Who's The Mean Girl?

44 thoughts on “Who's The Mean Girl?”

1. This post made me think more about how I judge the women in my office. Saleswomen tend to dress much differently from women in the project management office (my own function) or in direct engineering. I understand why this is, but it does bring with it some divisiveness.

   I’m interested in the logic behind the hostility. Any time I encounter a woman who is clearly dressing for the men (which is how I interpret the skirt and low neckline) I automatically see that as competitive. The woman in question is by inference classifying any other women she may encounter as secondary. She is willing to sacrifice the classic female interaction pattern of behaving communally, to enhance her chances of getting more attention from the men. That just rankles.

   Interestingly for me it’s very context dependent. I make no such judgments when going out for the evening.

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2. I automatically see that as competitive. The woman in question is by inference classifying any other women she may encounter as secondary. She is willing to sacrifice the classic female interaction pattern of behaving communally, to enhance her chances of getting more attention from the men. That just rankles.
   There is a huge amount of speculation built in here. Probably life in general goes better when one tries not to do this sort of speculation. Certainly it’s not something that can be justified “any time” you encounter such a person- probably very few times at all.

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3. Well, Matt, I would point to the fact that a huge number of girls and women had the same reaction, including Laura. I’m absolutely speculating as to why they may have their reaction – I’m just sharing my own admittedly broken logic. Do I do anything about it? No. But that’s where my mind goes.

   The flip side of this is something that’s not being discussed here. Studies have shown how strongly men’s reactions to women vary based on that woman’s attractiveness. If I can believe NPR, a very attractive woman can raise up to twice as much money when fundraising – if she’s asking men. The rest of us women, we know this. We see this every day. It’s hard not to let it impact your interactions with other women.

   I’m not sure what the equivalent is for guys, if there is one. That’s an interesting question.

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4. Alright, to add another spin to this study…. The study looked at the reactions of college girls to two types of girls — Ms. Short Skirt and Ms. Jeans. College girls aren’t cooked up in a vacuum. They have already been exposed to both types of girls in high school.

   And maybe they have been exposed girls who were really not nice AND wore short skirts. Now, they associate mean-ness with short skirts.

   Or maybe they have been used to being overlooked for their plain looks and jeans, so choose to put all their efforts into school. They saw college as their turf. Ms. Short Skirt had her time in the sun in high school, but now it was their time to shine.

   I don’t know. Just throwing it out there. I think the reactions to Ms. Short Skirt is more complicated than competition for men.

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5. “If they are going to teach these lessons in school (I’m not even sure if school is the right place for this), I think the message should be about being kind, inclusive, non-judgmental. ”

   I *think* that’s the approach in my kids’ elementary school. Here’s an example of the “fill the bucket” stuff from some other school:

   http://www.belgrade-news.com/news/article_9b791af4-48bd-11e3-be20-0019bb2963f4.html

   (Quick Google search–got to run,)

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6. I certainly associate meanness with short skirts, based on some experiences. I hope I’d never be mean to someone just because she was wearing a short skirt, obviously. But women make choices about their clothes – how much time to spend shopping, dressing, getting a perfect look, etc., and what that look is going to consist in – and sometimes (often, I’d guess) it’s because they want to send a message of some kind or another. The message it sends to me is something like the “I want attention” one mentioned above. Of course sometimes women just do what feels comfortable, or want to have fun with their clothes, or are dressing for a particular occasion or a particular guy, but in my experience there’s a fair amount of correlation between the person who dresses “I want attention”-y and who acts “I want attention”-y. Guys who are really into muscles (or even fitness generally) might be a parallel.

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7. My thought is that those two pictures are too extreme. The “mean” girl is dressed in a very short skirt, knee socks, bright pink shirt that draws attention and exposes her chest quite dramatically (frankly, the streetwalker uniform from Pretty Woman, no?) while the other looks like she’s wearing a big box store uniform (replace the shirt with a red one, and it looks like a Target uniform).

