Odd Girl Out (52 page)

Indeed, the warning signs of relationship violence bear a powerful resemblance to bullying between best friends. Like Lucia in chapter seven, abusers "can make you feel like you are the most special person in the whole world." No matter how hard a target of relationship violence tries, she can never meet her abuser's expectations, a dynamic prominent in Reese's and Natalie's relationship. As in Annie's friendship with Samantha, an abuser can try to cut the target off from friends, family, or anyone who could help her leave the relationship. The abuser will argue these individuals are "untrustworthy or don't like the abuser."

If we care about teaching girls to choose healthy relationships of all kinds, it is vital that we promote awareness of submissive and aggressive behaviors in girls' relationships. When abusive dynamics are without a language, and when anger cannot be properly voiced, girls may not develop the ability to name what is happening or extract themselves from destructive situations. As a result, girls may be learning submissive behavior they will import, uninterrupted, into intimate adult relationships. In other words, the failure to recognize abuse may not confine itself to girls, or to girlhood. Consciousness of these behaviors is absolutely critical to stopping vulnerability to abuse at the earliest possible ages.

The middle-school years are what many would call the epicenter of the crisis of female adolescence. By now well known, the story of the crisis is often read as a eulogy to the intrepid, authentic girl. Uncovered most famously by psychologists Mary Pipher in
Reviving Ophelia,
and Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown in
Meeting at the Crossroads,
the event marks a moment that has by turns been described as a "Bermuda triangle" in which the "selves of girls go down in droves" and a crossroads at which girls undergo a second socialization by the culture into womanhood.

Over the course of a few years, as girls become conscious of the culture around them, they are forced into abrupt disconnection with themselves. Their truthful voices, their fearless capacity to speak their minds, their fierce appetite for food and play and truth, will no longer be tolerated. To be successful and socially accepted, girls must adopt feminine postures of sexual, social, verbal, and physical restraint. They must deny their own versions of what they see, know, and feel. To avoid rejection, they must enter whitewashed relationships, eschewing open conflict and becoming shackled to cultural rules that deny their freedom to know the truth of themselves, their bodies, and their feelings. It is here, in the growing space between what girls know to be true and what they must pretend to feel and know with others, that their self-esteem shrivels.

The crisis of female adolescence has been described mostly in individual terms, its interpersonal consequences largely ignored.
¹⁰⁷
In fact, the loss that is taking place is not simply one of the authentic self but of the self that is able to engage with her peers. The crisis, Brown and Gilligan report, is fundamentally relational. Pressure to deny the authenticity of
themselves
robs girls of the ability to communicate sincerely with one another. After all, girls are making Faustian bargains, sacrificing their true selves for damaged, false relationships with others. Disconnecting internally, they fall apart interpersonally, suppressing conflict and anger, adopting facades of the "nice and polite," and striving toward interactions that deny the realities of human relationship. They lose the ability to "name relational violations," or assert feelings of hurt and anger toward another person. "Feelings are felt, thoughts are thought," but they are "no longer exposed to the air and the light of relationship." Instead, they are sequestered in an "underground."

If we look at the crisis as a moment where alternative aggressions intensify, the loss of girls' self-esteem may be seen in a new light. By adjusting the lens we use to examine girls' lives, the underground appears as not just an emotional end point where girls store their true feelings. It may itself be an active medium to communicate conflict, especially alternative aggressions. Further investigation of this link may offer a new portal into the kinds of help we can give girls during this difficult period. If alternative aggressions are a major symptom of girls' loss of self-esteem, perhaps we can strengthen our attack against the onset of this crisis by focusing more resources and research on girls' interpersonal relationships. We might work harder to prohibit girls from engaging in alternative aggressions and instead guide them into more assertive acts of truth telling and direct aggression.

