The school year has begun and with it comes the daily drama of girls on Instagram.
I have boys and only one who is able to comprehend social hierarchy. For boys, it’s really simple. The social hierarchy is determined by which sports you play, the brand of your t-shirt, and the size of your gaming room at home. Jonah is athletic, but not for a cool sport, so he’s somewhere in the middle of the road — the perfect place. He travels with a pack of friends around town on a Friday night. He’s in a good spot right now. And there’s zero drama about friends and popularity.
My friends who have teenage girls are nearly always hysterical, because their daughters are hysterical. They tell me about horrible, subtle acts of meanness that happen on Instagram. Jonah takes a picture of his foot and puts it on Instagram. Girls are using Instagram to boost their position in the social heirarchy.
A group of girls will go to the ice-cream shop with a group, take a group selfie, and post it on Instagram. The girl who takes the picture makes sure that she notes in the comment section that she took the picture, so everybody knows that she was there. The girl who takes the picture is always the least popular of the group. They put the picture on Instagram to show how popular they are and to make others feel bad that they weren’t in the group. Then the girls who were left out, go to the mall, and post it on Instagram, so they can signal that they don’t care that they were left out and are having a super awesome time at the mall.
I’m really glad that I am not a teenager.
Apt. 11d 
It’s not just Instagram – some of the girls use Twitter as a veritable battle ground. Tweeting every move of the sleepover, starbucks-run, mall-trip. It gets mean. Really mean. On-line exclusion appears to be weapon #1 of the middle school mean girls. (And I think that some of the parents don’t even know their kid has a twitter account…)
We actively have lots of conversations about using social media for good, not evil. My daughter only rarely posts group photos. She doesn’t tag her photos. All of her accounts are private (only friends can see them.) We don’t let her on snapchat or ask.fm. She can follow people on Twitter, but she’s not posting anything yet.
And don’t get me started on ask.fm – I think that site is pure evil.
We talk a lot about the difference between posting to share something good with the world vs. posting something just to make yourself feel more important.
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Yup, that’s all true. But, girls can rise above it/find the middle of the road, too, just like boys. Paying the non-cool sport and wearing the old navy t-shirt can leave you in the middle of the road, but with friends and a pretty nice life. That’s true for girls, too, and the first step is that they have to chose not to define themselves on the basis of their popularity (at the lunch table, with the boys, or on instagram).
I know boys who are not in good places, as well (though their hysteria takes a different form). They’re the ones for whom playing the non-cool sport, or not being a star in the cool sport is not enough, who define themselves by whether the blonde sorority girls like them. Those boys end up in pretty bad places, too They don’t seem to play the straight out popularity games, where popularity doesn’t come as a side effect of some other status game — sports, for example), but in the popularity game itself (though maybe the brand of the t-shirt is close).
The social media aspect to the childish status games does add something really toxic — maybe it’s the permanence and the quantification? The kids have to learn when they’re pretty young and vulnerable not to define themselves by others (i.e. the lesson of not getting jealous of people’s fancy vacations on Facebook, and letting that make your life worse, a lesson that a lot of adults find difficult).
Ask.fm is evil. And, sometimes searchable as well. And it violates the privacy of others, with kids answering questions like “who is the most awkward boy and girl you know?” with full names. It seems the site made its rounds in the graduating class in my kids’ MS last year, with kids posting publicly. Some of them still have searchable sites, and those sites come up when you search their names. Parents clearly sat with a number of the kids and had them shut down their sites. Others seem to have remained oblivious.
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“Yup, that’s all true. But, girls can rise above it/find the middle of the road, too, just like boys.”
I forget the terminology for this, but the reason that we see girls being mean and shallow on social media is that that’s a medium that’s very attractive to mean and shallow people.
If people choose not to live highly visible lives on social media, it won’t be possible to study them and throw them into the average.
“I know boys who are not in good places, as well (though their hysteria takes a different form). They’re the ones for whom playing the non-cool sport, or not being a star in the cool sport is not enough, who define themselves by whether the blonde sorority girls like them. Those boys end up in pretty bad places, too”
That’s actually one of my current interests–the socially struggling teenage or young adult male. Not for any personal reasons, thank goodness–it’s just that I hang out on a couple of forum where there are a lot of posts from those guys. They allow themselves to get sucked into men’s rights/red pill stuff because it’s a superficially satisfying explanation of life, the universe and everything and it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more they believe that only “alpha” guys are successful with women, the more they fail with women, and then the more they believe that only “alpha” guys are successful with women, etc. It’s pretty sad.
