Girlfighting

Betrayal and Rejection among Girls

Lyn Mikel Brown

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780814799512
• eBook ISBN: 9780814787069
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Social Sciences

Offers a developmental explanation for girlfighting and pathways to build girl allies

For some time, reality TV, talk shows, soap-operas, and sitcoms have turned their spotlights on women and girls who thrive on competition and nastiness. Few fairytales lack the evil stepmother, wicked witch, or jealous sister. Even cartoons feature mean and sassy girls who only become sweet and innocent when adults appear. And recently, popular books and magazines have turned their gaze away from ways of positively influencing girls' independence and self-esteem and towards the topic of girls' meanness to other girls. What does this say about the way our culture views girlhood? How much do these portrayals affect the way girls view themselves?

In Girlfighting, psychologist and educator Lyn Mikel Brown scrutinizes the way our culture nurtures and reinforces this sort of meanness in girls. She argues that the old adage "girls will be girls"—gossipy, competitive, cliquish, backstabbing— and the idea that fighting is part of a developmental stage or a rite-of-passage, are not acceptable explanations. Instead, she asserts, girls are discouraged from expressing strong feelings and are pressured to fulfill unrealistic expectations, to be popular, and struggle to find their way in a society that still reinforces gender stereotypes and places greater value on boys. Under such pressure, in their frustration and anger, girls (often unconsciously) find it less risky to take out their fears and anxieties on other girls instead of challenging the ways boys treat them, the way the media represents them, or the way the culture at large supports sexist practices.

Girlfighting traces the changes in girls' thoughts, actions and feelings from childhood into young adulthood, providing the developmental understanding and theoretical explanation often lacking in other conversations. Through interviews with over 400 girls of diverse racial, economic, and geographic backgrounds, Brown chronicles the labyrinthine journey girls take from direct and outspoken children who like and trust other girls, to distrusting and competitive young women. She argues that this familiar pathway can and should be interrupted and provides ways to move beyond girlfighting to build girl allies and to support coalitions among girls.

By allowing the voices of girls to be heard, Brown demonstrates the complex and often contradictory realities girls face, helping us to better understand and critique the socializing forces in their lives and challenging us to rethink the messages we send them.

1
Reading the Culture of Girlfighting

SARA, A TWENTY-YEAR-OLD COLLEGE STUDENT, sits forward in her chair in a way that suggests earnestness. Her wavy dark hair is pulled back in a ponytail; her intense brown eyes hold my gaze whenever she comments or answers a question. She has an air of self-assurance. I think about this as I stand before this classroom full of students, mostly sophomores like Sara; a room full of adolescents here to learn about adolescence. I recall her paper; it’s somewhere in the pile I’m handing back today, still speaking to me, pulling at me. The assignment was autobiographical, to explore a significant moment in early adolescence. Sara chose to reveal her painful, protracted search for popularity:

It was in fourth grade that I discovered what popularity meant… friends, security, and the envy of my peers…. I started to associate myself with the popular girls. I worked my way in slowly, quietly, and took a back seat to the “leaders” of the group. I dressed like they did, walked like they did…. I remember using a valley girl voice for the second half of fourth grade, placing “like” in between almost every word. It was difficult and drove me and my parents crazy, but it was necessary in order to attain rank.

By fifth grade I was there. I was popular. I made sacrifices along the way, losing touch with my best friend who didn’t fit the “mold,” using my allowance to supplement the clothes allowance my parents gave me in order to buy the designer clothes, spending my winter recesses freezing on the playground because wearing a hat wasn’t cool, sleeping over at strangers’ houses where I wasn’t comfortable because the hostess had popular status, and putting down others in order to ensure my place at the top.

Talking behind “friends’” backs became second nature, and I became an excellent liar to deal with the rare occasions when people confronted me about my inconsistencies…. They called us the “clan,” even the teachers did, and I always thought of it as a fitting and endearing title. It gave us an aura of being elite, exclusive, and that was exactly what we were….

