Bad
Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?
Lyn
Mikel Brown, Ed.D
Brown
is associate professor of Education at Colby College
and author of Raising Their Voices: The Politics of
Girls' Anger (Harvard University Press 1998) and the forthcoming Girlfighting:
Betrayal and Rejection Among Girls (New York University Press, September
2003).
Meda
Chesney-Lind, Ph.D
Chesney-Lind
is professor of Women's Studies at the University of
Hawaii at Manoa and co-author of Girls, Delinquency
and Juvenile Justice (Wadsworth, 2003), The Female
Offender (Sage, 2003) and Female Gangs in America (Lakeview Press, 1999).
____________________________________________
Suddenly
the world is filled with nasty girls. "Girls just
want to be mean," the New York Times Magazine announced last year as a slew of new books on girls' relational
aggression told us how "to tame them," to use
the Times' own words.
Girls
will be (backstabbing, catty) girlsÑthe latest flavor
de jour of the American media's love affair with "bad" girls.
Hardly a new idea in a country that grew up reading Longfellow's poem about his
daughter: "when
she was good, she was very very good, but when she was
bad she was horrid."
Now
comes the ultimate girl fight in living color. Full-scale "savagery
in the Chicago suburbs," Newsweek called it. Junior girls from the privileged Glenbrook North High
School paid for the right to be hazed by seniors at the
annual powder puff football game. After the beatings
and humiliations ended, five girls were sent to the hospital,
one with a broken ankle, another with a concussion so
serious it caused memory loss, another to receive 10
stitches in her scalp.
As
authors who write about girls' anger, aggression and
violence, we are troubled, for reasons that are obvious
and some that are less so. Violence that girls perpetrate
on other girls, whether it's emotional or physical, is
cause for concern. But the media frenzy that greeted
the lurid and voyeuristic video of girls fighting other
girls is also problematic. In fact, it signals another
major issue for those concerned about girls development.
Girls grow up in a world that has long encouraged, them
to turn their
rage against one another and then likes to be in the
audience for the fight. Like the Glenbrook parents, they
might even supply the beer .
Girls'
anger has a long history of being dismissed ("she's
just a bitch," "it must be PMS") and trivialized
("you're beautiful when you're angry"). Girls
violence is generally either ignored entirely or sensationalized
and sexualized. Girlfighting, in particular, is often presented
as a spectacle (consider mud or Jello wrestling) enjoyed
for its eroticism as much as its entertainment value (think
Jerry Springer).
The
hazing we watched up-close and personal, over and over
again, was horrifying, but questions about how and why
the episode gripped the nation are at least as troubling.
Who was it watching the events unfold on the field? Why
was it caught on videotape to begin with? How was it
passed on to cable and network television? Who made the
decision to run it repeatedly? Why was it international
news?
Girlfighting
as spectator sport. Again.
Why,
when boys perpetrate 80 percent of serious violence in
the U.S., is this the story that captivates us-and helps
define a generation of girls?
In
the shock and awe, we've missed the point. The school
principal suggests this is just kids with "old scores
to settle." That doesn't tell us enough and, worse,
it fudges the real issues.
This
was girls fighting over boyfriends and popularity. The
seniors used words like "bitches," "wimps," and "sluts" to
shame the juniors into staying on the field. In what
many think of as post-feminist America, it's not popular
to raise issues of power and subordination, but the fact
that girls are fighting other girls in front of videotaping
boys, is hardly insignificant. That girls used sexist
and misogynistic language to control other girls during
and after the event and that their fights were primarily
for boys' attention and favor is a symptom of deeper
cultural problems. As with many girl fights, boys are
both the "cause" of girl's violence and the real audience.
We
need to ask harder, more critical questions about why
girls are fighting. Why embrace insults that ratify the
sexual double standard? Why is strength in women always
de-valued as "bitchiness?" Why the endless competition
among girls for male approval? And why fight each other
instead of against a culture still rife with sexism and
violence toward women?
Girlfighting
gets acted out horizontally on other girls because this
is the safest and easiest outlet for their outrage and
frustration. Girls are essentially accessing and mimicking
the male violence they sometimes know all too well; and
they are choosing victims that are societally approvedÑother
girls. This pattern of horizontal aggression has long
characterized subordinate groups since it manages the
inevitable anger in the group being controlled without
jeopardizing the over all structure of male privilege.
Girls'
violence also served one additional purpose. It's not
uncommon for the targets of that violence to, themselves,
be the group members that are challenging the rigid norms
of girlhood. Why, for example, wouldn't the girlfighters
go after those "girly girls" that the media
continuously tells them are weak, vapid, and stupid?
From the evil head cheerleaders in the Disney Channel's Kim
Possible and Lizzie McGuire, to The Man
Show's Juggy Squad on Comedy Central, to Thong
Song wannabes, these girls make easy targets.
Girls
who take out other girls for being "dykes," "hos," and "bitches" can
prove they are different, worth taking seriously, a force
to contend with. No wimps, wusses, or victims here. But
this posturing is short-lived protection at best, because
selling out other girls this way only continues a climate
of misogyny, and any wrong move can quickly turn the
perpetrator into a victim
The
problem is not girls; the problem is a culture that denigrates,
commodifies and demoralizes women and then gets a - kick
out watching the divide and conquer consequences.
There's
an old saying, "men
kill their weak, women kill their strong." If
we would give girls legitimate avenues to power, value
their minds as much as their bodies, they'd be less likely
to go down those nasty, underhanded or openly hostile
roads, less likely to take their legitimate rage out
on other girls. Let's face it, "meanness" and other covert
aggressions are, in the final analysis, weapons of the
weak; horizontal violence ultimately ratifies boy not
girl power. When we join with girls to- create real pathways
to power and possibility, we'll have a lot less to video
tape and we'd have a lot more to be proud of both in
ourselves and in our daughters.
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