Odd Girl Out (35 page)

In New Jersey, Alizah resolved to remake her image. She spent hours assembling a wardrobe that would fit in, and when she spoke to me, nearly fifteen years later, she could describe the first-day outfit down to the angle of her shirt collar. As she stood in line at the cafeteria, the cool girls swarmed. "What's up with the shoes? My father wears those shoes. You can't afford socks? Why does she have a triangle on her ass? What the hell is Guess? Why do you have a horse on your shirt?"

At that point, Alizah said, "I can't do anything else. I can't try any harder. I'm not even getting a chance here. I thought, screw you. I'm going to do what I want to do, and I'm going to wear what I want to wear." The next day Alizah wore the camouflage print pants she loved, with a tight black sleeveless top. She spiked her hair. "The girls said I had fishing lures in my ears and I glared at them."

Alizah befriended a girl who looked like her in the cafeteria. "Everyone said she was drinking bleach out of her thermos because she wanted to die. I sat down, introduced myself, and that was it. I thought, she's as much of an outcast as I am and we're going to get along just fine. We were best friends and are close to this day."

As I tried to understand what made the difference, Alizah explained, "I think I just didn't care anymore. I thought, I'm not going to try and be your friend. If you want to hang out with me, that's cool, but I'm not going to overextend myself and tell you my secrets and put myself out on the line."

Alizah had tried so hard to make people like her in California that she had been involved in few school activities. Her world revolved around trying to win others' affection. So she made changes. She started making her own clothes in high school and joined journalism, yearbook, and theater clubs. She became the first junior to edit the school newspaper.

"I became my own person. I was determined that I wasn't going to fall into it again. I didn't want the pain. I thought, even if I don't have a lot of friends, I'm going to keep myself busy and do the things I like to do. And I made friends that way, through my activities, as opposed to following everyone around and doing what everyone else was doing."

For some girls, being cast out is a blessing in disguise, as many are guided into a more centered, authentic self-awareness. Being the odd girl out helped Naomi off a treadmill of want and disappointment. "I felt like nothing, like no matter what I did it wasn't going to be okay, because nobody cared. I didn't have to live up to the standard other people had to live up to. I looked at these popular girls and they had these boyfriends that were like those cafeteria boyfriends. I felt like there was—these people, they had to be pretty, beautiful but not too sexy. They had to be desirable but not slutty, they had to be an ideal but always an unreachable ideal. Whereas I felt that as nothing, I had the freedom to be what I really was because nobody was looking to me for anything."

For twelve-year-old Alix, being bullied empowered her to demand respect in her relationships for who she is and to settle for nothing less. "It taught me to always be myself. I want people to respect me for who I am, not who I'm pretending to be." Ruth, now in her twenties, said, "My communication style became fiercer because I had to fight to earn it." And, she added, "It taught me compassion and independence. I can be alone and not feel insecure."

Girls who survive bullying can emerge from the experience with new strength. They can grow into women who learn to choose the right relationships and avoid abusive ones. They incorporate from their experience the ability to recognize harmful people long before harm can find them. If girls can go through their pain in a culture that validates it, more and more girls will get to walk away with silver linings.

 

When it is expressed, the overt aggression of girls is pathologized as unfeminine or worse. Minority and low-income girls are often stereotyped as aggressive, loud, and disruptive, and therefore "at risk." "Those loud black girls" is a term used to demean the brassy presence of African American female youth. When Jill McLean Taylor and her colleagues asked urban girls to fill out a questionnaire, they found that over half answered the question "What gets me into trouble?" with "my mouth" or "my big mouth." The girls spoke "as if repeating a mantra given them by some higher authority."
⁷⁹

Scuffles between boys, though met with swift punishment, are nevertheless seen as a predictable side effect of male adolescence. Yet when girls fight physically, their aggression is seen as a sign of deviant behavior. This double standard has grave consequences, suggesting to girls that their aggression will be more acceptable if only they keep it indirect or covert. Moreover, physically aggressive girls appear to be disproportionately working-class girls and girls of color; when they are punished disproportionately, officials perpetuate stereotypes about them, suggesting it is only they who break the rules. Not surprisingly, when girls of color are studied, it's often to identify high-risk behavior, individual deviancy, or social problems.

