Odd Girl Out (24 page)

The same goes for jealousy. To be jealous is to desire more than we have been given, to wish to take rather than to give. Jealousy is unbridled desire. Jealousy transforms friends into mere objects, as girls obsess over whatever part of them—body, hair, boyfriend, skin—they want for themselves. A group of ninth graders talked to me about sitting around comparing bodies during free time at school. "If we're not doing anything," one said, "we're like, 'I want her legs,' and 'I like her height' and 'I love her hair.'"

Girls are loosely aware of the way feeling jealous violates the expectation that they must be both perfect and self-sacrificing. One-on-one jealousy "bothers us," a Ridgewood ninth grader told me. "If we're jealous of somebody, I think it's because they're admirable, and maybe they have physical features that we like or something like that, and we don't want people to think that we don't accept ourselves." For some girls, jealousy is selfish, a refusal to embrace the care giving qualities of a grown woman. "Well, I feel immature [when I'm jealous]," a ninth grader told me. "You feel like a little—you're not supposed to feel like that. You're acting like a baby."

As with aggression, girls learn to mute feelings of jealousy and competition. As with aggression, jealousy and competition do not disappear but instead morph into "acceptable" forms. And as with aggression, to remain steadfastly "good" and "nice," girls must re-sort to hidden codes. They learn, in other words, to express competition and jealousy indirectly.

"All that" is the hub of a hidden code that allows girls to displace feelings of competition, jealousy, anger, and desire. "Sometimes," a ninth grader told me, "I'll get angry about some little thing, and then," she said, switching to a fake-crying voice, "I'm like, 'I'm just jealous of you!'" A classmate offered, "I mean, you don't go around saying, 'She's so pretty.' Instead you say something bad to make you feel better."

 

speaking in code

Code words, I found, are scattered all over girls' lives. They are often used to set standards of behavior. "All that," for example, inscribes a border around girls' assertiveness. It is a social red zone used to telegraph to girls they have drifted beyond what is acceptably feminine, a vehicle allowing girls to police each other into passivity when they become too much of something—when, in other words, they become too assertive.

The remarks that earn you the title "all that" are often not even explicit: "You like my shoes?" can be perceived by the listener as bragging. "I don't know which party to go to this weekend!" is heard as conceit. "Do you like my hair?" or "Are my nails okay?"—even frequent checks of makeup or hair combing are taken as signs the girl thinks she's thin or pretty. There are cruder signs, too: the girl who thinks she's all that may dare to suggest she thinks she's pretty. She may not speak to and smile at everyone throughout the day. She may attract and flirt with boys, even the ones already spoken for.

All of this is not to say the "all that" girls aren't actually conceited. Plenty of them may be. But "all that" is less a fixed identity than it is a hidden repository in which girls can store uncomfortable feelings of anger, jealousy, and competitiveness. Quite often the distance between "all that" and jealousy is really a matter of degrees.

Indeed, the girls who get ostracized are usually the ones who have what most girls are expected to want: looks, the guy, money, and cool clothes. When I ask girls what they get jealous of, a Mississippi freshman summed it up: "Who they go out with, what they wear, how much money they have, who likes them, who hangs out with them, and in some cases the grades they get." What is "all that," really, but
acting like
you've got some or all of these things instead of just quietly owning them, in an aw-shucks sort of way.

Jacqueline, a sophomore, explained that a girl who thinks she's all that "flaunts everything. Like if she's smart, you know, she always has the answers around the teachers. She knows she always gets praise or whatever." When I asked why it bothers girls so much, she said, "Because if you have a lot of stuff, you have it.... My mother always told me nobody's better than anybody." I pressed harder. Why does it make girls so insecure? "Because we want that and we don't like the fact that she has it. We want to be like that.... You don't have to show the whole world you have good grades. That makes other people feel bad."

Another code word between girls is "flirt." You might think girls aspire to be attractive to guys, but calling someone a flirt is rarely a compliment. Many girls think flirting with a guy is tantamount to being physically intimate with him, and if a girl happens to be seen flirting with a guy who's already spoken for, her social life may be in danger.

The trouble is that no one can say for sure exactly what flirting is. Like "all that," just about anything qualifies, as long as it's with a guy. As Stephanie discovered, a girl could be talking to a guy, looking at him, working with him, responding to him, writing him a note, instant messaging with him, playing around—or she could be seen doing any of these things. The definition of flirting depends not on the doer, but the viewer. A ninth grader illustrated the murkiness of "flirt" in a story she told.

"This girl in our school, she was liking this boy. He was always coming up and talking to me. I didn't like him like that. He was my friend. One day I was talking to him and he grabbed my waist and pushed me back and pulled me and I'm screaming and she was thinking that I was flirting with him and then the next day at school she put White-Out in my hair. I asked her why she did that and she said, 'Because you're flirting with my dude.' I was like, 'No.' She went and asked him and he was like, 'No, we're just friends.' And then she apologized."

Needless to say, it is a short walk from "flirt" to "slut." Although most adults believe a slut is a promiscuous girl, often the opposite is true. The accused girl is often only assertive, not active; because she wears tight-fitting clothes and approaches boys fearlessly, she is labeled a slut. It is not her sexual behavior that earns ire, but her departure from the norms of feminine sexual modesty.