   The “mean” girl look would be against the dress code in many circumstances (a written one in some places and an unwritten one in others).

   What if you took the two girls and just changed their hair? or just their shirts? (or a real skirt for the khakis instead of whatever that is).

   I wouldn’t be willing to judge the woman based on my speculation of what I believe she’s signalling unless I received confirmatory evidence from her behavior. To speculate in this context, or even to play the odds, is my definition of stereotyping, negatively, in a way that impacts individual significantly.

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8. Do people really think the inference from “this woman is wearing a short skirt” to “this woman is mean” is a good one? That would be really surprising. I’d be fall on the floor shocked if that line of thinking wasn’t based on wild over-generalization from a small number of cases. Think about other similar inferences people make, and ask if they seem reasonable.

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9. The one of the left looks like the girl that would steal your boyfriend. Maybe we view her as a predator. Maybe we have a reaction to protect what’s ours. (That’s the political scientist speaking here — ha!)

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   1. Then we’d probably need a model that includes how attractive the boyfriend is. Somebody doesn’t go through the trouble to look like that to steal a shitty boyfriend.

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10. I immediately realized it was the same person. I was looking at the faces.

    “The study examined how women reacted differently when the same girl dressed to show off her boobs and legs vs. when she dressed more conservatively. Girls sneered at the girl in the short skirt and were nicer to the girl in jeans.”

    And how did the guys react?

    jen is quite correct that there is a traditional female communal interaction style, and that dressing to set yourself out from the herd is a violation of that code and there will be punishment. There are a lot of other rules, but that’s a biggie.

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    1. dressing to set yourself out from the herd is a violation of that code and there will be punishment.

       I don’t doubt that, but it’s pretty terrible and stupid, no? Surely not something that reasonable people would want to perpetuate or notice in themselves with anything other than shame, I’d think, something to be combated.

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       1. The problem is that there is a positive flip side to the conformist communal female ethos–there’s emotional solidarity, often passionate platonic friendships, and extensive mutual help. The problem is that if one violates the code of one’s particular community (the particulars of which may in fact be terrible, depending on the community), one loses out on those relationships and that help.

          Conformity = Community

          Without conformity (of some kind), there’s no community.

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       2. For some reason I can’t seem to get my reply to Amy to come out below her, but really, that’s either trivially true or nonsense. It’s especially nonsense when applied to something like dress. All of the good things noted are possible without “punishing” people for dressing in a way that’s different from one’s self. The level of “conformity” needed for “community” is quite small, except among fools. And, when the rules of one’s community are like those suggested by the subjects in the main post (and many comments!) one would do well to violate them, given that they are at best dumb and mostly vile.

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       3. If you hit reply to the comment somebody has replied to, your reply will be below their reply once it posts. Anyway, I think we should all make sure to pay careful attention to how we stare at young womens legs and report back.

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11. I also immediately saw that they were the same woman. I am wondering if you all consider yourselves feminists and if viewing other women as competition or mean girls are compatible with a feminist philosophy?

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12. I never met anyone who dressed like Girl #1. I wore a lot of extremely short skirts in my 20’s (a brief moment of mourning for my formerly fabulous legs), but I wore them with black tights and Doc Martens. I wasn’t going for look #1. I’ve only seen Girl #1-types on TV and they are generally depicted as being stupid or mean, so I wonder if these college girls were set up in some way.

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    1. I was wondering this but didn’t ask because I have had a very sheltered experience. I have never seen anyone dressed like that outside of television either. I would have liked to see a more reasonable experiement. I’m guessing there would have been significant reactions if the woman had been sent into the room naked, too. Or in a clown costume.

       My (admittedly biased in the insider academic way) is tree are a lot of bad experiments done in the field of evolutionary psych or whatever this was.

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    2. I never met anyone who dressed like Girl #1

       No? That’s surprising. It’s not a very common look, but surely not that unusual. And even if so, so what? I hope that no one but an idiot takes their cues as to how to respond to how people dress form TV. That really would be dumb.

