Odd Girl Out
Page 24
Girls bullied by their best or close friends often find themselves in these situations. Many parents have asked me to decipher the power these girls exercise over their daughters. The only answer I have is the one the girls give me: the bully controls her target by controlling her version of events. For instance, when Michelle protested Erin's behavior, Michelle was told that she was almost always wrong, that it really happened this way, or not at all. "She would always get mad," Michelle recalled. "If you were mad at her about something, she would turn it around so that it was your fault. It would always be my fault, my fault, my fault."
When I suggested to Natalie that she confront Reese, Natalie retorted, "When you talk to her, she'll tell you a different story, and she's going to have all these explanations that make sense to you!" For these girls, it feels easier to believe someone else's story rather than their own. If they can know themselves as at fault and in need of forgiveness, they can continue to believe in the relationship rather than feel that they have been cast out of the circle of friendship.
the truth about popularity
It may come as a surprise, but once a girl gets her coveted status, popularity is no walk in the park. Competition and insecurity are rampant. When popular girls talk about their social lives, many of them talk about losing themselves. Their feelings closely mirror the symptoms psychologists associate with girls' loss of self-esteem.
Corinna, a sixth grader, was devastated when she lost one of her close friends to the popular clique. The girl and her new friends would "talk and walk very close together, and if one of their other good friends said hi, they won't, they don't, they can't hear," she remembered. Corinna set out to be included in the popular group and eventually won her way in. Once she was the one excluding her other friends from the popular crowd, Corinna felt dislocated and strange. "I know that I am kind of excluding [my other less popular friends] and I don't want to do that. But I feel like it's literally a bubble or something, and you get sucked in and then when you go out and stuff, it's just like so weird." She paused. "It's like, you go in, it's like, all of this talk and I don't know what else. They talk about boys and all these things. They have inside jokes that I don't really get."
I asked what it felt like inside the bubble.
"It kind of feels good because I'm like included, but then again I know these aren't the best friends for me," she explained. Here Corinna echoes the observations of Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan: she has sacrificed her connection to her true feelings in order to remain in less authentic relationships with others.63 In the process, she becomes disconnected from herself.
"I belong but I don't belong," she continued. "I fit into a lot of groups but I'm not part of any group. I'm walking around alone at recess. Sometimes I feel like I have so many friends but sometimes I feel like I have none, and everyone likes me or maybe they're just being nice." And sometimes, she said later, "sometimes I'll get sad and go into a shell even though I'm a happy-go-lucky person."
At Linden, Alexis, an extremely popular freshman, confided how hard it can be to keep up with other girls. "You don't trust anyone. You're totally insecure. To everyone you look fine, but it's very fake." Her friend Sarah agreed. "Are you my friend because of me or because I know this guy? False friendships are kept up for image all the time."
Now a sophomore, Lily Carter told me, "It takes so much more effort to be a part of that group than not to because when you're in that group it's so intense. It's like every second of every day you have to be perfect. You need to be perfect, your makeup needs to be perfect, you need to be wearing the perfect clothes. Your whole presence needs to be perfect, the way people look at you, the way you look at yourself. You know, I mean, what you say, everything you say, how the guys treat you, everything has to be perfect.... [The hardest part] is that you're not perfect. That you're not doing everything perfectly. And that one day, you're going to wake up and you're just not going to be popular. And you're not going to have those friends anymore."
The closer they edge toward the center of the clique, the more some girls are urged to silence their own authentic voices. A few spoke to me wistfully of wanting to appear less "hyper," while some mentioned friends who warned that boisterous play was inappropriate and unattractive. These girls feel like they are no longer entitled to "be myself."
Heathers was the first in a string of movies depicting the clandestine politics of popular girl cliques. By the late 1990s, however, something had changed. A new fairy tale was being spun, and this time the prince was beside the point. In films like She's All That and Cruel Intentions, the romance was with popularity, the transformation of the girl from school geek to clique goddess. Popularity became so popular that it got its own show on the WB channel. In the film Jawbreaker, Courtney is part fairy godmother and mostly witch as she offers Fern the chance of a lifetime: "You're nothing. We're everything. You're the shadow, we're the sun. But I'm here to offer you something you never dared dream of. Something you were never meant to be. We're going to make you one of us. Beautiful and popular."
For better or worse, popularity is accepted by researchers and schools alike as a tool children use to group themselves socially. But the sheer volume of incidents of aggression spawned by the race for popularity deserves a closer investigation. Why is it so many of us are well trained to spot destructive images portraying girls as thin and beautiful, but we overlook the subtext of the race for popularity: that girls must be liked, even worshiped by their peers, often at the expense of authentic relationships? If some girls who want to be skinny starve themselves, some girls trying to be popular destroy one another. This makes popularity, and the race for it, as dangerous an issue for girls as weight, appearance, or sexuality.
When the politics of popularity devastate girls' relationships, the loss is multilayered. A girl is abandoned by someone she loves and trusts. The loss signals her low social value, an event that shrinks her self-esteem and for which she blames herself. She learns a new, dark understanding of relationship as a tool. And where the abandonment is public and followed by cruelty, there is public scorn and shame. For the newly popular girl, there is the danger of losing herself as she moves on and up into the "bubble."