I also think there is a toxic interaction between the socially failing guys and girls’ social media. Those guys have their noses pressed up against the window of those girls’ social media and they interpret it in very unsophisticated, misogynistic ways. I think getting older boys and young men to understand the relationship between social media and reality is a really important job for parents. Example: 1) compare the documentation of the social event you attended with the actual event. Did it look more glamorous and fun on social media than it actually was? 2) Think about the people you know who don’t have a huge, exhaustive social media presence.
“The kids have to learn when they’re pretty young and vulnerable not to define themselves by others (i.e. the lesson of not getting jealous of people’s fancy vacations on Facebook, and letting that make your life worse, a lesson that a lot of adults find difficult).”
I loved that video/short film that Laura posted earlier about the guy who discovers all sorts of ways to present his failures as successes on Facebook. When appropriate (13+?), I’ll have to show that to my kids.
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A relative told me about a family wedding she went to last year. On reflection, I suspect that it probably photographed and Facebooked beautifully–great dresses, cute church, adorable tiny wedding cake. However, it was purgatory for the guests–there wasn’t enough food, there weren’t enough cups, nobody but a handful got any wedding cake, there weren’t enough chairs to sit in, and about an hour into the reception, it was time to put away the chairs because the rental was only for an hour. Oh, and it was a small wedding (around 40 guests) with a number of people in attendance who used to be married to each other…From the point of view of a guest, it was largely a fiasco, but it’s quite likely that anybody who wasn’t there and only saw pictures would assume that it was the social event of the year.
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PS: I think the girls just have to learn early to deal with posting the fabulous edited versions of their lives.
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“A group of girls will go to the ice-cream shop with a group, take a group selfie, and post it on Instagram. The girl who takes the picture makes sure that she notes in the comment section that she took the picture, so everybody knows that she was there. ”
A real question about usage: if one person takes a photo of another person or group of people, and isn’t herself in the photo, can it still be a “selfie”? I’d though the who point of that idea was that it was a person taking a photo of themselves (and possible others). Is that no longer so?
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There was an entire episode of “The Middle” about this — where the mom insists on hosting a sleepover and photographing every move.
I also know some middle school TEACHERS who act very much like the middle school girls. One of our neighbors put in a backyard barbecue pit and tiki bar and then named it and gave it its own facebook page — so now you can see these posts that say “So and so and so and so were at Neighbor X’s tiki bar”. Also, where we live a lot of the adults have summer beach houses which they name and give their own facebook pages, so you can see who was invited to whose beach house. Mean kids practically always learn mean behavior from their mean parents.
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I honestly think it’s fine to share your wonderful life with the world, if you want to. It’s the motivation, whether you’re sharing joy or putting other people down and out that differentiates between good and bad behavior, and I’ll give people the benefit of the positive motivation unless I’m forced not to.
The tagging is an interesting phenomenon, especially the default demand in FB. I recently posted a picture from a party (an auction buy-in, so it was to advertise the school fundraising) and FB automatically tagged my FB friends who were in the picture, which is downright creepy.
I’m amused at the idea of a barbecue pit with a FB page and tagging. We have FB friends with summer houses and ski houses and all the rest, but none of them seems to have a FB page for them.
I do agree that there are parents who want their kids to be popular, which I think, in the old days, meant getting invited to all the parties, but now includes having lots of followers on Instagram.
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So thankful that S is mostly above/beyond this. She had some tough years where she seemed to hate-watch others’ Twitter activities, but now she honestly does not give a crap. It helps (I think) that I didn’t allow her to have a Facebook until she was 13 (and when she turned 13, FB was in decline and she never joined), and then I didn’t allow her to have a Twitter account. I simply did not want her online with the kids in her town. I let her use Tumblr so she could be online “friends” with people she didn’t know in real life.
E is clueless. He did want some sort of app like Kik, but I said no.
I really have no interest in making my kids’ MS/HS years socially wonderful and the best years of their lives. If they’re miserable and foreveralone, yay. It will make them *really* want to go to college.
