Odd Girl Out (13 page)

For the target, the mass shutting down of one by many has consequences that reach far beyond the moment. "It's like your life is a pond," a seventh grader told me, "and a girl throws a stone inside it, and the ripples mess up your life." If fights are ultimately a contest of relationships, the facts of the conflict are easily dwarfed by the alliances forming around them. As a result, girls are often forced to question their own version of events, feeling crazy once again. "When I'm in fights with people, they turn it against me," said Cari at Marymount. "They say it's my fault. Everyone will say you have no right to be angry. They make you think you're crazy." By lobbing the conflict out to others to judge and decide, said her classmate Courtney, "You can never win. The entire grade takes sides."

When fights cannot be enacted and concluded directly, girls learn it may be easier to stay silent. Noura, interviewed by Brown and Gilligan, described a typical episode of gossip, explaining that if she disagreed with someone's perception, "that person would get mad ... and so sometimes I just don't know what to say, and it's hard to say something." Gradually, like a circus leaving town, the lights go out of the voices, opinions, and feelings of these girls.

Most fascinating about the ritual of alliance building is how it validates the experience of aggression for girls. Girls understand that face-to-face, one-on-one aggression with another girl is unacceptable. "If you have no sympathizers, you're the bad one. You're randomly mean," says Courtney. Megan, who lost the support of her peers in a campaign against Melissa, concluded that she "felt foolish being mean to someone without my friends."

Together, however, it's another story. A plurality creates a safe space for girls to be mean in a culture that refuses to allow girls individual acts of aggression, making alliance building a rare intersection of peer approval with aggression. Alliances create underground networks in which girls can be in charge of their own social norms, deciding together when the use of aggression is deserved.

A Sackler sixth grader explained alliance building as a way to circumvent punishment. "You don't want to be blamed for it, and so you blame it on other people, saying 'Pass it on.'" Aggressive boys may be just as likely to seek refuge from punishment or guilt in a gang. The different rules of the aggression game, however, make it likely that angry girls will seek and need company. A study confirmed that the guilt girls experience during aggressive acts decreases significantly when responsibility can be shared with other people.
²³

 

middlegirls

Even if a girl manages to avoid being on either end of a conflict, she may end up stuck in the middle of it, a position just as perilous. When it's clear girls have no choice but to be drawn into conflict, many adapt by resorting to a skill they know well, one they have long observed in the adult women around them. Over the treachery of taking a side, they choose to be mediators, or what I call "middlegirls."

When a girl's friends are the two people fighting, being in the middle is often the riskiest place. With both girls lobbying for a friend's support, both friendships can become endangered, or destroyed. Julia from Arden explained, "If you have two best friends, you feel you have to pick sides. [But] if you pick one side, the other girl starts whispering. You feel defeated and you want to give up. You become the one at fault." What's more, suballiances can develop, increasing pressure on a girl in the middle to act. "Then there are so many people against you," Stacy said, "and you just get defeated and stop."

Since girls often refuse to talk to one another when they're mad, middlegirls are critical players in the conflict process. By the time a middlegirl enters the lives of girls in conflict, the foes are usually running scared. The middlegirl's prime directive is to broker a compromise between the rival parties. By acting as an affectionate diplomat of sorts, she effectively rescues both girls from their isolation.

But the consequences for the middlegirl can be mixed. For instance, in the course of her diplomacy, the middlegirl learns she will be valued when she maintains the health of others' relationships, a skill prized in the feminine character. "I feel really good about myself when I can get my friends to sit down and talk," an eleven-year-old told me.

The warring girls face equally uncertain outcomes. A middlegirl holds their social future in her hands, and she knows it. She can just as soon gut a friendship as she can stitch it back together. A middlegirl may have her own agenda with one of the girls. Perhaps, as one sixth grader told me, she will lie to avoid being caught in a crossfire that is getting dangerously close. In that case, she said, "[you] would be afraid that the person would start telling rumors about you and then telling lies and then they won't be your friend anymore."