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13. Steve Sailer has a good post on this. He says:

    “It’s also cartel behavior intended to keep down the cost and time invested in appearances. Hair care, for example, can chew up a lot of a woman’s day. If you are a woman, would you rather live in a culture where all the women wake up a half-hour early to do their hair (e.g., Italy, Dallas) or one where everybody sleeps in (e.g., Sweden, Boston)? The latter, certainly.

    “But what if you were the only woman who got up a half-hour early? You’d be like the once Beyonce in a world of Rachel Maddows! That would be totally worth it! But what if everybody gets up a half-hour early? Well, then you could get up an hour early! And so on …

    “So, cartels form of women who agree to limit their competitiveness over men. But they have to be constantly checking for cheaters.”

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/11/girl-on-girl-catfights.html

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14. I thought that the graphic was illustrating how you can make your body proportions appear very differently with different clothing choices. The dark top over light pants makes the young woman appear long-waisted. The pink top with the black short skirt normalizes her proportions (although those black boots? appear like black knee socks and struck me as weird).

    I didn’t see one as sexualized and the other as non-sexualized or one as mean and the other as nice. The meanest female I ever knew dressed more like the second pose than the first so maybe that conditioned me otherwise?

    As for the nuances in young women’s dress, a lot of it is about the brands they wear. Lululemon was really big when Eldest was in the last half of her high school years and there are few things pricier than a wardrobe full of those telltale garments. Ugg-type boots appear to be making a resurgence and straight, straight, straight hair continues to rule. Autistic Youngest cares not a lick for what brand clothing she wears as long as it’s comfy. She has one online store where she likes to buy clothes: ThinkGeek.

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15. It’s funny what Laura says about the girls all looking sort of alike. I only have a daughter, and I remember noticing how each of the high school girls looked very different to me (though not in their dress, since the school had uniforms), whereas the boys were absolutely indistinguishable.

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16. I also had no association with meanness or niceness on either part. I thought maybe it was an illustration of the same woman say, clubbing vs. staying home, or dressing in a way that highlights traditional femininity vs. one that doesn’t. I also immediately assumed the image was about 10 years old, because both styles look kind of dated. I’m kind of shocked at how many people would judge the woman the first woman. Judging someone harshly because they look like someone who could be a mean girl is just being a mean girl oneself. It also feels kind of anti-feminist to assume a woman dressing in a short skirt is doing it to steal one’s man or take all the attention. Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, but can you know her thought process without asking her? I don’t think so.

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    1. I have a depeche mode from a little campus research.

       Apparently, what we are wearing this season (at least those of us with presentable rear ends) is very tight leggings, combined with riding boots. This season, that’s what the “mean girl” would actually be wearing this fall, rather than the Pretty Woman ensemble in the photograph.

       As you can see from the Pinterest photos, you can wear them with just about any kind of loose top or sweater.

       The first few times I saw this look around campus, I thought I was just seeing members of the Equestrian Club who hadn’t had time to change after training. Oops!

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       1. Funny- that was a style in NY City about 5 years ago, and a bit goofy then.

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       2. It must have just arrived here. I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it last year, or at least it wasn’t nearly as prevalent. It’s EVERYWHERE right now, which is why I finally clued in to the fact that every 10th female on campus is not a member of the riding club.

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       3. My wife rides horses quite a bit, so it’s not unusual for me to see people in jodhpurs and boots, but I too was surprised when I started seeing people wear the look around town. To me, it seemed about the same as if people had started wearing a baseball uniform around. But, one way you can tell an equestrian from a fashion trend follower is that on the pseudo-jodhpurs the seam is often on the inside of the thigh (as with lots of normal pants) while that would never be the case on real riding pants- it would tear your legs all up. Also, real jodhpurs are likely to be covered in horse hair, sweat, and dirt.

