Odd Girl Out (12 page)

So the denouement is often as troubled as the fight itself. The prime directive for girls is to maintain the relationship at any cost; this, along with the accompanying fear of a lost relationship, is what drives almost every step of a fight.
Sorry
may be a universal code word for a truce, but it is often perfunctory and swift, casual and automatic, like saying "bless you" when someone sneezes. However it is delivered, via written, cyber, or human medium, sorry is a razor-sharp, clean slice through a fight, shutting it down as abruptly as pulling the plug on a blaring stereo. And because this perfunctory apology often comes when a fight has not yet played itself out, because it is driven more by the fear of a lost relationship than the need to clear the air, sorry is often a purely procedural event, calling for peace while the source of the conflict still festers, tucked away like a genie stuffed into a bottle, stewing unresolved until the next trigger comes.

One girl recalled her usual "make-up" line: "Let's just be friends. I can't understand why we got in such a stupid fight." Steering clear of the details, a sixth grader told me, avoids being brought too close to the precipice of her own anger. "Someone might say the wrong thing again," she explained. Others simply can no longer endure the isolation. "I didn't want her to stay mad at me," her classmate explained, "so I'd just say sorry." Anyway, another girl offered, if you wait it out, "your anger just melts away." A Ridgewood eighth grader said, "You forget about what you're mad about because you don't want to lose the friendship." Still another recalled an erstwhile friend who bullied her mercilessly, then approached her at school and inexplicably apologized. "It just happened," she said. "Sorry."

Carmen Peralta said being direct with friends doesn't work for her, since everyone she knows gives knee-jerk apologies instead of really talking about their feelings. "When a person tells you [she's angry], it makes you feel like you're going to say sorry automatically—automatically, not thinking. But if you don't say, 'I'm mad at you,'" she said, and instead speak without words, forcing the person to wonder why you are acting strangely around her, "the person will actually think about what [she's] doing wrong."

Sometimes Carmen does apologize, but she can't stand it that she's always the one to say it first. "Sometimes when I say, 'I'm sorry,' [it's because] I just feel more guilty [not because I] understand what the person's saying. I just figure, 'What the hell, I'll say I'm sorry and make it all better.' I don't think that does make it all better," she added, shrugging, "because I'll probably still act the way that's annoying the person."

Under these social conditions, a cycle gets put into motion. Old conflicts are printed indelibly into memories and, unresolved, are summoned for use in the next conflict. One of the most common grievances I heard from girls was: "We remember everything. We never forget." One girl explained why: "Boys duke it out. Girls, they don't finish [the fight]. It grows bigger. And there's another fight and the next one's huge. That's what leads to people not being friends anymore." A Sackler sixth grader said, "You go back to these teeny tiny things that you didn't talk about before. Then it gets bigger." Lisa, at Arden, said, "Girls always look back at what you did the last time."

 

just kidding

Girls who want to bypass conflict entirely may turn to other behavioral pathways. Humor is an especially popular way to injure a peer indirectly. Joking weaves a membrane of protection around the aggressor as she jabs at a target. A sixth grader described a classmate who easily got away with teasing. "She'd say something, the teacher would kind of look, and she's like, 'I was just kidding!'" At Linden, students talked about the moment in which teasing crosses over into insult. "Slut is the worst insult," said Erica. "Ho is said easily. Like, 'That's such a ho outfit.'" When the jostling goes into shaky territory, someone quickly exclaims, "We were just kidding!"

Rarely, if ever, does the targeted girl disagree. The fear of being called hypersensitive—
Can't you take a joke?
—is enormous. Nobody wants to hang out with someone like that, and everyone knows it. "What's the big deal?" can sting when you're trying to act cool. "When a girl is the butt of all jokes, she wants to tell her friends it hurts her," sixteen-year-old Ellie said. "She thinks, 'I know they're not doing it to hurt me.' And they deny it. But it beats at your self-esteem."

