What is especially sad is that teen girls today enjoy acting like this to each other. It's cool to be a bi***. I've heard conversations about how proud they were to put another down, listened to tears and sobbing because girls were mean, then a week later heard a story about how sobbing girl turned around and did the same to someone else. If you aren't tough and mean, you're weak.
What's especially ironic is that the movie "Mean Girls" apparently had the exact opposite effect that the book it was based on intended. Teen girls I know LOVE that movie. Kind of like "Heathers." It's very cool.
Interesting article! I see mean women all the time. I've worked for mean women, as well. And let me tell you, working for a woman supervisor can be the toughest job. I've had some great nursing supervisors, but there have been that couple who are terrible, vindictive, spiteful, etc. Female principals are pretty much the same...most, anyway!
Obvious _ I _ C _ ping. I could not resist. Call me weak and obvious.
I have only seen the trailer for this film, but man alive, it seems pretty violent; not beheadings or knifings, just endless face-slappings and punching. Didn't appeal to me much.
Horse Hockey.
It is the synergistic effects of bad behavior, female ease with practicing flagrant duplicity, and the dissonance that comes from outright refusal to accept responsibility for ones actions despite all evidence.
Pinging the Alpha Mean Grrrrl.
< |:0~
I knew it had to be in there somewhere.
Oh crapola. "North American standard"? Then I suppose 4000000 BC years ago, there was North America...
Women-bashing ping.
This is exactly the reason I always preferred hanging out with guys/men as opposed to girls/women. I'm closing in on 40 and let me tell you, a lot of these women never outgrow that behavior.
Mean Girl ping ;)
I learned from Alexis Carrington.
The Heartless Manifesto
Do really sappy, insipid, "always and forever" love poems make you want to puke? (and that goes for Bon Jovi lyrics too!)
Do you find typical "Women's Magazines" to be either stomach turning or pathetically laughable?
Are you tired of the walking wounded moping around expecting that the world owes them something because they are victims?
Do you find the likes of Michael Bolton and Kenny G. revolting?
Does the sight of an incredibly handsome man turn you off, cause so many of them have room-temperature IQ's, and obnoxious or non-existent personalities?
Are you sick of lazy women who use emotional and sexual manipulation to get what they want instead of using their own brains and muscles?
Are you fed up with women who feel they HAVE to be in a "Relationship" in order to be whole, and will sacrifice their self-esteem and personal growth in order to avoid being on their own?
Are you tired of men and women who are emotional children, and won't accept responsibility for their actions or behavior?
Do you want to SMACK women who play "helpless" just to gain male attention and stroke male egos?
Have you run out of sympathy for your Female friends who continually whine about how awful MEN ARE, but then they keep dating the same kind of ASSHOLES, over and OVER, AND OVER AGAIN!?
Are you fed up with your Male friends who are looking to date a woman with the appearance of a supermodel, and yet they continually whine about how "women don't like nice guys - they only want good-looking assholes"???
Do the words "If you REALLY loved me...." turn your heart to ice??!!!
Do you retch in response to "The Rules", and laugh uproariously at "The Code"?
Have you HAD IT with people telling you that you are TOO LOUD, TOO ASSERTIVE, or TOO OPINIONATED?
Do you wish you had a button that said: "Thank you for sharing, now SHUT UP and quit Whining!" ????
Do you ever get tired of those whiners and their online "journals"? Or the guys who hit on you and you politely decline, and they keep pestering you and pestering you, and pestering you like some obnoxious, festering, pus-filled sore, until you finally have to WHAP them over the head with a VERY LARGE CLUE-BY-FOUR (tm)....?
Do you feel like you might as well "get hung for a sheep as a lamb", because no matter how POLITELY you try to turn down some guy's advances, you invariably get called a "Bitch"?
If you answered YES to all of the above, then Heartless Bitches International wants YOU. Heartless Bitches is now recruiting!
My wife has been a teacher for 15 years, and the levels of cattiness and stab-in-the-back behavior she has witnessed from her fellow female teachers is astonishing.
