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

in response to a question about the girls’ self-esteem, that self-esteem is not the issue: “They seem pretty pleased with themselves.”
    The mean girl has been absorbed as a pop culture figure, while any insight regarding how she got that way (or the degree of cultural change necessary to eliminate her kind) is forgotten. Self-help has been traded for a more traditional moralizing. Plus, it’s supposed to be funny. In boycentric films like Lord of the Flies, Bully, and the recent Mean Creek, teen male anger—which frequently erupts in violence—is given serious moral dimension; in contrast, Cady does no real soul-searching because her anger is presented as slapstick. (Interestingly, the ’80s teen classic Heathers, Mean Girls’ obvious precursor, did involve anger erupting into murder yet was also billed as a comedy.)
    Despite all this, the mean-girls craze may have opened the door for a cultural discussion about the importance of female friendship. Talking
about what girls will put up with for friendship—pursuing it with a passion previously ascribed only to romantic relationships—can lead to a greater understanding of the crucial role that female friendships play in girls’ lives, as important as any romance. And tween/teen media featuring nonmean girls does thrive: The protagonists of popular TV shows like Lizzie McGuire and That’s So Raven value close female friends, and then there’s that thriving straight-to-video empire created by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. A T-shirt sold last summer at the tween chain Rave Girl made an even bolder statement: Emblazoned with “Hilary’s Best Friend” (referring to Hilary Duff), it’s a powerful counterpoint to those “Mrs. Kutcher” and “Mrs. Lachey” Ts that also made the rounds last year. Sure, there must be a lot of competition to be Hilary’s best friend, but it would be a joy comparable (or even superior) to wedding a pop idol.
    Anti-mean-girls rhetoric sounds feminist because it’s nominally about empowering girls; but, once filtered through popular media, it doesn’t ask girls to explore their anger or aggression, nor does it address why they’re expected to be “nice”—and, more important, how being nice doesn’t always leave room for being smart, strong, capable, independent, or adventurous. What could’ve been a teen feminist movement, touching on some of the great unrecognized truths about life as a girl, ultimately became nothing more than a tired recapitulation of the good girl/bad girl game, with all its attendant moralism. The mean-girls debates could have helped transform the way teenage girls are encouraged to think and act toward each other. But in the end, all we got was another catfight.

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    Ladies and Gentlemen
    FEMININITY, MASCULINITY, AND IDENTITY
     
     
     
    IT’S NOT MUCH OF A STRETCH TO MAKE THE CASE THAT MOST of the pop culture landscape, no matter what the ostensible plot or supposed topic at hand, is actually devoted to limning our expectations of men and women, girls and boys, and exploring the tensions therein. Magazines like Glamour, Redbook, Men’s Health, and Maxim are nothing if not instruction manuals for gender-appropriate behavior. Both Survivor and The Apprentice saw fit to structure entire seasons around a “battle of the sexes” gimmick. The Chicago Sun-Times headlined a July 2005 story “‘Guy roles for women’ on CBS this fall.” (Just what would those “guy roles” be? Why, doctors and lawyers, and, you know, “leaders in charge of large responsibilities and their own complex lives,” according to the paper.) Makeover shows from the mild What Not to Wear to the surgitastic likes of Extreme Makeover often focus on “correcting” gendered traits: On the former, women are forced to trade their baggy shirts and ratty sneakers for, as hostess Stacy put it on at least one occasion, “some clothes that are actually made for women”; on the latter, men with “weak” chins get implants and women