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Or become basement dwelling video game watchers. My lesson from finding he Ask.fm feeds is that kids will be doing things parents don’t know about. We have to decide how dangerous they are and how much we want to monitor.
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My sisters were appalled because I told them S has watched It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Then I told S they were appalled and she was offended that they would think she would be influenced by the obviously bad behavior of fictional characters.
Meanwhile, E has started to read Reddit (mostly to read about bad jokes). There’s a minefield I’m not ready to deal with. Time to call in the male parental unit.
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Yet again the zombie of “Girls are so verbally mean, unlike boys who just hit each other and forget about it.”
I see and read about examples of boys’ verbal meanness all the time. Boys grow up to inhabit groups like 4chan, most of the rest of the gaming and STEM communities, and professional sports, all of whom are prone to verbal bullying (plus physical, in the third example.) Yet this zombie theory is tossed around wherever there is a thread on parenting older children.
I was made miserable in middle-to-senior high by some highly verbal, witty and caustic boys. Girls, not so much. And if you think exclusion from social groups is not a boy thing, well, I’d like to see some large peer-reviewed studies backing that up, because it does not seem to fit my experience.
Oh, and boys who do the “just hit each other and forget about it” sometimes kill each other.
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…Sorry, I know that came across really grumpy. But it does make me grumpy, as a zombie theory that pops up (Aaaaaaargh!) with such regularity. And I don’t blame Laura for buying it, as it’s so pervasive, but it is a misogynist trope with little basis in reality. Both genders bully, and both genders bully verbally and socially.
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Yes, you’re grumpy, but I also get where you’re coming from. I think there are differences in boy/girl social dynamics in MS, but it’s not true that girls are “meaner” than boys. I also think the impression remains because mothers/girls talk about the feelings more publicly than the boys who feel excluded.
There was an article circulating out there about the difficult boys face in MS years, because of the lack of real friends for many of them — that friendships outside of the “bro” culture of sports can be difficult to find.
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Yeah.
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Thanks. I get tired of the universalizing about ‘mean girls’ as well.
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An interesting and related experiment: http://petapixel.com/2014/09/11/dutch-girl-fakes-5-week-vacation-south-east-asia-posting-phoney-photos-facebook/
(done as a class project)
My first experience with the “internet” (it was probably whatever preceded it, in the defense network), was people fake chatting on computers in the dorm computer room (one of the first computer rooms, personal computers first became available). The dorm-boys created a fake persona for international chats, that usually involved drama, romantic and otherwise. They thought they were talking to girls, but now that I think about it, it seems equally likely that they were talking to other dorm-boys creating other fake personas.
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Look, I don’t know what to tell you. There’s been books written about this topic. I’m just saying that three different moms of girls in different towns told me the exact same story about Instagram. I follow my neices on Instagram. I also follow Jonah and occasionally check out his friends’ streams. The boys post pictures of moldy burritos.
Jonah is reading over my shoulder. He said that boys ignore each other. He said that boys probably talk behind each other’s back, but they don’t do it on social media. In this town/state, there’s very, very strict anti-bullying laws, so the most obvious acts of meanness are dealt with severely and publicly.
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I’m having this discussion on Facebook with my old college and hs friends, too. Multi-platform discussions are amusing…
Look, not ALL girls are mean. There is always a group of mean kids. Both boys and girls. And it’s always a handful. Been that way when we were kids, too. The mean girls have social media at their disposal these days. This post was just about that topic. Girls and boys use social media differently. And the mean girls use Instagram to hurt others.
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“There’s been books written about this topic”.
Well, there are books and then there are… books, especially with pop psychology.
Some titles?
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Here’s research by Pew on how boys and girls use social media differently. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/06/27/girls_use_social_media_more_than_boys_study_shows.html
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Here’s another study that found that girls use social media significantly more than boys. http://www.editlib.org/p/147570/
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This paper doesn’t examine gender, but it talks about how social media is used by teens for ostracism and alienation. http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9296925&fileId=S0816512214000029
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Here’s more http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/full/10.1179/1053078913Z.0000000007
“The literature on gender differences in the expression of aggression finds that girls tend to engage in a passive, relational style of aggression which extends into their online behavior (e.g. spreading rumors, the threat of withdrawing affection, excluding someone from a social network and/or important social function; Crick, Casas, & Nelson, 2002; Nansel et al., 2001, 2003). Relational aggression can also include such behavior as ignoring someone, excluding someone, name-calling, making sarcastic verbal comments toward someone, using negative body language, and threatening to end a relationship if one does not get his or her own way (Dellasega & Nixon, 2003; Mikel-Brown, 2003; Remillar & Lamb, 2005; Simmons, 2002).
