Odd Girl Out (23 page)

Alone, Stephanie wandered through the halls at the beginning of sophomore year. The lockers and the rug were the same, but she knew she'd changed. "I didn't trust people at all ... if they were nice to me, I didn't trust them at all. If one of the popular girls said 'Stephanie, I like your hair,' I thought they were being, like taking pity on me, like 'Oh, she's the big loser,' and rather than just being, 'Yeah, you have cool pants on and they're nice and everybody likes them.'...I didn't trust anybody with any of my secrets. No one. No one knew anything that I thought, [it] like had to be kept close.... I remember kissing someone at a dance at the end of that year, like the last dance of the school year, and being literally petrified to the point where it wasn't even healthy, because like what are people going to say if they saw me kissing, and I don't even remember who it was. I closed down from people.... Even when you think it's over...."

By the end of sophomore year, Stephanie convinced her parents that the school didn't challenge her academically. She asked to transfer to the other public school, and they agreed.

At the new school, Stephanie became popular so swiftly that when she told me about it, she averted her eyes as though she thought I wouldn't believe her. By the end of October, she had half the junior class partying at her house on her birthday. The change was as instant as it was unbelievable. "I didn't understand it; I didn't try. I didn't know where it came from, and I was really, you know, becoming friends with people." Still guarded, she deflected her new friends' questions about transferring from her old school with the same answer: the classes had been a disappointment.

When Stephanie was invited to a ten-year reunion at the school she'd left, she mulled it over. "There was a part of me that hoped... I could show up and be like, yeah, I'm a consultant and I live on my own and I have a great life and I feel fantastic, and I love every partof my body, I love every part of my skin, I love everything I do. And you know not because I'm faking it, not because I'm pretending, but because I'm genuinely, I'm like okay, everything's not perfect, but it ain't that bad. And that's how I feel right now. And I would love to, kind of like, show it to them, and that I can't believe it's still there. That the wounds were so deep fifteen years ago ... I still wanted to kind of like say, you know, fuck you, look how cool I am now. You were totally wrong. And you have no idea how deep the wounds were. I didn't."

Despite what happened, Stephanie told me she is most grateful for the women in her life. "Women," she said, "are the strongest people in the world. Everything we do is harder and I really believe that. I think women are incredible creatures." Stephanie credits the women in her childhood for teaching her to hold fast to her own self-worth, no matter the obstacles. Thinking often of what she "owe[s] to the girls coming after me," she volunteers frequently with children. "I feel," she said, "like I have to always work with some connection to children for the rest of my life, simply because I think it's so important to tell them our stories and to witness what they're talking about and really make them feel comfortable talking about whatever they think is important." And it's women, she reminded me, who gave her back the strength to trust again. About her best friends, she said, "I know that I could give them my wallet and car keys and my dog and my boyfriend and I would get everything back."

 

As I discovered with the girls I interviewed, every clique can draw its own invisible lines. Not surprisingly, it is often the new girl in class who unwittingly crosses them, triggering resentment in her peers. Listen to Megan and Taylor, two ninth-grade classmates talking about their best friend Jenny when she first switched schools.

"Remember," Megan said, "when Jenny first came from [the school] where she was, like, the shit? And she came and before she made any other friends she had already gotten this cocky attitude. People didn't even know her. We were just talking about this—remember what a bitch she was?"

"Yeah." Taylor nodded. "She had so much confidence, too. And you come to a new situation, it's just like, why is she doing that? She has
no
place—"

"No right!" Megan interjected.

"—to be doing that. I remember before Jenny came she was telling me that she knew
so
many people. She acted like she knew everything. I don't know. That made me feel like, gosh, I don't know anybody. I don't have any friends. It's like, excuse me, what do you think you're doing?"

Or listen to a group of ninth graders in Mississippi, where I asked, "How do we feel about a girl who walks into the room who we don't know and who's pretty?"

"We automatically feel a hate towards her," Keisha said immediately.

"We feel offended," Toya offered.