Teach girls to be aggressive? Well, yes. I return again to a major symptom of girls' loss of self-esteem: idealized, or conflict-free, relationships. If we can guide girls into comfort with "messy" feelings such as jealousy, competition, and anger, they will be less likely to take them out of their relationships with others. They will feel free to confess strong feelings, and they will stay in touch with themselves. They will be less likely to repress the feelings that over time simmer into rageful acts of cruelty.

 

Events of unexplained aggression and loss mark some girls forever. The worry that there is always a hidden layer of truth beneath a facade of "niceness" can leave girls permanently unsure about what they can trust in others and in themselves. These stories in particular haunt me. These are the girls, it seems, who drift away from other girls, who cease to support one another, who mature into mistrust and even hatred toward their peers.

Marcie was one of the first adult women I interviewed. The odd girl out more often than not during elementary and middle school, she confided that her current relationships with other women today are bittersweet. Now in her late twenties, she remarked, "Quite often, I feel like it's me who doesn't fit in with the rest of them. I know it's internal, and that there's a little part of me that will never quite trust them. There's a little part of me that believes they will turn on me at any moment."

Marcie's words were echoed in the voices of many girls and women I later met. Women like Marcie, injured in childhood by their peers, are still speaking in girls' voices. They feel a raw hurt and bewilderment that belies the years that have passed. These women are asking why the people around them, sometimes their closest friends, expressed anger indirectly and at times without warning, leaving them disoriented, alone, and full of self-blame.

When we can agree that nice girls get really angry, and that good girls are sometimes quite bad, we will have plowed the social desert between "nice" and "bitch." When we have built a positive vocabulary for girls to tell each other their truths, more girls will raise their voices. They will pose and answer their own questions and solve their own mysteries of relationship.

What greater gift can we give girls than the ability to speak their truths and honor the truths of their peers? In a world prepared to value all of girls' feelings and not just some, girls will enjoy the exhilarating freedom of honesty in relationship. They will live without the crippling fear of abandonment. It is my hope that as they, and any woman who has ever been the odd girl out, collect their thoughts to speak their minds, they will whisper to themselves, "What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I
ever
been afraid?"
¹⁰⁸

1. Michelle Anthony,
Little Girls Can Be Mean
(New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2010).

2. See Marion K. Underwood,
Social Aggression Among Girls
(New York: Guilford Press, 2003). Also see the publications of Nicki R. Crick at the Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota.

3. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan,
Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).

4. Adrienne Rich, "From Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," in
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).

5. Anne Campbell,
Men, Women, and Aggression
(New York: Basic Books, 1993).

6. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan,
Meeting at the Crossroads.

7. Peggy Orenstein,
Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap
(New York: Doubleday, 1994). In the first part of this quote Orenstein cites Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan, "The Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls," paper presented at the Laurel-Harvard Conference on the Psychology of Women and the Education of Girls, Cleveland, OH, April 1990; Orenstein also advises readers to see Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan,
Meeting at the Crossroads.

8. For other examples, see Beverly I. Fagot and Richard Hagan, "Aggression in Toddlers: Responses to the Assertive Acts of Boys and Girls,"
Sex Roles
12 (1985): 341–51; David G. Perry, Louise C. Perry, and Robert J. Weiss, "Sex Differences in the Consequences that Children Anticipate for Aggression,"
Developmental Psychology
25 (1989): 312–19.

9. Kaj Bjoerkqvist and Pirkko Niemela, "New Trends in the Study of Female Aggression," in
Of Mice and Women: Aspects of Female Aggression,
ed. K. Bjoerkqvist and P. Niemela (San Diego: Academic Press, 1992).

10. Kaj Bjoerkqvist, Kirsti M. J. Lagerspetz, and Ari Kaukiainen, "Do Girls Manipulate and Boys Fight.? Developmental Trends in Regard to Direct and Indirect Aggression,"
Aggressive Behavior
18 (1992): 117–27.

11. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan,
Meeting at the Crossroads.