This passive aggression is covert and as such, its potential harm tends to be underestimated by teachers, guidance counselors, and parents (Merten, 1997; Simmons, 2002). However, the impact on the targeted girls and adolescents is clearly shown in their poorer academic performance, lack of confidence, low self-esteem, and higher incidences of depression, loneliness, emotional distress, and alienation (Dellasega & Nixon, 2003).
Social aggression is specifically intended to damage self-esteem or social status (Underwood, 2003). These forms of aggression often co-occur, becoming a part of the ‘rites of passage’ among girls which presumably will eventually be outgrown. In this regard, ‘meanness’ is seen as a phase that girls are supposed to simply transcend (Merten, 1997). Thus, parents and teachers often dismiss this kind of behavior by calling it ‘normal’ girl behavior. However, Remillar and Lamb (2005) found that girls are far more likely than boys to perceive this type of aggression as hurtful and damaging.”
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And for a book, I recommend “Odd Girl Out” by Rachel Simmons. I’m not sure if it qualifies as “pop” psychology or not, but it really hit home for us. Relational aggression is real, and it is very hard to deal with.
We just lived through a year of utter hell due to this. (mean girl/social media/relational aggression) We finally switched schools and it’s like we have a different kid. The new school doesn’t have ANY of this going on. (Smaller, alternative school with strong community-building philosophy). We ignored it for far too long, saying “kids will be kids” – but it is very damaging, and I wish we’d paid more attention and taken action sooner.
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What about the avalanche of social exclusion by males which we have discovered in the STEM and gaming fields (Rebecca Watson, Anita Sarkeesian and others) in the last few years, which mainly consists of verbal abuse via the internet, plus rape and death threats just as a bonus. Where did these men and boys learn to use words to exclude and punish? Surely they didn’t just discover these talents as soon as they left school?
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There is now some pushback against the assumptions about girls.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2013/11/18/the_myth_of_the_mean_girl.html
Popular culture has been so consistent in depicting girls and women as treacherous, disloyal and devious that it has become a defining stereotype — even though there’s a growing body of research suggesting that boys and men practice what is termed “indirect aggression” as much and even more than females.
Cited: University of Victoria study, Canada and EU countries; University of Arizona, Noel Card, analysis of 107 studies, University of Alberta – Peter Hurd
Sybille Artz:
There’s a common belief that boys punch each other then shake hands and go on. “That absolutely not the case,” she says. “If we need an example of indirect or relational aggression to hold in front of ourselves while we make up stories about the mean girl we only have to sit in any legislature or parliament.”
Some of the writers about “mean girls” themselves, rather like the originators of the Conflict Tactics scale, are unappy about the uses to which their studies have been put.
When I read her the titles of recently published books about mean women, she said it “breaks my heart a little. It assumes this bedrock of nastiness is the default thing that women do. It misses the entire point of what I was trying to do. It’s not getting it.”
Now Wiseman has turned to boys in a new book, Masterminds and Wingmen. Boys, too, are affected by the mean things that their friends say to them even in a joking way.
“They felt they couldn’t admit it,” she says. “They had to laugh it off and say that it was nothing serious. To admit you were really bothered by something made you incredibly vulnerable to ridicule.”
Boys were eager to speak to her, she says, “to help other boys, because ‘girls get this stuff and boys don’t.’ ”
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Sorry, the paras “When I read -> and boys don’t” should have been inside the blockquotes.
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If one reads the media these days, one might conclude that most girls are mean and petty and most boys are potential rapists (and now with the Rice bruhaha — all football players are gladiator types who are inclined to beat their wives/significant others).
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not to mention homicidal psychopaths.