The feeling of being crazy plagues the target of these "jokes," as she must choose between the sting of her own feelings and what she wants to believe about her friends. Believing a friend while ignoring the hum of her own instinct is an important example of how a girl can "give up or give over [her] version of reality to those who have the power to name or reconfigure [her] experience," a major symptom of girls' loss of self-esteem observed by Brown and Gilligan.
²¹

Fear of reprisal is not the only deterrent to speaking up. Tasha Keller had just gotten her learner's permit, and she was scarfing down a bagel at a deli as we talked about how she responds when girls use jokes to cover their true feelings.

"In the end you see how foolish it is to get upset," she said, her words muffled with chewing.

"Even though someone's being nasty?" I asked.

"If someone's joking around, you're not supposed to think it's such a big thing."

"Even if someone hurts your feelings?"

"If someone told you something that hurt your feelings, would you think that's worse than being beaten up? The bigger thing would have been if someone's beating you up at school. That's what you think of a bully as." She was practically lecturing me now. "You don't think of it as someone who's..." She paused, searching to describe the phenomenon that has for so long remained unnamed—"
nicely abusing
you also."

Some mainstream psychologists view the ritual of comic or casual peer insults as formative to child development. University of California at Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner argues that "teasers convey that they are joking through laughter, knowing looks and nudges, and tone of voice."
²²
Here girls' social world is again seen through a male lens. With access to a much wider range of opportunities for direct aggression, boys' use of humorous one-upping can be clearly distinguished from "real" or serious moments of anger. For girls, whose aggressions are frequently conveyed in body language, and who mostly share in common the need to sequester anger, the use of humor serves a different purpose. "A lot of times," thirteen-year-old Jasmine told me, "what you say when you're joking is really what you mean but you're too afraid to say it." And, she added, "humor doesn't work unless both people know it's true."

 

ganging up

"It's weird how time erases things," muses the once-popular, now-outcast Julie in the film
Jawbreaker.

"Time doesn't erase things," replies the once-outcast, now-popular Fern. "People erase things."

"People erase people." Julie sighs.

Nothing launches a girl faster, or takes her down harder, than alliance building, or "ganging up." The ultimate relational aggression, alliance building forces the target to face not only the potential loss of the relationship with her opponent, but with many of her friends. It goes like this: Spotting a conflict on the horizon, a girl will begin a scrupulous underground campaign to best her opponent. Like a skilled politician, she will methodically build a coalition of other girls willing to throw their support behind her. Friends who have "endorsed" her will ignore the target, lobby others for support, or confront the target directly until she is partly or completely isolated. "You kind of declare war in your own way," explained Daniella, a sixth grader.

Ganging up is the product of a secret relational ecosystem that flourishes in an atmosphere where direct conflict between individuals is forbidden. By engaging in conflict as a group, no one girl is ever directly responsible for her aggression. Anger is often conveyed wordlessly, and the facade of the group functions as an eave under which a girl can preserve her "nice girl" image. The loser usually ends up isolated from others, giving her exactly what she fears conflict begets: relational loss. The specter of isolation is often enough to make most people "forget" their angry feelings.

Girls use alliance building to short-circuit the link expected between anger and the loss of relationship. Victoria, interviewed by Brown and Gilligan, explains that when people get mad it helps to "pass [their feelings] on to someone else and it will keep on going around so everyone can pick corners." Kenya, a Ridgewood sixth grader, explained, "They are mad at their friend, and their friend's mad at them, and they need to go find another friend and get to know them better and tell them about their problem, and maybe that will help another friendship to start." In this way, alliance building becomes an event of friendship. It provides a way for girls to displace their aggression while remaining connected to others. No matter how intense the fight, a girl is assured of a friendship that will outlast it; the girls who rally to her side promise her that with their presence. In this way, the trials of conflict are transformed into a series of relationships to be negotiated, a skill at which girls excel.