"She's the most attractive person—," said Melissa.

"And she's new and she's going to be getting all the attention," Torie finished.

"We want her to be less confident so she won't talk to our boys," Keisha said. "Somebody new come in, they threatened by what they are. Look at her, this and that. She's going to take my friends, she's going to take my man."

I asked, "Do girls want other girls to be confident in general?"

"
No,
" came a chorus.

"No." It was Keisha.

Why not?

"Girls don't because they're threatened by what they are."

 

Every class, every school, pieces together its own definition of the girl who thinks she's all that. "All that" changes meaning depending on the events of the week. The school culture plays a role: in poorer schools, "all that" is often about luxury items like acrylic nails, hair extensions, and new sneakers. In wealthier schools, it may be more about flirtatiousness or conceit. The label cuts a wide swath across lines of class and race; no matter where I went, whether or not I brought it up, it always found its way into our discussions, and to great gusts of enthusiasm.

In spite of the legion definitions of "all that," there is one bottom line. There are rules, and the girl who thinks she's all that breaks them. They are the rules of femininity: girls must be modest, self-abnegating, and demure; girls must be nice and put others before themselves; girls get power by who likes them, who approves, who they know, but not by their own hand. Break these rules, and "all that" looms on the horizon.

Here is the common denominator for "all that," the one that never changes: The girl who thinks she's all that is the girl who expresses or projects an aura of assertiveness or self-confidence. She may assert her sexuality, her independence, her body, or her speech. She has appetite and desire. The girl who thinks she's all that is generally the one who resists the self-sacrifice and restraint that define "good girls." Her speech and body, even her clothes, suggest others are not foremost on her mind.

The "all that" label flummoxes girls. On the one hand, they know it's not cool to be conceited, to think you're better than others. On the other hand, they sometimes find themselves jealous of the ones who do. "It's bad if you think you're skinny because then you're full of yourself. But if you're fat? Then you're bad," said Sarah, a Marymount eighth grader.

 

Our culture has girls playing a perverse game of Twister, pushing and tangling themselves into increasingly strained, unnatural positions. We are telling girls to be bold and timid, voracious and slight, sexual and demure. We are telling them to hurry up and wait. But in the game of Twister, players eventually wind up in impossible positions and collapse.

Game over. In a culture that cannot decide who it wants them to be, girls are being asked to become the sum of our confUsion. Girls make sense of our mixed messages by deciding to behave indirectly, deducing that manipulation—the sum of power and passivity—is the best route to power. The media reinforces this culture of indirection, prompting duplicity and evasion in girls.

The culture of indirection reflects a desire to have it both ways—to give girls the world but keep them on a leash. It is
yes, but: yes,
you may be anything you want,
but
only if you don't stray beyond the parameters of what is acceptable.
Yes,
girls can compete and win,
but
only while being modest, self-abnegating, and demure. Go too far, tip the scales, even without meaning to or knowing it, and you may be the next girl who thinks she's all that.

The culture of indirection permeates every corner of girls' lives. Deceit is eroticized in the media, where we are titillated by the prospect of a prim facade concealing a truer, dangerous passion. Think of the mousy librarian who tucks up her hair and conceals breasts, hips, and eyes beneath dowdy dresses and chunky glasses. This is the girl who "works it," who appears sweet while suggesting the boil of sin beneath the surface. The sexually indirect girl milks the good girl/bad girl dichotomy to the bone.

The sexiest among us, writes Elizabeth Wurtzel, is "the small town sweetheart who drips sugar and saccharine for all the world to see but is in fact full of lust and evil ... and malice and bad thoughts."
⁵⁰
The erotic value of this girl emanates directly from the layer of truth hidden beneath her false exterior. It is the very fact of her lie that arouses us. As the tagline for the film
Sorority
drawls, "When they're bad, they're very, very good."