In Mississippi, I was sitting with seventh graders talking about alliance building.

"Why do lots of girls get involved in a person's fight?" I asked.

"She gets to watch it," Beth said.

"They'll be able to go tell other people what happened. 'Oh I know what happened!'" Andra sneered.

"You might want to be somebody's best friend so you make the fight worse than it is," Angela added.

"Sometimes people change things and make someone even madder," Beth said.

"Why," I asked, "would someone want to do that?"

"Because they don't really like that person or anything."

"—because you want to make them fight."

"And the person in the middle can add to the rumors."

"What does she stand to gain?" I asked.

"The messenger might have added or changed the story because one of the girls had made her mad before," Beth continued. "She had done something to her but she was waiting for a chance to get her back."

Forced to prioritize others' relationships at the expense of their own, middlegirls can quickly become part of the conflict itself. A sixth grader at Arden described her often futile attempts to bring girls together. "No matter how much I try to help, they ended up getting mad at me anyway. The way they made peace is over being mad at me." A classmate of hers got burned by choosing not to take sides. "They both got mad when I was with the other one." A fifth grader at a private religious school wrote simply, "I got into a fight talking about a fight." The words of a classmate were telling in describing her social problems that year: "I had a fight
between
Adelia and Marina" (my italics).

Rebecca, a sixth grader at the religious school, explained it this way: "I think of it as a Ping-Pong game. A championship. And like, you're gonna win. And the middlegirl is the ball, and one friend's on one side and one friend's on the other. And you want to keep on bouncing back and forth because you don't want to stop on one side or the other but eventually you have to land somewhere."

The increasing importance of the middlegirl is a result of a social community in which open conflict is feared and forbidden. The middlegirl helps filter and tamp down the anger that would otherwise flow freely between girls. She is a human tool girls use to avoid the possibility that they will say something the wrong way, or speak words they don't mean. As an Arden seventh grader put it, "When two of my friends were in a huge fight, it had become necessary that I was there. It was about me, too. They needed me to control themselves." Girls in conflict use middlegirls to fence in their own anger, helping them to stay "nice" at the moments that most challenge their feminine identities.

The middlegirl role has built itself not only into the structure of girls' conflicts but into their friendships. One researcher found that the failure of a girl to mediate conflict among her friends was actually perceived by her peers as overtly aggressive behavior.
²⁴
Like girls who take sides, middlegirls who step in to help someone out in their time of need are met with the sort of gratitude and affection that thrives in situations where one person has a disproportionate amount of power. "Sometimes," a Sackler sixth grader told me, "there could be a fight with a popular girl. And the only reason you're helping her is because she's using you and you think that's so cool. The middlegirl is really thinking it's good for her."

The phenomenon of alliance building evokes the image of a daily relational minefield for girls. Each and every day presents the possibility of a relationship's endangerment. Friendships must be consistently charted, tallied, and negotiated. In waging these underground campaigns, the features of friendship become corrupted.

In 2000, UCLA researchers identified sex differences in the human response to immediate danger. Where males opted for "fight or flight," females would "tend and befriend," often nurturing or seeking the support of others rather than attempting to aggress or escape. The study, which exposed the troubling bias of research toward male subjects and the "fight or flight" response, showed that in stressful situations, females often seek company.
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The findings suggest that girls' tendency to seek group comfort when threatened is a historic phenomenon, the study of which may yield more information on female aggression.

 

cliques

In 2000, the television show
Survivor
gripped America with a contest of sixteen "real" people vying to be the last one standing on a precarious deserted island. At the end of each weekly episode, viewers watched the disturbing spectacle of once-chummy Survivors coldly voting one of their own off the island. Every week, fans waited eagerly to see who would be next.

