Odd Girl Out (29 page)

They are nine years old.

 

Researchers have nailed down some broad ideas about what makes girls popular, but they remind me of my mom out to dinner without her reading glasses: She knows what restaurant we're at, but she can't read the menu. When a prominent research team observed students at an Ohio public elementary school, they witnessed the most pronounced sex differences in popularity politics. For girls, they concluded, success was having money, good looks, and "social development," which they defined as the "early attainment of adult social characteristics."
⁶¹
Which most mothers could have told them without the trouble of a formal study.

As parents with a pulse know, popular girls get maximum access to the booty of womanhood. The cool girls are the first to discover makeup and boys. They get the parents born without genes for party supervision, bedtime setting, and credit card control. They look and act like they just stepped off the pages of a Delia's catalog. They do just about everything and anything to simulate womanhood.

But here is the truth about girls and popularity: It is a cutthroat contest into which girls pour boundless energy and anxiety. It is an addiction, a siren call, a prize for which some would pay any price. Popularity changes girls, causes a great many of them to lie and cheat and steal. They lie to be accepted, cheat their friends by using them, steal people's secrets to resell at a higher social price. It is an accepted fact of life, an eleven-year-old advised me, that "if girls have a chance to be popular, they will take it, and they wouldn't really care who they were hurting."

Women have long relied upon their affiliations with others to enhance social status, and at its core, popularity is a mean and merciless competition for relationships. When women lacked earning power and equality, they were especially inclined to "marry up: to marry men who are taller, richer, older, stronger, with at least the promise of more social clout."
⁶²
Despite the advent of girl power, many girls today cut their friendships from the same cloth. Lexie remembers the thrill of having a popular friend. "It meant so much for me and my self-esteem," she told me. "I used to drop her name in conversation with friends or write her name in my schoolbooks because I wanted people to know that Susan K., one of the cool girls, liked
me
!" Jessie Johnston, a sixth grader, explained, "It's pressure you put on yourself. I wish she was my best friend because she's really popular and that would make me popular, too." A high-school junior put it more bluntly: "You use people to advance up the hierarchy."

With scientific precision, girls track their bearings on the relational landscape. They chart alliances in professional-looking graphs, monitoring the balance of power. One sixth-grade graph I saw positioned peers along an axis that began with
A
("Acquaintance") and ended at
BF
("Best Friend"). In the diary of seventh grade she lent me, Lily Carter's story of her life is always told in terms of relationships. "It is really hard for me to write about my life," she begins, "but I'll try."

Today Arlyn was talking about Asia and how she didn't have her own personality. It got me thinking about myself. Julia has stopped talking to me since her Bat Mitzvah. It really bothers me. Liz is nice to me except she never calls me, I call her. It makes me feel inferior or something. Anyway I was thinking that maybe Liz has stopped being as nice to me as she was at the beginning of the year.

With relationships in constant flux, girls pressure peers to evaluate their friendships, their looks, their personalities. Emily's friend presided over a weekly ritual in which she seated their clique in a secret circle and gave each girl a grade out of one hundred. Such events are anything but frivolous. In the uncertain world of girls' relationships, the need to know anything for certain is urgent. The number may be the one thing you can hold on to.

"People ask, who do you like more as a best friend, me or so-and-so?" Ashley Vernon said, just after telling me shyly that she is the most popular girl in her grade. When she told her friend that she likes people equally, the girl replied, "Well, you gotta like one of us more. You gotta have a really, really good friend." Once, when the girl learned she was liked more than someone else in their clique, she left a gloating note in the "less liked" girl's locker. Ashley's friends compete to sit next to her, often making her pick a number; the closest guesser gets the lucky seat. "They think it's a privilege to be there or something," she said sheepishly.