Nikki, an eighth grader from Marymount, described how it works: "If I'm mad at someone, it's just a lot easier to tell everyone else and turn them against the person because then I'm the one who's right. If you just tell the person, one-on-one, then the two of you are out there to be judged by the whole grade, and you can't know if you are going to be the one who's considered right by the others."

During alliance building, discussions spread like wildfire through circles of friends, growing in intensity until they dominate the day. "First people tell each other; then they use the phone, then the Internet; it gets bigger and bigger; they cut and paste conversations [from instant messages]," recalled thirteen-year-old Rebecca at Marymount. One girl wins, her classmate Maria noted, when she "gets people not to like the other one."

Another girl described it this way: "I think it was mostly just like, nobody can get mad at me for something. I was the good friend. I wasn't the problem. I am like best friends with all of these people now that I didn't used to be friends with. I have everything that she thought she had. It was just like a sense of empowerment."

Alliance building also conforms to girls' tendency to stockpile old conflicts. The aggressor's strategy is to appeal to those who have a history with the target. Particularly where girls have known each other for many years, the aggressor can plumb a rich history of relational trouble.

Alliance building was in full swing among the Mississippi fifth graders. Danika explained, "Girls try to get information from you about your other friend, [who] is their enemy. Such as, do you like so and so?" I asked how it works.

"They take [the information] from you and say, 'Thank you.' Then you say you have to be right back, that you're going to see somebody, and you go tell [your friend]. It's just like collecting information from the enemy." The potential foot soldiers have usually been waiting for the right opportunity. Beccy explained, "One person can have a problem, talk to one person, and she's got something she remembers from last week."

This is classic indirection, since it allows girls to hold the conflict at arm's length as they watch others fight it. Girls have multiple incentives to become embroiled in each others' conflicts. First, alliance building offers a chance for girls to belong, even briefly, to an ad hoc clique. Jumping on another girl's bandwagon to show support in her time of conflict affords a rare moment of inclusion and comfort. Nikki remarked, "People don't know what we're fighting about, but they want to be in it. They want to be part of the gossip." Said her classmate Mallory, "It gives you something to belong to, and inclusion is such a big deal." Since the girl coordinating the alliance is usually vulnerable, stepping in with support is an opportunity to be a friend while racking up a future favor for when your turn inevitably rolls around. Needless to say, effective foot soldiers can take leaps up the social ladder. "If you take sides," Rachel explained, "you can become popular through them and be their friend."

Indeed, popularity itself is in large part defined by the ability of one girl to turn her friends against someone else. If isolation is trauma for girls, there is power to be found in relationships. Having girls on her side offers a girl a sense of personal strength. "It makes you feel more popular and like you have more power. You're in the right," explained Lauren at Marymount. Said eleven-year-old Mary at Arden, "It gives you a feeling of security. If you know people are gathering on your side, you think, 'Wow, I am powerful. I have a feeling of power.'"

Alliance building is a sign of peer affirmation, an unspoken contract that means, for the moment anyway, that a girl will not be abandoned. If she can turn everyone against a target, it is impossible for them to turn against her. "It's a way of getting people to say you're cool and strong," Dana noted.

So ingrained is alliance building in girls' lives that many I spoke with struggled to imagine life without it. "You don't do it on purpose," said Lauren, shrugging. "It's your natural instinct. I tell other people and try to make myself look good."

"When you can't tell anyone, you feel helpless," explained Dana. "You don't know who to go to. It builds up."

Of course, there are troubling social and individual costs to this activity. Lauren described how to attract more supporters when the marrow of a conflict thins: "You bring other stuff into it. 'Oh, do you see what she's wearing.'" And sometimes, invariably, "you exaggerate and don't tell the whole truth." She explained, "When more people get involved, there's a lot more pressure to win." In this way, alliance building encourages other alternative aggressions, including rumor spreading and secret telling. Alliance building can distort the conflicts, and it makes fights last longer than they would have if they had been played out directly.