With just three contestants remaining, Kelly, long predicted the winner, was voted off. But it wasn't her surprise loss that made headlines that week. It was a breathtakingly cruel farewell from her fellow player, Sue. Calmly, before a spellbound audience of 55 million, Sue warned, "If I was ever to pass you along in life again and you were laying there dying of thirst, I would not give you a drink of water. I would let the vultures take you and do whatever they want with you, with no ill regrets." Mouths fell open across the nation.

Survivor's
rite of expulsion resembles a disturbing ritual in cliques of girls. With little or no warning a clique will rise up and cut down one of its own. For the targeted girl, the sheer force of this unexpected expulsion can be startling, unpredictable, and even devastating.

In clique expulsions, punishments range from pretending the girl never existed to embarking on campaigns of scorching cruelty. These expulsions may seem sudden, arbitrary, and just plain mean. Bystanders may well wonder how a group could turn against one of their own with such intensity. Yet if we listen to the voices of girls, it does not take long to understand the intensity. Their anger is explained not by a root evil churning deep in their hearts, a pathetically common explanation, but rather by the imperative to above all be nice. Because these girls lack the tools to deal with everyday feelings of anger, hurt, betrayal, and jealousy, their feelings stew and fester before boiling to the surface and unleashing torrents of rage.

 

ERIN AND MICHELLE:
TWO FACES IN THE MIRROR?

Dr. Diane Harrigan remembers the day she ran into a teacher at her daughter's school. As she escorted Erin to class late in the day—it was a victory when her daughter could muster the strength to come to school at all—the unfamiliar woman stopped and touched her hand lightly to Diane's shoulder. "I just want you to know," she said quietly, "I know what you're going through." The teacher's own daughter, now thirty, was so shaken by being suddenly abandoned by her best friends as a teen that when she unexpectedly spied the ringleader at a bookstore recently, she'd had to leave. "It's still hard," the woman said. Diane felt tears start. "I know," she replied.

"She was the only person that really got it in the whole school," Diane told me. A clinical psychologist, Diane was the first parent to call me after the letters about my research went out to her daughter's class. Her daughter Erin had been the target of a clique expulsion and was still suffering the consequences.

 

Michelle was angry. She'd been assigned to buddy the new girl, Erin Harrigan, the summer before fifth grade. After talking on the phone and instant messaging, Michelle thought that Erin seemed really nice. But the first week of class, Erin sailed around like she was the most popular girl in the grade, like she always had been. She marched right up to the cool clique at lunch, sparkling with self-assurance and grace. Michelle said hi to her in the hallway, and she was pretty sure Erin didn't say hi back. Now they were going to be in a fight.

As groups became more defined in fifth and sixth grade, Michelle wasn't sure where she fit in. Sometimes the social tide brought her closer to the cool girls, and other times she drifted into the faceless sea of regular kids. She watched Erin beat out Kelly as most popular girl in sixth grade, become best friends with Nicole and exclude Kelly, and attract the hottest guys. She felt the constant rub of anger. Erin was confident and boy crazy, and she knew it.

When Nicole moved away the summer after sixth grade, Erin sent Michelle an instant message. It was good timing. Michelle had been getting annoyed with her friends, and Erin was a welcome change. Michelle's bitterness was quickly swallowed as her new friendship swept her into the popular group. Erin's friendship was intoxicating, the transformation quick and clean. Suddenly, Michelle was cool.

Three years later, fifteen-year-old Michelle and I were talking over cups of tea at a café near her school. "Erin's the kind of person so that when you're first friends with her, it's like a drug almost," she said. "She just seems like such a good friend. She's so nice and fun, not to mention the fact that she's really popular, and you're like, why is she friends with me? She says everything that you want her to say and she acts like she's such a good friend and acts like you're the best thing ever to happen to her, and you're kind of excited because you're like insecure and you're her everything. That's what people generally want to be. They want to be important to somebody else." Reveling in her proximity to Erin, Michelle enjoyed the rush she felt at being at the center of everything exciting.