In the race for popularity, girls take on as many friends as they can, trying to balance them like so many saucers stacked and swaying on a tray. America Online hit the jackpot with its Instant Messenger technology, which allows girls to exchange cybermessages with their peers in real time—actually, about as many online buddies as can fit on a single screen. Girls can have a hundred people or more on their buddy lists. They can exchange messages with five people at once, have someone over at their house, and still be on the phone, thus managing multiple relationships at once. "It's like being able to be on the phone but with six individual conversations!" crowed eighth-grader Shelley McCullough. "It's a way to extend your friendships." IM, as it's called, is dominated by girls, no doubt because it's a girl gizmo that fits their social specs to a tee. Perhaps that's why one junior chortled to me cheerfully, "IM is God's gift to teenagers!"

Lily's diary tracks shifting alliances with growing panic. "Today was awful," she writes in January 1998. "Julia hasn't been nice to me all this week and I don't know why. Julia is taking over Liz and the two of them are completely excluding me. The same thing is happening to Asia with Arlyn and Julia." At soccer practice, she notes anxiously that Liz and Arlyn are mysteriously sitting in another row. "Neither Liz nor Arlyn waited for me or Asia after the game.... Arlyn turned her back on me the WHOLE PRACTICE! AAAAAHHHHH!"

Girls' fierce attachment to their friends illustrates the powerful influence relationship exerts over their lives. As they grow more socially sophisticated, the love between girls takes them into new, en- chanting territory. But for girls on the popularity treadmill, friendship is rarely just friendship; it's a ticket, a tool, an opportunity—or a deadweight. You can own everything Abercrombie ever made, but if you don't have the right friends, you're nobody.

In the 1989 film
Heathers,
it is the threat and promise of relationships that drive the characters' jockeying to become "Heather #1," the most popular girl in school. Jason Dean is the dark new student who seduces the protagonist Veronica, helping her weave her re-pressed anger toward her friends into vengeful acts of violence. He forces one of the Heathers into his service by waving around an old photograph of her with Martha "Dumptruck," the biggest loser in school. Heather gasps. A long-expired relationship with a "lesser" person would be enough to bring her down, and she knows it.

After Veronica embarrasses Heather Chandler by throwing up at a college party, the ringleader corners her and snarls, "You were nothing before you met me. You were playing Barbies with Betty Finn. You were a Bluebird. You were a Brownie. You were a Girl Scout cookie." Without me, she crows, "Monday morning you're history. I'll tell everyone about tonight."

Relationships are the Rosetta stone of girls' social status. Not surprisingly, they often inspire suspicion:
Why is she my friend? Why did she buy her that gift? What does she want from me? Or I from her?
The popularity contest leaves many girls dubious of their peers' intentions. Daniella mused, "When you're separately with your friends, they're like, 'Oh, you're so much better than [the others], the way you do that is so great.' You get all these compliments but they're not always meaningful. Or, like, [they say] you have better hair, or you're
so
much better than they are. But what they're saying to you is meaningless....it's to make you think you should go to them."

At Marymount, Emily listed some of the relational calculations she and her friends have made. "She's going to be invited to the next party, so I'll be friends with her, or I'll be friends with her because she's rich." The strategy also works in reverse. A fifth grader in Mississippi explained, "They can act like you're the most important person and then they'll leave you. When you need them the most, they dump you.... When they're popular enough, they just move on." Jessie Johnston said, "I'd rather just go around 'cause if you're in the popular group and something happened, suddenly no one really likes you. With their influence you can just plummet to the bottom."

Authentic connections between girls are the first to go in the race for popularity. Getting popular requires strategy and calculation, that affection be shown selectively, that some be left behind, that others be attended to in private, and that the rules change from day to day. "It's not a contest," warned the ad for
Popular,
the WB's hit television show. "It's a war."

 

friends, sometimes

The sudden loss of a close friend to popularity is one of the most wrenching and common experiences I observed. The course of things is simple enough: one girl's window to popularity opens and she jumps through it, leaving her close or best friend behind. The abandoned find themselves alone with the knowledge they don't have what it takes to be cool.

The aftermath of the change is far more complicated. The break is often not clean but gradual, and there are a variety of scenarios. Some girls are mean in public and nice in private. Others are the reverse. Some girls simply behave as though their friends no longer exist.