Our culture has long pathologized the black female as a willful matriarch. Black mothers are portrayed as domineering disciplinarians who promote disobedience in their children. The culture's anger toward the black female can be traced, in large part, to her mouth. The black woman crystallizes the culture's discomfort with female strength, voice, and aggression: her willingness to raise her voice and defend herself publicly, to provide for her family irrespective of the presence of a man, and to speak her heart and mind—all of these dis- rupt the social and sexual order of society.

What little we know about girls' relationships is based mostly on studies of white, middle-class girls. Indeed, most of the stories in this book come from that part of society. The rich diversity of female relationships found among other races, ethnicities, and class backgrounds has often been overlooked.

That the girls who engage in direct conflict may have little real social power is a sad irony, to say the least. The assertiveness shown by some minority girls may reflect not self-confidence but their vulnerability in the larger society. Their voices indeed challenge the picture of indirect aggression painted in other chapters of this book. Yet in many instances their forthrightness stems from the girls' sense that they can make themselves heard only by using physical force or dangerous speech. Because it is linked to their marginalization, their directness cannot serve as a model for overcoming girls' sense of powerlessness.

Dealing effectively with that feeling of powerlessness is essential to fighting the loss of girls' authentic selves. What we can learn about assertive girls would be undeniably useful in developing concrete strategies to fight the loss of girls' authentic selves. The more we know about these girls, the more we honor their voices, the closer we will get to developing concrete strategies to combat female bullying in all its forms.

Suzanne Cohen was preparing for an emergency conference with her six-year-old daughter's teacher when she was suddenly uneasy. Standing before the classroom's closed door, poised to discuss the abusive behavior of her daughter's classmate, "I realized that I was about to describe this child [as] extremely manipulative, competitive, and underhanded. And to say that about a six-year-old girl—you sound like a lunatic!"

She is right. A system that refuses to classify these behaviors as genuine aggression will look askance at complaints of indirect, social, and relational aggression. As a result, parents who confront girl bullying face an experience that, in its own way, can be as upsetting as their daughters'. In the absence of a public language to talk about bullying, it's hard to avoid inflammatory words like "liar," "sneaky," or "manipulator." As their daughters fear going public and facing retaliation, parents are afraid of being designated "hysterical" or "overinvested" by the school. And where girls must overcome the embarrassment of low social status, parents may quietly worry over the role their errors might have played in their daughter's experience.

The attempt of parents to tone down their demands on teachers is one of the most powerful subtexts in this chapter of the story of girl bullying. Sitting with four mothers who meet regularly to chat at a Washington coffee shop, I asked them to explain.

"As a parent, you're aware of the incredible amount of power the teacher has over your child's life," Ellen said. "You don't want to jeopardize that relationship in any way." Her friends nodded. Added Christine, "I think parents worry that teachers will take things out on their children because of how a parent acts." Because complaining about alternative aggressions is often perceived as overreacting to everyday school behavior, many mothers harbor a fear of becoming the classroom's "hysterical mother." The need to remain calm and dispassionate, they emphasized, is key.

Perhaps more than any other event in a child's life, bullying forces the question every parent struggles with: How much should I intercede on my child's behalf? While the answer to this question should depend on the child—is she ready to fend for herself? is she being prematurely exposed to danger?—too often the answer is determined by the anticipated response. Will other parents take offense? Will the school be responsive, or worse, punitive? With most schools strapped to accomplish the most basic extracurricular objectives, getting somewhere with a busy teacher can be an uphill battle.