She has repeated, over and over, "I hate working with women. They are almost all like that."
FWIW, here is a little something from H.L. Mencken. Women are feral realists:
Henry Louis Mencken once wrote "A man’s women folk, whatever their outward show of respect for his merit and authority, always regard him secretly as an ass, and with something akin to pity" (1). While Mencken’s blunt declaration provides shock-value humor, it is also a serious and profound statement that reflects his intellectual deviation from the gender stereotypes of his time.
Mencken’s ideas about the societal roles of women differed greatly from those of traditional, conservative, Victorian Americans in the nineteen twenties. In fact, he frequently criticized this genre of Americans, whom he labeled the "booboise", for their "provincialism of attitude in manners, morals, politics, and taste" (Martin 67). In order to compare Mencken’s view with that of the "booboise", however, traditional ideas about gender roles must first be explored.
Women in the 1920’s were placed in a socially subordinate position relative to their male counterparts. This was influenced directly by the preceding Victorian era, in which women were expected to be subservient to men in nearly all walks of life. But, even with the "New Woman" of the modern era and notions of female empowerment, the advertising industry still did much to perpetuate ideas of the woman as a domestic servant (Horn 104). Thus, women in the twenties were viewed as domestic creatures, second class citizens, and emotional beings.
The advertisement pages of any "Ladies Home Journal" or "Vanity Fair" from the roaring twenties can testify that women were viewed in this time as the administrators of domestic life. Though the flood of new consumer products promised to "empower" women by offering the right to choose, the twenties paradoxically imprisoned them by further entrenching the connection between women and the private, domestic world. This necessarily precluded women from participating in the public arenas of politics, government, and business on the same level as men.
This is not to say that there were no women active outside of the family domain. Women created potent political lobbies, fought for birth control rights, started businesses, and entered the work force. Many women succeeded in areas typically deemed "masculine". These success, however, were only relative to previous eras of exclusion and remained extremely limited. For example, it has been noted that female voter turnout was significantly lower than that of males, racial and socioeconomic barriers limited the political power of women as a whole, and women attained only a fraction of the pay, skills, and status of men in the workplace. (Dumenil 108-112). Women were indeed "second class citizens" in the United States. Even the discourse and rhetoric of the times constructed women in the public sphere as second rate. Law professionals were called "lady lawyers" and government officials were referred to as "lady magistrates."
Finally, there pervaded in the twenties a conviction that women were emotionally guided individuals, usually incapable of thinking rationally. This notion perhaps has its roots, again, in the Victorian culture. The biological ability of the woman to bear children branded her as the caretaker, mother, and consequently, the giver of moral and emotional guidance. This feminine lack of reason served largely as the justification to exclude women from the realm of the public.
Mencken’s ideas about the roles of women countered those prominent at the time. He made public his ideas in the 1918 book "In Defense of Women". He attempted to explain the vast social mischaracterization of women and satirically scrutinize middle-class notions of masculinity.
Women, according to Mr. Mencken, were not a second class group of individuals, but an inherently superior one. He argued in his gender treatise that the source of a woman’s superiority lay in her intelligence when he wrote that "women, in point of fact, are not only intelligent: they have an almost monopoly on certain of the subtler and more utile forms of intelligence. The thing itself, indeed, might be reasonably described as a special feminine character" (8-9). Mencken argues further that the feminine intelligence has been mischaracterized throughout history and labeled as "women’s’ intuition". This "intuition," he claims, is nothing more than a male social construct, invented to mask the raw intelligence of women (28). Mencken concedes in his writings, however, that women have historically been and shall continue to be utter failures in law, business, and other "masculine" fields of interest. But, he challenges the validity of these domains and calls them "superficial", "imbecile" and "childish" practices which put "little more strain on the mental powers than a chimpanzee suffers in learning to scratch a match" (13). Women tend to succeed as teachers, nurses, and artists. These are the trades that Mencken hails as requiring ingenuity, quick comprehension, and courage (23). So, while he held that no external societal forces barred women from entering the public domain, women gravitated naturally toward the occupations that were truly worthwhile and beneficial to society, and thus away from law, business, and government.