The rules of popularity require that the girl who has arrived police herself as harshly as others do to maintain her status. The myth that popular girls are blissfully content couldn't be more wrong. The closer you get to the epicenter of popularity, the more perilous it gets. "Even though it looks secure, it's the most insecure thing in the world," Erin told me. "Everything changes in there. You compete with those five people every day: who does things first, who looks the best. It's hard and competitive. There's so much insecurity and fighting because you're selfish."
Lounging in a circle, sixteen eighth-grade girls were speaking informally with me about the feeling of being judged by others. Leslie, lying on her back, head propped up under clasped hands, had had it with me. I could tell. If her brown eyes rolled any higher they would disappear. She rocked her body up, exasperated. "Look, we can't stop talking about each other, okay?" she said. "We're addicted! As soon as we walk out of this room we're going to talk about what everyone said."
Bronwyn, a popular girl who had been sitting quietly for thirty minutes, finally raised her hand. "I just wish that people wouldn't judge each other, saying this person's not good enough. I hang around some people who just sit there and make fun of what people wear. I sit there and listen to it because I consider them my friends, but it bothers me. If they talk about other people, what are they saying about me?"
No one answered. They were thinking.
Chapter Eight
resistance
For some girls, silence and indirection are neither attractive nor an option. They are instead signs of weakness. I found this to be true especially among the girls I met whose lives were marked by oppression. For them, assertiveness and anger were tools of spiritual strength. These young women might encounter the misogyny of families and neig
hbors, the racism of teachers, and threats of violence in their neighborhoods. Where economic struggle and disenfranchisement prevail, self-assertion and aggression become as much a part of the social landscape as playgrounds and ice-cream trucks. In this world, silence can mean invisibility and danger.
Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan have found that girls on the margins of their school communities, whether because of race or class, "were more likely to stay in touch with their thoughts and feelings and to have close, confiding relationships."64 Researchers studying the self-esteem and emotional health of some working-class girls and girls of color report findings that run directly counter to the signs of loss so epidemic in white, middle-class girls.
Indeed, the now-famous American Association of University Women's 1990 report on girls found that black girls scored highest on self-esteem measures throughout adolescence.65 In interviews with urban adolescents, psychologist Niobe Way discovered a unique tendency to "speak one's mind" in relationships. The girls she interviewed, who came from predominantly working-class African American families, described relationships empowered, not dissolved, by conflict.66
These girls are exceptional. The heart of their resistance appears to be an ease with truth telling, a willingness to know and voice their negative emotions. When girls make a choice to value their emotions, they value themselves. They tell the truth because their survival may depend on raising their voices in a hostile culture.
How might the face of girls' anger take on a different appearance, and why? Not all girls resort to alternative aggressions as a primary means of releasing negative feelings. In this chapter, I explore the use and origins of truth telling as a means of resisting silence and oppression. I conclude with the story of a target of bullying, whose despair prompted her to fight back.
My own white, middle-class background made me especially aware of my difference when I spoke with girls in less-privileged communities. At times, I was positively floored by some girls' courage and outspokenness, which felt so different from my own. In spite of this, I repeated to myself—and now share with you, the reader—the words of bell hooks, who cautions us to avoid romanticizing the truth telling of African American girls. Truth telling and assertiveness, she argues, are "not necessarily traits associated with building self-esteem. An outspoken girl might still feel worthless because her skin was not light enough or the right texture."
hooks urges us to remember that "[t]here is no one story of black girlhood."67 Indeed, now that the white, middle-class experience is being dislodged as the exclusive model for research, it is especially important to heed hooks's words. To imagine a universal minority female experience would be to repeat exclusive patterns of research. Girls from all walks of life have different experiences. Not all white, middle-class girls avoid conflict, and not all other girls embrace it. Every child is her own person, with her own unique set of life circumstances.
Indeed, dominant middle-class notions of femininity are foreign to the experience of many white girls. "I know where I come from," writes author and essayist Dorothy Allison, "and it is not that part of the world."68 Research confirms that some working-class white children are socialized by their parents to use physical aggression to protect themselves from peers. After spending a year in the working-class Maine town of Mansfield, Lyn Mikel Brown noticed how the girls she studied resisted some aspects of the middle-class model of femininity while embracing others.
Although these girls are care-givers and nurturers, they reveal, often with pride, that part of themselves that is outspoken and direct, that knows and expresses deep, passionate anger, even that part of themselves prone to uncontrollable rage.... While their experience of themselves and their perception of relationships contest the selflessness and purity typically associated with white middle-class notions of motherhood and femininity, care-taking, nurturance, and responsiveness hold a central place in their lives.
Although Brown would find, as I did, many working-class girls who were unwilling to bring anger into their close relationships, she concludes that "they do so, not because anger is a culturally inappropriate emotion, but because they need their friends."69 The Mansfield girls at once appreciate and elude anger, presenting an alternative picture of girls' relationship to aggression.
getting physical
The e-mail came a few days after the 2000 New Year. "I am a Caucasian female who often experienced physical confrontations by African American and Mexican American females. I was not the aggressor. I protected myself and my two sisters were always looking out for me. We did not tolerate any crap, we knocked the shit out of these girls. Do not get me wrong, though, I never looked for, or wanted to fight."