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    2. My actual first thought when I saw the image was that the top girl was dressed like a Penn undergrad for a night out on the town circa 2004. Looking back, black bootcut chinos or short skirt + bright, jewel toned top is going to define 2000s fashion. Also those hideous giant cork wedges. If I had to put together a representative woman from, say, 2005, she’d be wearing a one-shoulder hot pink or turquoise top, black boot cut chinos, and 4 inch cork wedge sandals. She’d also probably have straightened, highlighted hair. One aspect about fashion is how things that you think look good at the time can look so awful in retrospect. I didn’t ever dress like this, but I don’t remember thinking the look was unattractive at the time. In general though, I cringe at how I used to dress in the past.

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       1. I meant to say, one aspect of fashion that always fascinates me is…

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17. Judging someone harshly because they look like someone who could be a mean girl is just being a mean girl oneself.
    Yes, this very much (though I’d not use “judging”. “Judging” people is often fine, if the judgment is warranted. I’d say drawing bad or false inferences, as many above clearly are.)

    It also feels kind of anti-feminist to assume a woman dressing in a short skirt is doing it to steal one’s man or take all the attention.
    This, too, except for the “kind of” part.

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18. I don’t associate “mean girl” with short skirts, so I didn’t have that reaction. But I’m not surprised by the reaction of the female students in the study — and yes, that makes THEM the “mean girls” and still says nothing about where the model is on the mean/nice spectrum. It’s a different spectrum that’s depicted here, the sexy/non-sexy spectrum, and I don’t think it’s useful to conflate the two.

    Dress sends a deliberate message, and the more deliberate the dress, the more clear or important or targeted the message is likely to be. It’s unrealistic to expect people NOT to react to the message. The message was constructed to create a reaction. Even jeans and a Think Geek t-shirt reveal something about the wearer (or project something that the wearer wants to project). And revealing clothing says one thing in a club context, and a different thing in an office context.

    There are real, tangible results to wearing revealing clothing; in a professional setting, one of them is often attention/advancement. Other women resent that because feminism promised a meritocracy, and the sexy dressers are undermining it.

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19. There are real, tangible results to wearing revealing clothing; in a professional setting, one of them is often attention/advancement.

    Is this really the case? I imagine in a lot of professional settings, dressing in a revealing manner is considered unprofessional and could hold one back. A female lawyer revealing cleavage in a courtroom could very well lose her case if the wrong judge is presiding, but dressing over-conservatively for the setting would not have the same effect. In a student setting, a student dressing like the first person may be be judged as less intelligent or less serious by the professor, and judging from commenters here, if the professor is female might be subject to outright hostility or dislike on the part of the professor. Even if the student is dressing to attract male sexual attention and succeeds and becomes the professor’s girlfriend, using sex as a form of professional advancement is always tenuous and has a very high risk of negative consequences.

    Finally, using sexuality to bully women isn’t exactly a new concept. The idea that the pretty girl is a “slut” and gets everything by sleeping around is an extremely old and pernicious sexist stereotype, so I’m surprised that people who consider themselves feminists and non-bullies would unselfconsciously repeat it. Looking at cases like Phoebe Price, pretty girls are probably if not more likely to be the victims of bullying as geeky or nerdy girls, and they’re often blamed for being bullied by those who should know better.

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    1. I agree with this. None of the female lawyers I know wear revealing clothes to work. They consider it unprofessional, and far more likely to attract negative attention. In a big law firm, it’s pretty much a guarantee that they are right.

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20. Just to be clear, I do not believe women gain advantage in the office by sleeping with the boss, nor do I believe that all pretty girls are sluts. I also would agree that very few women I know wear anything revealing to work.

    I do however know very well that women are often judged first by appearance and then by performance. Take two, say, marketing interns. One is quite attractive, the other is just average. Guess who gets mentioned at the company meeting? Guess who gets the best projects, and the job offer at the end of the summer? There’s no sleeping around anywhere near this. (Nor is there much consideration of the actual performance of the two interns.)

    I’m not a big one for saying guys just “don’t get it” and thus can’t chime in on a conversation like this, but I am struck by the wide gulf in these comments between the genders.

