submerged by it.

  When I asked women and girls to talk about times they had bullied or been mean to other girls, they were suddenly indisposed. There were closets to be cleaned, homework to get done, cavities to be filled. After reading some of my interview questions, one girl blocked me from e-mailing her ever again.

  At first I thought my inability to track down girl bullies would be a fatal flaw in my research, but it turned out to be the research itself. If girls were going to such great lengths to hide their aggression, they'd hardly be breaking down my door to talk about it. Girls think being "mean"—conveying open, individual expressions of negative feelings—is just as bad as being fat, ugly, or uncool. So, for that matter, do most women. "Mean" undermines the core of the feminine identity: to be nice, to nurture, to say yes. As it turned out, I was coming up against the same problems as the first aggression researchers, who took women at their word when they refused to be aggressive under the microscope.

  I can see things more clearly now. I can remember girls widely acknowledged to be bullies, girls whose multiple targets had interviewed individually with me for hours, who assure me that, "When I get angry, I'll read my Bible" or "When I'm mad, I'll get sad. It doesn't feel good to be angry." I waited for a disclosure that would never come.

  The same thing had happened the first time I asked a group of mostly white, middle-class girls to volunteer stories of being mean. They'd looked at me as though I'd asked them to swallow live goldfish. The next time, I took the hint. I asked the girls to role-play a hypothetical situation with girl bullies and targets they didn't know. The floodgates opened. As long as they didn't have to personally identify as mean, they had plenty to say.

  The weirdest thing was, I had done the same thing. When I first started hanging out with girls, I never identified myself as a former mean girl. My victimization in third grade was a trump card that had embedded itself comfortably into my life's narrative. People nodded gravely when they heard why I was writing the book. "Oh, of course," they said, their eyes serious and sympathetic. The truth is, I approached writing this chapter the same way I'd sauntered into that Washington lounge to meet Anne: without a thought to my own capacity for cruelty. That wasn't me, I thought; I did what I had to do. I was merely an accomplice, an enabler. I was different than Abby, than Rebecca: they were demons. They were evil.

  Then, after writing up the stories of Kathy, Megan, and the others, something felt wrong to me. I couldn't put my finger on it, but eventually I knew: I couldn't deliver the demon. There was no evil child here, no bad apple. These girls were good people who had done bad things, and for understandable, if not good, reasons. They were not the cold, cunning creatures girl bullies are so often made out to be.

  The belief that we are only targets or only bullies has caricatured the memories and discussions of girls' meanness. It has also helped many of us dismiss the complexity of our own behavior. The upshot is that it's transformed "us against them" into "us against us."

  By washing our hands of our own capacity to injure, we perpetuate the stereotype that females are nonaggressive. We become accomplices in the culture's repression of assertive women and girls by making aggression pathological, private, and hidden. We also help silence the public discussion of the ways and reasons girls are mean to each other. Most disturbingly, we become strangers to each other. By leaving these episodes in the private, emotional realm, by continuing to imagine those who have bullied us living in the gutter and falling off cliffs—and trust me, I have—we deprive alternative aggressions of a fair hearing and ourselves of a more honest sisterhood, because to put it out there would mean we have to admit to ourselves that inside we are all mean, that inside we are all aggressive. And girlfriends, we are.

  "Oh, yeah," I'd hear in cafés, at parties, on grocery lines. "It happened to me." Nearly everyone I met had a story to tell, a wretched moment to remember. But meanness, anger, impulsive, thoughtless behavior—it's in each of us. Even my conscience cannot throw itself fast enough before the speeding train of my meanness: I have indulged in the knowledge of a shared secret, in eyes locking exclusively with someone else's or rolling in furtive annoyance. I have said I wasn't angry when I was, then degraded people behind their backs. I have gossiped. I have relished that rush of inclusion at the expense of an odd girl out. Have you?

  The question bears answering.

  It is time to own our own feelings—to own up, as author Rosalind Wiseman would say.59 It is time, in all seriousness, to get in touch with our inner bully.

  When we hide natural feelings of competition, jealousy, anger, and resentment, we lie to each other and ourselves. Our friendships, as so many of us know, pay the price. When I started living with my close friend and college roommate Jenny, our first big fight swelled rotten and quiet inside our small apartment until one day it cracked wide open. "You make me feel badly because I wake up at eleven in the morning!" she said. "Your boyfriend's too loud when he comes in at night," I shot back. We went back and forth, beckoning each other toward the edge, where we finally teetered perilously. I seesawed between rage and panic. I knew I was being defensive, even irrational, but I could hardly contain my anger. "I'm just not sure if this is going to work out," she said quietly. She sounded resigned and sad. "I just don't know if we can do this."

  My head felt gummy. I was holding my breath, tingling with fear. "What is it?" I finally shouted. "What is so bad here that we have to end our friendship?"

  Then, abruptly, she asked, "Don't you think you're arrogant?" I froze. Was this a trick question?

  "Yes?" I half asked, mental fingers crossed.

  "Good," she said. "Because if you hadn't said that, I wouldn't be able to trust you."

  Now we said it: I was jealous. I was jealous of her beautiful body and her irresistible sexual allure. I was jealous of her spiritual enlightenment, the ea
se with which she loved and was loved. Jenny was jealous, too: of my steely self-discipline, my grasp of current events. She envied my social life and my regular gym schedule.

  Here we were, two young women standing tremulous before the Great and Powerful Oz. The curtain had been pulled back, and jealousy, expelled between us on the black couch, was laid bare. Now that we had confessed it, face to face, now that it had been yanked from its hiding place, jealousy was nothing special, nothing insurmountable. In fact, as we looked at each other, still sitting there intact, jealousy felt like nothing much, not even half of what we thought it would be.

  Thinking back to that day, I remember the summer I learned to kayak. The guide instructed me to lean into the rush of the river's current, but when I began to lean in that first time I jerked back, muscles taut. No way: I was going to capsize. My body's instinct was to lean against the weight of the water to create balance. If you do that, the instructor warned, you're going to flip over.

  Jealousy feels this way: that it must be sequestered, that it will be the end of our friendships if we show it the light of day. But what saved Jenny and me that day was that the jealousy and anger became ours—not mine, not hers, not inside of us as it was, silent as a tumor, corroding us from within. When we acknowledged it, when we named it, it lost its dark, baleful hugeness. We gave it a place inside our relationship, made it a part of us, for better or for worse. And we were released.

  How close I came to saying I wasn't arrogant but instead humble and sweet, ever respectful of others. How easy it was to forget Anne, to let my betrayal fade away from my consciousness. Our culture has made truth telling and anger, indeed, everything that is "not nice," feel very wrong to girls. We have been taught that the right answer is the one that hurts the least. As Brown and Gilligan have shown us, it is critical that girls learn how to expose their most uncomfortable feelings to "the air and the light of relationship."60 For at the core of us are natural feelings of anger and desire, the messy, uncomfortable truths that make us, our relationships, our friends and lovers, imperfect.