12. Carol Gilligan,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

13. Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–11)85
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

14. Anne Campbell,
Men, Women, and Aggression.

15. For example, see Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler,
Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

16. Nicki R. Crick, Maureen A. Bigbee, and Cynthia Howes, "Gender Differences in Children's Normative Beliefs about Aggression: How Do I Hurt Thee? Let Me Count the Ways,"
Child Development
67 (1996): 1003–14.

17. For the best overview of research on relational aggression, see Nicki R. Crick, et al., "Childhood Aggression and Gender: A New Look at an Old Problem," in
Gender and Motivation,
ed. Dan Bernstein (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999).

18. Nicki R Crick, "The Role of Overt Aggression, Relational Aggression, and Prosocial Behavior in the Prediction of Children's Future Social Adjustment,"
Child Development
67 (1996): 2317–27; Nicki R Crick and Jennifer K. Grotpeter, "Relational Aggression, Gender, and Social-Psychological Adjustment,"
Child Development
66 (1995): 710–22; Nicki R. Crick, Maureen A. Bigbee, and Cynthia Howes, "Gender Differences in Children's Normative Beliefs about Aggression: How Do I Hurt Thee? Let Me Count the Ways."

19. Lyn Mikel Brown and Carol Gilligan,
Meeting at the Crossroads.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid.

22. Lynn Smith, "Hey, Poo-Poo Head, Let's Be Friends: Childhood Teasing Needn't Be Traumatic,"
Los Angeles Times,
6 December 2000, sec. E, p. 1.

23. Alice H. Eagly and Valerie J. Steffen, "Gender and Aggressive Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Social Psychological Literature,"
Psychological Bulletin
100 (1986): 309–30; Ann Frodi, Jacqueline Macaulay, and Pauline R. Thorne, "Are Women Always Less Aggressive Than Men? A Review of the Experimental Literature,"
Psychological Bulletin
84 (1977): 634–60.

24. Don E. Merten, "The Meaning of Meanness: Popularity, Competition, and Conflict among Junior High School Girls,"
Sociology of Education
70 (1997): 175–91.

25. Erica Goode, "Scientists Find a Particularly Female Response to Stress,"
New York Times,
19 May 2000, sec. A, p. 20.

26. danah boyd, "'Bullying' Has Little Resonance with Teenagers," November 15, 2010, blog post at
www.zephoria.org
. See also "Victimization of Adolescent Girls" by Amanda Burgess-Proctor, Sameer Hinduja, and Justin Patchin. Cyberbullying Research Center (2010),
www.cyberbullying.us
. I have also noticed this in informal surveys I take when I visit schools around the country.

27. Thankfully, this is changing. Increasingly, state laws are mandating that schools include cyberbullying in their anti-bullying policy.

28. danah boyd, "Friendship," in
Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out,
eds. Mizuko Ito, et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010).

29. "Popularity math" is a phrase suggested by Lilly Jay to describe this phenomenon.

30. S. Hinduja and J. W. Patchin,
School Climate and Cyber Integrity: Preventing Cyberbullying and Sexting One Classroom at a Time
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications/Corwin Press, 2012, in press).

31. I first read this on danah boyd's blog as a single statement.

32. Jan Hoffman, "As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch Up,"
New York Times,
4 December 2010.

33.
Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8–18 Year Olds.
Kaiser Family Foundation Study (January 2010).

34. The Nielsen Company,
US Teen Mobile Report
(October 2010). In their study,
Teens, Cell Phones and Texting,
the Pew Internet and American Life Project (2006) also found that 1 in 3 teens sent 3,000 texts per month.

35. S. Hinduja and J. W. Patchin,
School Climate and Cyber Integrity: Preventing Cyberbullying and Sexting One Classroom at a Time.
See also Pew Internet and American Life Project "Cyberbullying" (2006). Online at
www.pewinternet.org
.

36. Cyberbullying Research Center,
Cyberbullying: Identification, Prevention, and Response
by Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin (2010).