Why are teenage girls so mean?

By Haleigh Bolton

 I sat quietly during class, minding my own business, and I started to hear the people behind me start to talk bad about me. Although they weren’t directly saying my name, I knew they were talking about me, and they knew I was listening.

I’ve never understood the point of it. Why do they think they can say whatever they want about someone just for the sole reason of hurting their feelings? My mom used to tell me that they were just insecure about themselves or they had nothing else better to do-but really, what is the point?

We live in a culture that is fascinated by the idea of mean girls and I think that's where a lot of it stems from. Almost every movie or TV show has one of them, yet we still watch it because we claim them as guilty pleasures. As a society, we should stop normalizing this. Shows like The Real Housewives of New York or The Jersey Shore are some of the most popular in the country because of how completely ruthless they are to each other. Seriously, what happened to the whole “girls support girls” thing?

Although it’s easy to look down on these people, I think we should be diving deeper into the actual reasoning behind it, and what causes it. “Relational aggression” describes this type of bullying that’s intended to hurt someone by damaging their reputation or relationships with others. 

In a study done by the National Library of Medicine, it was found that girls who engage in this behavior are usually doing it for personal gain, like popularity or status- and the school environment is the perfect breeding ground for this to take place. Most often it’s not just one girl, but a group of them- feeding off of each other's energy. This powerful need for belonging that we girls have can ultimately lead to our downfall. 

It happens quite often that people use lashing out as a way to cope with being insecure, dealing with trauma or just being a teenager. We validate this meanness and write it off like it's okay. People say “Not to be mean but…” as if that makes it okay or, “I tell it how it is” to try to make up for their superficiality. Adults are really good at making others feel inferior to them by thinking they’re always right. This is no different than some child saying, “Well he did it first!”

I can admit it, I’ve been mean before, but I wouldn’t call myself a ‘mean girl’. Everyone has been mean at least once in their life. I know what it feels like and that it never added anything positive to my life. It’s honestly so much easier to just be nice. 

I can recall numerous times that I could’ve chosen to be a nasty person because of what someone said or how they treated me, but I’m glad I didn’t. After taking a step back and turning to what we all learned in kindergarten, the “golden rule”, I realized that we really should be treating others the way we want to be treated. I think a lot of people would stop and think about the weight of their words if they imagined someone else saying it about them.