A girl who refuses to be "nice" all the time and to everyone may also get called a slut. She may flirt with a guy who is dating someone else or have a crush on a boy who is already spoken for. As Lyn Mikel Brown observed in her study of girls' anger, "a 'slut' is not someone who is sexually active per se, but rather someone who is disconnected from her partner or from other girls."
⁵²
Psychologist Deborah Tolman writes that "the fact of girls' sexual activity is explained in terms of relationships: girls have sex in the service of relationships."
⁵³
When a girl's sexuality becomes indiscriminate, performed to entertain or pleasure only herself, it has broken the rules.

In Mississippi, girls often used the word "skank" in a similar way. Like a slut, a skank is sexually brash, but she's also conceited. "[A skank] talks about [herself] more than anything else," a ninth grader said, imitating her: "'Well, I can do this. I can get any person.'" A skank may sit with her legs open, wearing baggy, skater clothes, or she may wear wear skintight, "slutty" clothes. She may talk in slang, not use proper language, or get into fights; or she might be excessively sexual with her boyfriend in public.

Some code words have multiple meanings. "I'm so fat" is a common lament with at least three separate translations. When I first started meeting with girls, middle-class students complained constantly of peers who overused the phrase. In fact, in a study called "Fat Talk," researchers noted that most girls who said "I'm so fat" weren't fat at all.
⁵⁴

First, "I'm so fat" is used as a tool of indirect one-upping. "Girls ask each other if they are fat, and that is a way of competing with each other," an eighth grader explained to me. "If they are skinny and ask themselves if they are fat, what does that say about me? It's a passive aggressive way of saying the other person's not skinny." In "Fat Talk," girls described "how their friends practically 'accused' them of being thin, 'as if it were my fault or something.'"

"I'm so fat" is also used as a roundabout way to seek positive re- inforcement from a peer. "'I'm so fat' is fishing for compliments," thirteen-year-old Nicole said. "[Girls] want attention." The researchers confirmed that "for many girls, the motivation in saying 'I'm so fat' is to gauge what other people think about them. Girls are really competitive but they don't make it seem that way," Mary Duke explained. "Like, 'I'm so fat.' When they say that it's because they want attention."

Finally, girls use "I'm so fat" to short-circuit the possibility of getting labeled "all that." The researchers found that if a girl didn't say she thought she was fat, she would imply that she was perfect. "In other words, saying she doesn't need to diet would be an admission that she didn't need to work on herself—that she was satisfied." Instead, they found, the "good girl" must put herself down, and so wind her way to the compliment she is seeking.

Another code word is the accusation of "copying." At Marymount, an eighth-grade girl threw out her shorts in tears after Lisa, a popular girl, was enraged by her wearing the same pair that Lisa had purchased at a special outlet. After alliances were built and the whole grade was talking, the "copier" wrote Lisa an anguished note and barricaded herself in the guidance counselor's office. I am astonished by the fever-pitch rage that flies across cliques when one girl is copying the look or behavior of another. Whether they're eight or in the eighth grade, the response is clearly disproportionate, suggesting "copying" has a hidden meaning.

Like "all that," "copying" is an accusation in which girls sometimes hide competition and jealousy. Often girls will say they detest copiers because they want to have their own unique style. Press a little harder, and you hear this: "If she copied me, people would think she looked better than me." A sixth grader explained over e-mail that "it feels like they're stealing my ideas.... I guess because we kind of compete with each other." The copying accusation takes a girl from being on the defensive, feeling discomfort about jealousy and competition, and changes the terms of the conflict. Now, righteously indignant, the copied one can deflect attention from the messier feelings fueling her reaction, directing her anger toward someone else.

What about the popular girl who gets angry that a wanna-be is dressing like her? The copying accusation is extremely effective. "Copying" gives the popular girl a concrete fault to attack. It deflects attention from the real issue: the wanna-be's attempt to get into the popular clique. Because being accused of copying can be such a heavy blow to a girl's social status, the popular girl manages to defuse the threat entirely and isolate the wanna-be from the group.

 

girl passive

Girls are expected to be passive and powerful at the same time. I never understood this more clearly than during an afternoon I spent at a leadership workshop for girls. The twenty-eight girls were between thirteen and seventeen; one quarter were nonwhite. Standing before a pad perched on a wooden easel, watched by fourteen pairs of eyes, I began.

"Caroline"—I pointed over to a younger counselor—"is going to be Vanna White." They giggled. "I want you guys to call out the qualities you think the ideal or perfect girl has. Then I want you to tell me who the anti-girl is—the girl no one wants to be. Think of a girl you know, or one you see represented in the media." I nodded at Caroline, who uncapped a red marker. And here is what they said (boldface added):

What I noticed first was how the ideal girl was
physically
perfect, a Caucasian Barbie doll: bone thin, tall, pretty, blond, blue eyes, big boobs, good teeth, clear skin—in other words, what you'd expect. Moments later, I realized that what these girls also find perfect is not just a flawless body, but also an indirect, middle-of-the-road character. For them, the ideal girl's true perfection was her ability to hold herself back from the world, expressing herself through manipulation.

Look again at the lists. The ideal girl is stupid, yet manipulative. She is dependent and helpless, yet she uses sex and romantic attachments to get power. She is popular yet superficial. She is fit, but not athletic, or strong. She is happy, but not excessively cheerful. She is fake. She is tiptoeing around the lines that will trigger the alarm of "all that."