Bonnie was twenty-eight and studying at a midwestern university for her master's in social work. "I was in so many fights," she wrote in her e-mail, "that I was expelled from the entire county school district. Basically my high school education was ruined. I finally graduated with a GED from the Job Corps in 1989." The youngest of three girls and a boy, she grew up in rural Southern California. Shortly after her brother died, the family moved to a working-class neighborhood in San Jose, "a suburb-city," she noted, "but it certainly didn't seem like [a suburb] to me."
The family was raised by Bonnie's mother, a survivor of multiple violent relationships with men, including a husband who beat Bonnie and her sisters. When Bonnie began her freshman year, her two sisters were already upperclassmen. They were everything to her. If anything truly anchored Bonnie during this stormy time, it was the almost religious devotion the sisters had to one another. "If there was some sort of crisis," she explained, "we would always know about it and be right there for each other.... We were very tight. No matter how angry we were." She recalls one sister as a guardian angel. "She would appear at these strange moments when I was in trouble."
Bonnie's new school was a confusing patchwork of the cliques and fervent musical subcultures that marked 1980s America. African American students were embracing hip-hop, while Bonnie was swept up in the culture of Lita Ford-style rock and roll. Pictures show Bonnie's hair blond and feathered back, her Levi's tight and tapered down the leg. She struggled through her first year, and by January was failing nearly all of her classes. She was cutting school more than she attended it.
Bonnie clashed often with her African American peers. Nasty looks were exchanged in the halls, insults were traded about clothing and style. Remembering the hostility, Bonnie was unrepentant about her own role in the conflicts, refusing to take responsibility for provoking anyone's anger. "I never considered myself to be a bully," she insisted, "or someone that would harass or assault anybody, although if someone assaulted me, I was going to protect myself and what I perceived as my own honor."
Bonnie does concede that her social skills weren't great, but she is quick to point out that she prized friendship above all else. "That was one of the things we prided ourselves on—making friends. Being accepting of others," she said. "I wasn't lacking in the fact that I knew how to treat people, and that you don't hit people unless you expect to be hit back."
One day, along the south side of the school, the rock-and-roll and heavy-metal crowd mingled on their part of the block, colonizing their patch of curb. An acquaintance of Bonnie's ran up, breathless. She had turned away an interested African American boy, and another girl who had been interested in him, also African American, was angry.
Twenty minutes later, the girls saw a crowd of African American girls coming toward them up Elm Street. "White trash!" they shouted. One of the girls came dangerously close to Bonnie. She told me she still can't remember who grabbed who first. "I think it was us—we grabbed her and threw her on the ground and jumped on top of her." A melee ensued. Bonnie looked up and saw one of her sisters surrounded by three girls, one of whom began swinging.
Once again, she couldn't remember what came next. "I went blank. I must have flipped out," she told me. "My friend said I threw the girls up against fences and went crazy."
Bonni
e was expelled and sent to another high school. She could return to her old school if she went without a fight for six months. At the new school, determined as she was to return to her sisters, there were more fights. Bonnie was sent to yet another school for troubled youth, or, as Bonnie put it, "where all the fuckups went." Bonnie grew angrier and skipped even more school.
Cat had been Bonnie's best friend for two years. Pugnacious, rowdy, and an inveterate rule breaker, Cat inspired suspicion in everyone around her. Bonnie was no exception, not least when she finally got her first serious boyfriend. "I said, 'You can do anything you want. You can have anyone you want, but don't fUck with me and don't fuck my boyfriend.'...I said, 'Listen to me. You sleep with my boyfriend, I will kick your ass. I will do this to you.'"
When she heard that Cat had hooked up with her boyfriend, Bonnie marched up to Cat in the hallway at school. "I didn't want to," Bonnie told me, "but people had known that I said that, and I had a reputation to protect. I was forced to. I had no choice but to put my hands on her. I said, 'What the fuck do you think you're doing? I don't even want to kick your ass and now I have to.'" Bonnie led her off school property to avoid further disciplinary action.
"I knew if I didn't, people were going to lose respect for me," she said, "and that opened me to more potential threats, disrespect. I told her straight out, over and over again, 'Don't do this or these will be the consequences.' I guess," she added, probably for my sake, "I was being a bully but in a way I was showing consequence to her."
Bonnie knew if she didn't fight Cat, she would disgrace her sisters' reputation, something she could not live with. "We had a real reputation for not taking anyone's shit," she explained. "If I would have backed down, everyone would have felt free to walk all over us." Bonnie stood opposite Cat, having repeated for the last time the terms of the deal. Cat had broken the rule. Bonnie grabbed Cat and punched her in the chest. Cat didn't move. Bonnie punched her four or five times, in the arm, in the stomach. Cat fell limply on the ground and lay there silent, refusing to fight.