Popular in HS? What do you think of "popular" stereotypes?

Cafe Society
1

Aiight, here’s what I mean: When I see movies like, “Weird Science” or “Pretty in Pink” (oh, shut up) or anything like that, the “popular” kids behave a certain way, and the underdogs behave a certain way, and I always identify far more with the underdogs.

When the popular people have screen time, there are people from my highschool I can easily associate with that character. I’m wondering…if you were one of the popular people in high school, did you recognize that those characters were based on you and your friends? Did any of them actually make you think about the people you had ostracized? Or did we see it the wrong way?

2

Are you kidding? The popular people don’t watch those shows on TV… they’re too busy going out and getting pregnant…

:::runs away:::

3

Ugh. It’s so not cool to admit you were popular in High School. Especially to Hama.

Regardless, I was Claire Standish, my boyfriend was John Bender.

I dunno, might have been different for me. I went to a very small HS. I think the entire four grades numbered about 400. I remember there were 88 in my graduating class. I was on the Scholastic Bowl, the Junior Engineering Technical Society, president of the Drama Club and homecoming queen. My boyfriend was a skater punk from California that also played tennis and drove his dad’s rusted-to-shit pickup truck. My best friend was very overweight and the cheerleading mascot. Probably not the standards of “popular” you’re looking for.

I know there were people we ostracized, definitely. I have very, very few memories of it being for…what am I trying to say here? Because they were “dorky” or “uncool” or whatnot, though. Mostly because they were ignorant, boring, and unable to complete a sentence without saying, “like” or “y’know.”

Of course, it’s been well over a decade since that time. Hindsight is usually rosy, especially when thinking of the notion of your own self. YMMV.

4

Well, let’s see. My senior year I was voted “Most Popular” (shut up). However, like Nymysys, I went to a really small school. I was also valedictorian, cheerleader, and party girl. I come from a pretty poor family, so I didn’t have brand name clothes, and I worked at a fast food restaurant. I never had my own car until I was 21. I drove my mom’s Escort Station Wagon, for Pete’s sake! :wink: My friends were all types.

There were some people at my school who were popular and snobby. However, I’m just not like that. I can guarantee that I NEVER ostracized anyone. I’d like to think that is why I was popular, because it certainly wasn’t due to being rich, dressing nice, or being pretty. I think you see the separation of kids more often in the larger schools.

5

Okay…so two actual responses, both from people who consider themselves having been popular, but who are from very small schools.

I’m from a high school of approximately 1200. I was decidedly not popular. I always knew that the “popular” characters in movies were caricatures, but a lot of what they did and said seemed, from my lowly point of view, to ring very true.

Are y’all not responding because you weren’t popular…or because you recognize yourself? I’m honestly curious.

6

I never thought I was popular in high school, but it was pointed out to me at a recent reunion that I managed to live the high school life of a popular person – lots of activities, student council, pep club, etc. I was surprised to learn that other people did categorize me as a popular person.

Watching those same movies, I did identify with whatever character Molly Ringwald was playing at the moment. I also felt like I was one of a few people who really thought about things like nuclear holocaust and the meaning of life, and that all the “popular” people were perpetually thinking about clothes, nail polish, and boys. Again, in hindsight, I realize that I spent quite a bit of time pondering what boy I would want to be with when the nuclear winter came. I believed that all the teen anxieties in my head were so loud, that they must have been evident to people around me, and likewise, the fact that the popular girl in my English class appeared serene proved that she didn’t have a serious thought in her head. It took me a while to figure out that you usually can’t tell what people are thinking about unless you take the time to get to know them.

I think those movies are actually very cleverly constructed so that most people identify with Molly or Anthony Michael, because they play upon the idea that many teens feel that they don’t fit in, even if they appear to fit in. At the same reunion, a guy whom I would have described as “the most popular boy in school” was talking about how he always felt that he was on the fringe of things.
350 people in my graduating class, middle class suburban school, 1987, if you’re keeping track.

7

You’re not going to believe this, but my high school didn’t have a “popular” clique. In fact, what cliques we had (if they can be called that) overlapped enough to be almost meaningless. The kids who were popular (the ones who ended up on Student Council or whatever) were popular mostly by virtue of belonging to as many different groups as possible. Again, it was a small school, with about 300 students. There seems to be a pattern developing here, doesn’t there?