On the surface, I assumed everyone loved me by the time I reached sixth grade. I was no longer the quiet one, the follower; I had become the leader who was being mimicked by twelve insecure followers. The strange thing was, I loved my friends dearly. We had slumber parties where we stayed up all night talking. We went on bike rides together, shopped together, even studied together. The times I treasured most were those that I spent with these girls as individuals. As a group we were a magnificent force whose wrath was feared by our unpopular peers…. We cut down others because we didn’t know how else to ensure that we wouldn’t be the ones teased relentlessly. We were selective about who we hung out with so others would feel privileged if we accepted them….

As the leader, I encouraged my friends to find fault in others. I didn’t see any other way for us to maintain an image of perfection unless others were imperfect. In this way I wanted to ensure that I would remain the leader of our group. I’d seen others fall from the throne, finally seen for their conniving and hurtful ways, and I worked overtime to be sure that didn’t happen to me. I was a liar, able to deceive anyone, and lucky for me I was good at all of this. After two years of practice at being just the right amount of nasty, I had everyone convinced that my life was perfect.

Within the group, I picked one target to put down, seeing in her the goodness and the ability to reveal to the others the type of person I was. I made her days difficult, finding her sensitive areas and using them as ammunition against her. She was from a home where her mother had a mental illness and her father was an alcoholic, something that I knew was abnormal and easy to justify as faulty. Despite the fact that such things were out of her control, the others followed my lead and teased her as often and as harshly as I did. I was successful; she finally left the group and didn’t reappear until the eighth grade when she was ready to confront me.

Sara can reveal this not so pretty story of her girlhood, in part because hers is a tale of redemption. At the end of sixth grade, a teacher falsely accused her of a misdeed, saying, “I know deep in my gut that you did this. You are the type of person who would do this.” This floored Sara—the jig was up; unbeknownst to her, others had seen and judged. Slowly she began to awaken to the fact that “my peers despised me; they all wanted to be me, but they hated me…. Everyone treated me with respect, wanted to gain popularity by associating with me, but they were all talking about me behind my back.”

When Sara pulled away, she “found that I was quickly replaced.” And worse, she was now the target. The popular group she had once led

came back for me with a vengeance. They were still a powerful force and were able to convince the entire school to hate me. There were notes on my desk when I got to class that read ‘DIE BITCH!’ and I couldn’t get so much as a look from any guys. They ruined me, devastated me to the point of missing nineteen days of school in eighth grade and I felt I deserved every minute of it.

Until fairly recently, bullying and aggression have been seen as boys’ issues. In the spring of 2001 I went to the foremost national conference on educational research and attended a number of panels on bullying, all so crowded that the audience flowed out the doors and stood in the hallways, straining to listen. Not one panelist addressed girlfighting or girl bullying, of the sort Sara describes, in any significant way. The clear assumption, among professionals at least, was that it was a boy problem. The same was true for the many articles in newspapers and magazines that followed the spate of school shootings. Identifying a bully really meant identifying the characteristics of a boy bully—and a white boy bully at that.¹ In fact, it’s true that only one of the twenty-nine school shooters has been a girl, and the more visible signs of bullying such as fist fights, pushing, and harassing and threatening behavior, were more likely to involve boys.

When it came to fighting or bullying, girls were a different matter or perhaps no real matter at all. There have been books written on girl gangs and violent girl behavior, but because such depictions of girls have been racialized—stereotyped and marginalized by the popular press as a problem of urban girls of color—educators have tended to dismiss the larger realities of girls’ anger and aggression these books address. Instead, the prevailing assumption has long been that girls are good at relationships; that their friendships and peer relationships, in particular, are responsive and healthy and, in spite of petty bickering and minor conflicts, devoid of really serious problems. Social science research on friendship has confirmed this for the most part. Intimacy is central to girls’ friendships and girls rely heavily on their best friends for love and support. Adolescent girls spend more time with their friends than do boys,² have smaller groups of friends than boys,³ expect and receive more kindness, loyalty, commitment, and empathic understanding from their best friends than do boys,⁴ and are more likely than boys to have open, self-disclosing relationships with their female peers.⁵

