Free BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine by Unknown

Björkqvist claimed that women were more likely to display anger “relationally,” within the context of their social relationships, rather than in the physical way that’s traditionally perceived as “aggressive.” Distilling the major forms of relational aggression—gossiping, rumor spreading, socially isolating one’s peers—through subsequent study, researchers concluded that when it was given equal weight to physical and more outright verbal expressions of anger, women were just as aggressive as men.
    Around the same time, pop psychologists were taking notice of the inner lives of teenage girls. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, Mary Pipher’s 1994 bestseller on the dangers of being young, American, and female, described female adolescence as tumultuous, scary, and a “hurricane” from which “no girl escapes.” Pipher’s work lent teenage girls and their problems a respect they rarely received in popular culture but said little about the possible role of suppressed aggression. This idea was left untouched until Lyn Mikel Brown’s 1998 study of teen-girl anger and aggression, Raising Their Voices . Brown made explicit her intention to contradict the image, by then well developed, of the teen girl as victim. Advocating
“healthy” anger (as opposed to “destructive” aggression) as crucial to girls’ self-respect, she linked it to the development of “strong voices” and the ability to “actively resist dominant cultural notions of femininity.”
    While Brown’s book didn’t cause quite the sensation of Ophelia et al., by the time it was published her topic was more relevant than ever. Taking its cues from the politically aware riot-grrrl culture, the ’90s girl power phenomenon—typified by postmodern (and feminism-literate) teen thrillers like Scream and Jawbreaker, a new national mania for women’s soccer, and the Spice Girls—championed a kind of wholesome, boisterous aggression. Though girl power, less a movement than a marketing pitch, stopped short of recognizing the many reasons a girl might have to be angry, it nailed the connection between self-esteem and the ability to display aggression in the dual meaning of one of the era’s popular slogans: “Girls Kick Ass.”
    By the end of the ’90s, any truly empowering elements of girl power had been lost in its marketing blitz, and pop psychologists seemed to lose interest in teen girls—until 2002, when “mean girls” became a media buzz phrase. Wedding Björkqvist’s theories of relational aggression to Reviving Ophelia’ s take on girlhood under siege, the mean-girls zeitgeist proclaimed by Queen Bees and Wannabes, Odd Girl Out , and others transformed teen girls from victims to victimizers. Mean girls made the cover of Newsweek and were the subject of hand-wringing everywhere from The Washington Post to Oprah.
    But an examination of the mean-girls coverage reveals a media interested in a few things besides girls’ self-esteem.
    Much of the coverage focused on Queen Bees, with its breezy tone and sound-bite-ready quotes. But its popularity may also stem from Wiseman’s dark, not-so-sympathetic depiction of teenage girls. Despite good intentions, Queen Bees has some weak points that can be (and have been) interpreted as license to denounce girls as catty and shallow.
    Wiseman presents her book as a relatively lighthearted guide to the adolescent heart of darkness she terms “Girl World.” But in her reach for humor and hipness, she reinforces much of what she seeks to eliminate. Unlike Simmons, who locates the roots of girls’ meanness in the cultural demands of niceness, Wiseman luridly promises to reveal the “nasty things” girls do to one another, but she doesn’t take societal expectations regarding female aggression into account in explaining them. Though she
rattles off the usual list of harmful media influences—music videos, sexualized advertising, etc.—she narrows her argument by