These ideas strongly challenged the old-stock American views that women were subordinate and that their domestic role was a product of natural male superiority. In his mind, women were the leaders of the race and their role in the private sphere was only a result conscious rejection of the mind-numbing and intellectually futile public sphere of men.
Mencken also directly contested the notion of women as emotionally guided creatures by asserting that "women are not sentimental, i.e., not prone to permit mere emotion and illusion to corrupt their estimation of a situation. The doctrine, perhaps, will raise a protest" (29). To evidence this claim, he sites the example of monogamous marriage, which he claims men run from and women pursue adamantly. Mencken’s argument is that the occurrence of marriage in society proves that women alone have the capacity to maintain cool-headed and pursue their long-term interests without being subject to emotional distractions, such as love or pulchritude. Men, on the other hand, eventually give in and marry (though it is ultimately against their best interests). They are "bowled over in a combat of wits" (Mencken 32). Thus it is clear to Mencken that women are the harsh realists of the species rather than the emotional idealists. Mencken also scoffs at the suggestion that a woman’s maternal instinct and caretaker mentality naturally assign her an emotional role. He argues that this maternity comes only from pity for the weaker male sex and out of necessity. All men are boys, in Mencken’s opinion, that are still nourished by a mother’s milk.
Benjamin De Casseres once said "[Mencken] puts his finger squarely and surely on the eternal enemy of superior men: women" (qtd. in Schaum, 379). The concept of men as superior beings pervaded most of the cultural mores in America during the twenties. Henry Louis Mencken’s views of womens’ roles in society contrasted deeply with those mores. Mecken, lead the modern crusade against Calvinist patriarchal structures (Martin 69).
It is critical to explore Mencken’s analysis of societal gender roles on a level of pure understanding. Before a true understanding of how gender roles functioned in the twenties (and during other periods in our history), one must be aware of the many contrasting ideas that existed. Consciousness precedes understanding, and Mencken’s view exemplifies a situation in which it is vital to raise consciousness about a set of ideas that did not conform to social dogma in order for a broader understanding to be attained.
Adler, Betty. H.L.M. The Mencken Bibliography. Baltimore:John Hopkins Press 1961
Bulsterbaum, Allison. H.L. Mencken: A Research Guide. New York and London: Garland Publishig, 1988
Dumenil, Lynn. The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920's. New York: Hill and Wang
Horn, Pamela. Women in the 1920's. United Kindgom: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1995.
Martin, Edward A. "H.L. Mencken and Equal Rights for Women." The Georgia Review 35 (1981): 65-76
Schaum, Melita. "H.L. Mencken and American Cultural Masculinism." Journal of American Studies 29 (1995): 379-398
Mencken, Henry Louis. In Defense fo Women. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1918
"It's impossible to talk about this issue without talking about patriarchy — it sets women up against each other,"
Hey! It took nearly half of the article before it came out that it's mens fault for women being bitches to each other.
When I read the title I thought it was about Hillary.
This probably makes me a "mean girl" in some sense, but I've never enjoyed friendships with women (and I am one). The ladies I know tend to be intensly interested in things I am not. It wasn't until I discovered FR that I found women who understood the same things I've always known.
I am more comfortable with men. Men are more WYSIWYG - I don't have to cut through emotional falderol and psycobabble to get the meaning of what they say.
My late mother used to try to console me when I lost the friendship of girl when I was young by telling me I was too smart for them . . . .didn't make the sting go away, but sure made me appreciate, and be confident in, my intelligence.
>>>Being nasty to each other is one of the unspoken rules about how girls and women are supposed to behave; one of the rigidly enforced North American standards of what constitutes femininity.
Oh great. So not only am I a mutant....now I'm a nonfeminine mutant.
Sheesh