Parents seeking justice for their daughters face cultural and personal obstacles. Most daunting is the fact that alternative aggressions are ignored or rarely considered a legitimate social problem. More often, school officials downplay the problem or blame the target. Many parents described daughters being sent to psychological counseling for treatment when there was nothing wrong with them, encouraged to get costly social skills training when it was the aggressor who in fact needed the help, or ignored because the aggressor was stealthy and it came down to a case of she-said, she-said. Not surprisingly, plenty of parents opt for silence.

Shame is also a reality. The discovery that your daughter struggles socially is painful; finding out she's not to blame is hardly a consolation. Every family handles it differently. It took no small courage for Linda to confide the shame that felt to her both searing and ridiculous. "There was this nagging piece, and I never went to this place," she told me. "This is even hard to say but I thought it sometimes. As much as everything I said to [my daughter] did not reflect this, deep down I thought, 'My kid isn't
popular
? She isn't one of the cool kids?' Even though I know that's not what I really want. But you want your kid to be wonderful." It took Suzanne Cohen great courage to overcome her instinct to block the whole incident out. As she waited for the teacher, she recalled, "I secretly harbored this fantasy that someone would turn around and say, 'Why can't Hannah stand up for herself? Why don't you teach her how to stand up for herself? Why is she letting this happen?'" Although these feelings are common to anyone coping with a child's misfortune, shame weighs more heavily when most people regard the problem as a trivial phase in child development.

When a child is found to be learning disabled, there is a specialist. The child's parent suspects the problem, often using accessible literature, and expresses her concern to a knowledgeable official. The parent is reassured her child's situation is neither her fault nor that unusual. In time, her child may receive specialized attention to provide her with tools to accommodate her different needs and perform to the best of her abilities.

When a child is the target of alternative aggressions, there is often nobody to help. Without rules to refer to or a language to narrate a child's pain, parents know the cards are stacked against them from the get-go. As Suzanne explained, "If I made too much of a fuss about her social issues, you know, it would be like, 'Well what's wrong with your kid if she can't deal with her issues? Why doesn't she just walk away and get over this?' And I was embarrassed—I was embarrassed to appear the way I felt."

Silence is a second skin for American families. We put our best foot forward and draw the curtains in times of trouble. From across the yard we quietly blame parents for their children's plight. Middle-class families in particular are committed to keeping children's social, emotional, and learning problems secret, especially psychological pain. One mother, confiding the pressure to stay silent about her daughter's problems, put it simply: "We're afraid our kids aren't perfect. And that it reflects our mothering abilities. That we're home too much or not home enough. It reflects on us."

With ever more opportunities to showcase children, parents compete vigorously to project an image of social bliss and indomitable health. They stack trophies and throw glamorous birthday parties. Sharing the experience of despair engendered by girl bullying is for many parents impossible. Margaret Kaplan explained, "If I go to this person and tell them this is what's happening, who are they going to tell? How many people are going to know? How distorted will it become? Will it be, 'Oh, the Kaplans:
They're
having problems.
We're
not.
We're
all perfect. We have this idyllic lifestyle.'" Despite her deft organizing of parents to demand extra art classes, Susan Sussman gave a bitter laugh when I suggested a group to combat alternative aggressions. "There is no way I am going to organize a group around my daughter's experience of cruelty," she said.

Susan Patterson said the smallest incidents can become the subject of lunchtime conversations in Ridgewood. At forty-one, with her daughter bullied by a close friend, she was resolved to lock the town out of her private life. She closed down at even the thought of coming forward, brushing me off with a bitterness that seems to contain a lifetime of disappointments. "This town talks about everybody," she seethed. "They can't hardly wait to get up in the morning and find out who's getting divorced, who's sleeping with who. I mean, that's just the way life has been here forever." She pushed fiercely for her daughter to handle her bully on her own. "I wanted her to be an independent woman. I kept thinking, this is not as bad as it is. I didn't want to think it was as bad as it was. But it was really, really bad."