But there has also been a prevailing view that complaining and bickering, deceit, and back-stabbing are normal aspects of growing up female and thus not worthy of serious scholarly attention. Girls are simply, by nature, catty and mean to one another but compared to, say, shooting their classmates, this is nothing. When it came to really serious bullying behavior, girls were the victims, not the perpetrators. This cultural misconception has enormous power. When Carol Gilligan and I wrote about girls’ struggles to hold onto their thoughts and feelings at early adolescence, their loss of voice received all the attention. No one seemed particularly interested in the younger outspoken girls or the girls who fought back and resisted “the tyranny of nice and kind.”⁶ Popular books like Reviving Ophelia reinforced the image of a girl-victim crumbling under the weight of a girl-toxic culture.⁷

What a difference a few years make. First of all, no one likes to feel like a victim and in time girls began to write and edit their own books: Girl Power, Ophelia Speaks, Listen Up! and Adios Barbie.⁸ It’s not that simple or one-sided, the young authors explained—we speak, we fight back, we don’t just consume, we create; no one story or experience defines us. These books joined the work of a growing collection of feminist psychologists and “Girl Studies” scholars who have been attending to the day-to-day realities of being a girl, writing about alternatives to the victim story, and exploring new versions of girlhood connected to social and cultural context, history, and the material conditions of girls’ lives.⁹ Taking their lead, writers of more popular books have attempted to reclaim pejorative terms directed at girls and women and to question their persistence in the culture. My shelves display a series of titles that would shock my mother: Cunt, Bitch, Slut, and the less provocative Promiscuities and Fat Talk.¹⁰ Part of the process of reclamation is an appreciation of how these terms are used by girls and women to control and undermine other girls and women.

It’s perhaps not surprising, given these developing views of girls as more active and complicated and culture as less monolithic and absolute, that new versions of girlhood have emerged—girls as smart, strong, athletic, brave, resistant. Out of these versions, a new popular ideal, some might say a counterideal, has developed: girl as fighter. In response to girl as victim, which fed off stereotypes of femininity as passive and vulnerable, girl as fighter is assertive, usually smart, psychologically tough, physically strong.¹¹ Again, there have always been girlfighters, but they have been easily dismissed as outsiders to ideal (white and middle-class) femininity: the delinquent, the violent gang girl, the tough streetwise girl. This dismissal, of course, was a way of defending the white ideal against the ever-encroaching reality that things were more complicated. This new version of girl as fighter places a desire for power and visibility firmly within the cultural definition of femininity. The girlfighter is now just as likely to be the girl who does well in school, who plays sports, the girl teachers like, the girl next door.

But there’s something suspicious about this shift from victim to fighter. In the media there’s been a pendulum swing—girlfighting was way out; now it’s so in. TV offers us a range of smart fighters from Alias and CSI to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charmed, and Birds of Prey, while movies are filled with the likes of Lara Croft and Charlie’s Angels. Like girl as victim, the girlfighter maps too easily onto familiar assumptions about femininity. She’s more in than outlaw because her fighting is mediated by qualities that make her pleasing—and sexually appealing—to men. She redeems herself through her beauty, occasional vulnerability, and her romantic relationships. Indeed, if we consider the rise of the girlfighter in popular culture, I think we can see how she reinforces as much as she challenges long-standing assumptions about the “nature” of girls and women.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY

It’s odd that just as girls began to assert their complicated realities and just as girlfighting, fraught as it is, emerged in the popular press, we became obsessed in this culture with the “mean” girl. Mean girls began to surface in the news media in the mid-1990s, as real concern for girls’ anger and aggression collided with the titillating nature of girlfighting. A young writer for YO! asked, “Are girls turning meaner?”¹² The Boston Sunday Globe announced, “Schools see rise in girls fighting.”¹³ An article entitled “Mean Streak” in the Chicago Tribune claimed “girls have a knack for cruelty.”¹⁴ Girls’ Life asked, “Do mean girls finish first?” and advised readers to “beat a bully at her own game.”¹⁵ A New York Times Magazine special “How to” issue featured a nasty fight between two popular high school girls.¹⁶ Newspaper articles reported that a Texas beauty queen was stripped of her crown for threatening cheerleaders’ lives, while a Canadian beauty queen lost hers for assaulting another contestant. An article in New Moon Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams was entitled simply, “In Seventh Grade, All Girls Are Mean to All Other Girls.”¹⁷ At the same time, reports began to show that even if the total number of girls committing violent crimes is still small compared to boys, physical girlfighting and girl-initiated violence have increased exponentially since the mid-1980s or so.¹⁸