Manipulation, especially when it's sexual, is often shown to girls as the path to power. This woman can't get what she wants by earning it, so instead she deceives and manipulates everyone around her. The classic female villainess, Wurtzel argues, "rarely holds up a bank, and she gets to be seductive and sweet until that creepy moment when, suddenly, she just isn't. She is conniving and manipulative and tempting and treacherous."

Glorifying female duplicity is not limited to Hollywood. A multi- billion-dollar market that has sprung up to cater to girls has also cashed in on the appeal of duplicity. In a July 2000 issue of
Teen
magazine, two photographs of the same young teenager were displayed: on the left, she was pierced and in leather, wearing heavy red and black makeup and a black tank top with lace bra. Her hands were clasped over her breasts, lips parted suggestively. On the right, the same girl was chastely clad in a cardigan, demurely hugging her schoolbooks, a Shirley Temple smile on her face. Above the racy photograph: "3:00—
THE MALL
." Above the other one: "3:15—
FOR MOM
." The product? Jane Cosmetics' makeup remover, promising to "clean up your act."

Other advertisements portray indirection as a form of beauty. These images suggest that the ideal girl should be indirect or duplicitous. The ads help reinforce the culture's message that being too assertive is unattractive in girls. Some feminists have argued that the image of the sexual temptress is a sign of empowerment, since it allows women to call the shots by saying when and where they'll become intimate. However, the temptress suggests that female power is palatable only when it's used for sex, and even then when it's defined by insincere or manipulative acts.

 

jealousy and competition

The culture of indirection places a massive psychological burden on the girls who internalize it. When girls call each other "all that," they are showing us the friction produced by a culture that is confused, a world that at once prohibits and promotes a language of body and voice in which girls can be confident.

Fifteen-year-old Tasha Keller told me about an attractive classmate who triggered her clique's anger because of her forthright behavior with boys. "You see her go up to the guys and it scares [the girls].... [In a movie] you see this girl going up to a guy and you've never been with a guy before. It's not like that. It never happens like that.

"They say you're supposed to get the guy and stuff, but the one who's closest to getting it is the one who's actually trying. And you're not supposed to try.

"Now that it's all about girls taking initiative and power and stuff, you get all these mixed messages. The media says girls should take control, like Nike ads," she continued. "The people on TV, they show you these scenarios, but they never show you how life is."

And how is life? I asked her. "It's this whole competition," she replied wistfully. "At school you don't have this perfect world around you.... There's so much jealousy. There's so much insecurity."

Two steps forward, one step back. It's not that we've done a bad job in teaching girls to reach for the stars. If they're privileged enough to enjoy a girl-positive school, American girls are overrun with a pastiche of powerful images past and present: Amelia Earhart, Sojourner Truth, Rigoberta Menchu, Lisa Leslie. They know women outnumber men in law school and college, that they are on the road to evening the scales in other fields. They ask, "Who will be the first woman president in my lifetime?"

The problem is with the means to get there. So fiercely have we focused on winning girls the right to dream that we have overlooked the cruder reality of what it will take to get them from point A to B and make their dreams come true. We have, in effect, put the cart before the horse.

What do I mean by this? The fear of being called "all that" and the demonization of girls who appear assertive or self-satisfied force underground the very behaviors girls need to become successful. Confidence and competition are critical tools for success, yet they break the rules of femininity. Openly competitive behavior undermines the "good girl" personality. Consider, for example, how competitive people aren't "nice" and oriented to others. Competition suggests a desire to be better than others. Competition and winning are about denying others what you wish to take for yourself.

As a result, being competitive, a sixth grader told me, becomes "a silent battle between the two girls. They don't say to their friends, 'I'm better' or 'I am competing with so-and-so,' but they kind of challenge each other, like 'beat this' through looks and actions.... They do it all in front of their competitor. That way the other person will see how great they are." Do you want to pinpoint the popular girls at school? The ones who shrug, "There is no popular group," or insist that "everybody's friends with each other" are your popular girls. As with aggression, as with conceit, competition violates the terms of femininity and so must be carefully shielded from others.
⁵¹