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Well, with football players, there’s mounting evidence that sub-concussive impacts to the head over years lead to subtle brain damage. Damage to the frontal lobe in particular, has been connected with violent behavior. See: http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/71/6/720.full and http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119467/does-head-trauma-cause-people-be-more-violent
If your brain is not as good at inhibiting impulses as it should be, you would expect to see violent outbursts.
It would be interesting to see how many proven violent abusers played contact sports in childhood. The correlation between surviving abuse and committing abuse could also be connected to subtle neurological damage from childhood beatings.
I will admit I have a viewpoint on this. A number of my children’s friends started playing football in late elementary school. Before that point, I would not have picked them out as violent, lacking control, or intellectually challenged in any way. After, well, yes.
As so many boys play contact sports from a young age in our country, it would be hard to find a control group. The cross country and tennis teams, perhaps. What if the damage is occurring before the drug use and alcohol use, in pee-wee football and baby lacrosse?
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I read this and nodded a lot, but then I thought about the verbally aggressive “geek”* guys/MRAs. Example: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/
*Geek does not mean not-athlete. Maybe this is something to be looked at–it could prove the hypothesis about physiological damage being the more important factor than involvement in a sports team.
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“A number of my children’s friends started playing football in late elementary school. Before that point, I would not have picked them out as violent, lacking control, or intellectually challenged in any way. After, well, yes.”
Ai yai yai.
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“I read this and nodded a lot, but then I thought about the verbally aggressive “geek”* guys/MRAs. Example: http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-i-learned-as-internets-most-hated-person/”
I haven’t read your link yet, but I agree that the verbally aggressive misogynistic male geek is a thing.
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They don’t do it face-to-face, though, do they? This is more like a female, rumor-spreading behind one’s back type of thing.
The pro athletes get in trouble with the law for acting on impulses. You’re angry with your girlfriend, you knock her out. You act on a sexual impulse. You’re in a group of teammates, everyone’s drinking (which lowers inhibitions further) and a female student gets raped.
If there start to be stories of high school robotics teams beating up lacrosse players, let me know. Otherwise, I’m thinking physical aggression is uniquely linked to subtle frontal lobe damage in some men.
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“This is more like a female, rumor-spreading behind one’s back type of thing. ” But, that’s the point, and, video gaming might induce the behavior (and, yes, by damaging the brain, say by training the brain in the unreal world of video games, which certainly seems a parallel to the unreal world of online harassment, where the people become pawns instead of people).
That hypothesis is wild speculation, though.
Sub-clinical concussions producing aggression/lack of impulse control is pretty speculative, as well. In particular, I’d want to know whether there’s actually more impulse aggression/violence (domestic violence, hitting one’s children, rape, etc.) that we can correlate changes in contact sports. My guess is that that kind of violence has always existed and that we just hear about it more. The official view on beating wives and children has changed drastically, and, in the case of hitting children, fairly recently. Hitting people on the head can clearly change behavior, but I’m less confident that the incidents of violence that get publicized can be connected to brain injury.
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But, I do tell my son, who plays hockey, in a league that doesn’t allow purposeful checks, but still has contact, that if I see him getting aggressive/see signs of volatility, that will influence my decision making about his play.
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And, he doesn’t play video games, either.
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And the consensus among his friends is that I’m a mean mom.
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If you gave 18th century writers access to the internet, you’d see a great deal of “aggressive” behavior. I don’t think being mean was invented recently, nor do we need to posit brain injury to explain it.
I enjoy Margaret Soltan’s University Diaries. The sort of behavior which _everyone_ ends up talking about is only a small subset of athletes behaving badly. I would put Hope Solo into the category of possible brain injury victim.
Video gaming may reduce the reluctance to hurt another person. But training is not injury, even if it gives me the heebee-jeebees.
The whole “make a man out of you” type of sales pitch for contact sports, though–let’s see. “Strong, silent type.” Yeah, if you find it harder to formulate a sentence, you’ll speak less.
The tolerance for men being “rowdy” or “sowing their oats” is part of the problem. In the case of professional athletes, there’s so much money it’s 1) a huge disincentive for the wives/girlfriends to speak up, 2) a support for lawyers to make the victims shut up via settlements, and 3) a reason for teammates to look the other way. I do wonder if Rice’s wife had a pre-nup, and what it said.
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