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21. I’m moving on… But I just want to add that interpretations of these findings that lack sympathy and context are also sexist. A little mansplaining going on here…

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    1. The context that…women internalize sexism and also engage in slut shaming of other women? In my experience, “mean girls” can be dressed like either woman. Women who use sexual attention to manipulate others or feel powerful can be dressed like either woman. But only women dressed like the first get slut shamed for dressing “provocatively” in our society. I’m not a third wave feminist who believes that all feminine beauty standards can be empowering, but I’m pretty sure slut shaming and bullying women who dress in outfits more revealing than one would oneself wear classifies as not feminist at all.

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22. A quick comment before the girl wakes up here on the west coast.

    I see this as not that much different from the judgements made about the Lululemon wearing, $200 highlighted hair woman of a few posts ago. I think that our reactions to these photos and to that Lululemon mythical woman tell more about ourselves than anyone else.

    We make judgements based on appearances. Assumptions. It becomes a shorthand where we think we know what that person is all about. Short skirt slutty, $200 highlights shallow.

    Four legs good, two legs bad and all that.

    I agree with BI – we, to varying degrees, envy those with a perceived advantage – looks, money, influence. And sometimes we react by making all sorts of baseless judgements about that individual.

    And it’s a bit embarrassing to catch yourself doing it.

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23. “The level of “conformity” needed for “community” is quite small, except among fools.”

    That may be theoretically true, in that one can imagine a warm and supportive community of people with very diverse lifestyles, but I don’t think such things exist in real life. The sociological research I have seen suggests that community normally exists among people of very similar behaviors, values, and tastes (Robert Putnam has written about this). And in my own life, the tight-knit communities of which I have been part (the butt room habitues in my dorm at Exeter, the junior tax associates at my first law firm, the parents at our summer community, etc.) have had very similar lifestyles. The few who diverged (e.g., the orthodox Jews at the law firm) were distinctly less tight with the others.

    For this reason, those who hope to create community (e.g., military units, religious organizations) impose substantial conformity of behavior, dress etc.

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    1. “That may be theoretically true, in that one can imagine a warm and supportive community of people with very diverse lifestyles, but I don’t think such things exist in real life.”

       Yes. There have to be at least some important shared values and experiences. The more shared experiences and values, the tighter and more supportive the group.

       I’m a big fan of the readership over at the Skeptical OB, and one of the enduring mysteries discussed there is why women embrace attachment parenting methods that don’t seem to be working for them, or continue supporting homebirth even after they’ve had a baby die or harmed during a homebirth disaster. One of the more plausible answers floated is that if that is your community, and that is your source of emotional and practical assistance, you run a terrible risk if you violate the norms of your group or express disloyalty.

       It can be really hard in the US in 2013 to find or build a supportive community, and people (particularly women) are often willing to make large sacrifices for the sake of that community.

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       1. “I’m a big fan of the readership over at the Skeptical OB, and one of the enduring mysteries discussed there is why women embrace attachment parenting methods that don’t seem to be working for them, or continue supporting homebirth even after they’ve had a baby die or harmed during a homebirth disaster.”

          Why do women have another child after losing one in stillbirth under the supervision of a doctor? That’s not a community thing.

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       2. And with many people moving for paid work opportunities, the community built from elementary school, neighbourhoods, university, etc. are lost. There are many people having to start over and over again.

          Community was one of the reasons (not the only one) for us to send our daughter to a parochial day school. Just made it easier to break in sooner.

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    2. Putnam has definitely shaped my thinking on this. It is no coincidence that the 1950s, which were the US’s peak as far as civic-mindedness is concerned was also famed at the time for conformity. Community and conformity go together like bread and butter.

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       1. “Community and conformity go together like bread and butter.”

          That explains a lot. I love bread, hate butter. 🙂

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       2. It might explain why everybody is hostile to vegans. I always figured it was just because it makes it too hard to pick a restaurant.

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