But when the ditched girls cling to broken pieces of friendship with those who have only partially abandoned them, they suffer well beyond the moment of initial loss. By staying friends with these girls, they learn that they will be cared for at times and under circumstances beyond their control. There is no language to articulate this behavior, and especially the confusion and sadness that result. As they lose control of their relationships, girls feel privately responsible for their loss.

As any witnessing parent knows, these are not simply part-time friendships. They are abusive. They are a training ground in which vulnerability and disempowerment are learned and the ability to identify abuse is lost. One girl described the situation this way: "It's kind of like a new friendship begins and then it ends three hours later. And then it begins the next week and it ends three hours later." But there can be little self-respect when a girl learns to be loved on someone else's terms. The willingness to give oneself over to another's omnipotence in a friendship bears disturbing similarities to the willingness of a target to remain in a violent relationship. I worry that if we do not teach girls early on to know and resist these dynamics, we may be permitting the groundwork to be laid for violence in their adult lives.

For children, there is something almost profane about being abandoned by a close friend. It undermines the few assumptions they are old enough to make—that friends are nice, that love and care will be reciprocated in kind—at a critical developmental moment. The impact of such a loss should not be underestimated.

 

Lucia and Haley had been best friends at Sackler since third grade, and this year, in fifth grade, they'd been placed in the same class with the lion's share of the popular girls. During the second week of school, Haley got the uneasy feeling that Lucia was ignoring her. She decided to check and asked Lucia a few times to play at recess. Sure enough, Lucia apologized and refused, telling Haley she was playing with someone else. It was always one of the cooler girls. In no time it was clear that Lucia was getting popular, playing soccer at lunchtime and being partners with new girls during class.

Haley and I were rocking gently on a damp wooden swing outside her house in the balmy April air. As she dipped her sneaker down to kick up chips of mud, I swung my legs around and leaned back against the armrest. I noticed the contrast her pale skin made against the tiny freckles pooling under her eyes. Haley's coffee-colored hair was broomstick straight, and her eyes were serious behind wire-rim glasses as she watched the mud. She reminded me of Harriet the Spy. I asked Haley how she was feeling.

"I feel hurt," she said, her words slow and measured. "I feel she's got other things to do and that I'm not as important as other people. Sometimes I just try and brush it off, but I really can't, and I have that feeling that you know, it's gonna end soon, our friendship. We never had a fight, and then all of a sudden, she's in another crowd, she doesn't care about me anymore. We stopped talking, it's finished."

I asked the obvious question. "Did you talk to Lucia about it?" Haley's eyes widened and she thrust her chin forward, indignant at the stupidity of the question. Of course she had. Lucia denied anything had changed in their friendship.

"So ... who's right?" I asked hesitantly, bracing for another reprimand. Haley's voice tightened with frustration.

"Sometimes I know that I'm right because I know who's hurting me. But I mean, then who is? I would know who's hurting my feelings! I say, 'You're hurting my feelings,' and people go back and say, 'What are you talking about? I'm not doing anything.' That's what I get a lot of: 'No I'm not!'"

For a brief moment there was nothing but the muted creak of the damp swing. "I think that maybe I'm not sure about my feelings," she said more evenly. "I don't know! I question my feelings. I'm like, 'Is she really saying this?' Because I was really sure that yesterday she was
ignoring
me, or yesterday she wouldn't talk to me at recess or something like that. And I really question the fact."

Haley echoed the remarks of so many girls: the feeling of "being crazy," of not being able to know for sure the realness of one's own feelings or version of events in the world. Haley knew she was being ignored, yet the girl she loved and trusted was telling her otherwise. For Haley, it was as though Lucia said the sky was brown with as much certainty as Haley felt when she saw it as blue, yet Haley could not decide who was right. Lucia was pulling Haley away from what Haley knew was true about herself, her feelings, and her life, and into a place where she would doubt the worth of all of these, offering them up to Lucia for definition. Lucia had managed to hurt Haley while assuring her that, in fact, she was not hurt at all, that she was imagining all of this.