In response to such articles and reports, psychological research on relational forms of aggression or what some refer to as alternative aggressions, long buried under the “girl as victim” stereotype, started to garner public attention.¹⁹ Relational aggression, more typical of and more stressful to girls than boys, is characterized by such behaviors as gossiping or spreading rumors about someone or threatening to exclude or reject them “for the purpose of controlling” their behavior.²⁰ Relational aggression is often indirect. In fact, as Sara and her friends illustrate, the goal is to hurt another person in such a way that it looks as though there has been no intention at all. It’s a strategy used more often by those with less power because it protects one from retaliation or from punishment by those in control. It’s a very useful strategy for girls because it provides a cover for unfeminine emotions like anger.

But equating girlfighting with relational aggression again pushed girls’ violent behavior and physical fighting to the margins: now meanness was “normal” but physical fighting was still deviant, unredeemable, outside the realm of typical girl behavior. This new view of girlfighting as psychological and relational warfare has thus done little to challenge feminine stereotypes. Indeed, popular books on the issue seemed to undermine their own attempts to affirm the power of relational aggression to cause girls long-term emotional and psychological damage. Adding pejorative labels like “fruit cup girl” to the lengthy list of dismissive terms adolescent girls already have for one another, even with the best of intentions, only reaffirmed girlfighting as trivial.²¹

When rooting out girl meanness becomes a goal in and of itself, we risk losing the bigger picture. Let’s catch, label, and fix “it” and then what? We’ll have our girls back? And which girls are we talking about? Clearly the Barbie doll-like images and the advice about raising a “gamma girl” that prevailed recently in the flurry of magazine articles about girls’ relational aggression indicate that the concern is really about middle-class white girls.²² Moreover, neither the literature on relational aggression nor the popular accounts of the ways girls enact it on each other seem to address the larger issue of power. Little consideration has been given to the fact that a girl’s social context, the options available to her, and the culture in which she lives will affect how she aggresses. No substantive consideration has been given to the fact that girlfighting might have something to do with the range of injustices and indignities girls experience in their daily lives.

The view of girlfighting as trivial is all too familiar. Girlfighting still gets our attention when it takes extreme forms, as it so often does in the media. Real-life conflicts such as those between Nancy Kerrigan and Tanya Harding, Amy Fisher and Mary Jo Buttafuoco, Monica and Linda made headlines and allowed us a voyeuristic look inside girlfighting. Because fighting among girls or their adult women counterparts is considered at once shocking, shameful, and funny, it’s laced with eroticism and becomes the fodder of sitcoms, talk shows, and soap operas. This is the motivation behind women’s prison movies, various forms of female wrestling, stories about cheerleaders or beauty queens who go awry, soap opera back-stabbing and Jerry Springer-type “bitch-slapping.” As one high school girl explains, “guys see two girls fighting and think they’re getting passionate and maybe the girls might start kissing and maybe the guys can get in on it.” “Guys invented the concept of jello-wrestling,” another young woman agrees, “so that they could watch girls fight.”

It becomes hard to take the issue very seriously. The Canadian beauty queen who took out her competitor ended up on the cover of Playboy wearing only boxing gloves. In the 1980s women in the nighttime soap, Dynasty,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?
• 1 Reading the Culture of Girlfighting
• 2 Good Girls and Real Boys: Preparing the Ground in Early Childhood
• 3 Playing It Like a Girl: Later Childhood and Preadolescence
• 4 Dancing through the Minefield: The Middle School Years
• 5 Patrolling the Borders: High School
• 6 From Girlfighting to Sisterhood
• 7 This Book Is an Action
• Appendix
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author