8

1600 here. For me the stereotypes seem totally off base. I’ve never been popular, but the one kid I knew who I would consider popular was only popular because somehow he knew everyone. When I went out to lunch with him he could usually find someone in the resturant who he knew. There was very little about him that was stereotypical.

Mostly though I never get involved in school enough to tell who is popular and who is not:)

9

Did you see Welcome to the Dollhouse? Guess which one I was. I made the mistake of watching that movie with three friends who were popular in junior high and high school. Big mistake.

10

My high school - about 1200 students - simply did not arrange itself the way movies would suggest they do; I’m inclined to believe movie high schools have very ordered social structures but I’m not sure all RL high schools do. There were POPULAR kids, and less popular kids, but there wasn’t really a single identifiable “clique” of either, and deliberate ostracization didn’t really happen. I was friend with the computer club guys AND the popular kids, and the jocks and the brainiacs. Many people belonged to more than one of those groups.

The stereotypical movie high schools never rang true to me. I never saw it. Might have just been my school. I do, however, believe that it’s generally true that almost all kids think THEY’RE the odd one out, and percieve other kids as being “popular” when they’re almost certainly equally insecure about themselves.

11

See, there’s what I’m saying. I haven’t seen it, but I’ve read about it a lot (apparently very popular with the Internet geek crowd, gee, wonder why?). What were your friends’ reactions? Did they think it was funny when the popular girls were cruel or abusive? Just “big mistake” doesn’t tell me anything. :slight_smile:

(Slight hijack: very damned glad you ended up being okay, because I have to have someone who’ll let me steal their french fries at the NYCDope this January…</slight hijack>)

As I said, I understand that these are caricatures…and maybe it was only certain high schools, like mine. I went to HS in a very closed-off upper-middle-class white community (in a school of 1200 I could literally count black kids on two hands and have fingers left over), and the social standings were VERY stratified. Some people mingled between the “groups”…but you had the jocks and cheerleaders (who were generally the popular people), the brains, the band fags/choir queers (that was me, thanks), the stoners, and the geeks. Think “Pretty in Pink” and you’ll have a good idea of how my school was. I know I can’t be the only one…and if I am, how did these caricatures in movies and on TV become so ubiquitous?

(As a side note…no one on Beverly Hills 90210 would ever have taken the hit in social standing necessary to be seen talking to me or any of my friends.)

12

Firstly, to all those who were popular in high school:

[Father Jack]
FECK OFF!!!
[/Father Jack]

Okay, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, I can’t say that I really identified with any particular group of people in high school – yes, I was an orchestra/stage crew/AV nerd, but apparently I was also much more well-regarded at the time than I knew until much later. So I was one of those middle ground types who make for boring films.

If there was anything in those teen movies that rang true, it was probably the message (as in the Breakfast Club) that the stereotypes didn’t reflect our inner selves, and that we were all pretty much screwed up.

13

I’m not 100% qualified to answer, because I wasn’t in the popular crowd. But I got along with most of them, and knew them fairly well. If that makes sense. I was too smart and too reluctant to party to really fit in with them socially outside of school, but we’d all gone to grade school together and had the same classes in high school. And did some of the same “leadership” type activities throughout.

That said, in my experience there were far fewer “mean” popular kids than are depicted in the movies. Most of the popular kids were perfectly nice. They were just conformist, or clueless about the feelings of the people outside their clique. They weren’t out-and-out mean to the non-popular kids. There were a few spectacular exceptions, of course, and their attitude (being more noticable than the neutral one of their cronies) may have seemed to some to be the attitude of “the popular crowd” but it wasn’t, in fact, the norm. I think most non-popular kids felt ignored but not shunned or shat upon.

My high school, BTW, had about 800 students over three grades.

14

Early 1980s, magnet geek public school, Buffalo, New York

The “popular kids” tended not to be the jocks, but rather very intelligent yet socially “ept” (as opposed to inept) kids, usually preppy, usually from prominent families – well-known businesspeople or political leaders.

Because there was a disproportionately large number of popular kids who shared my major in high school, and because I was somewhat preppy myself, I tended to be closely associated with them. However, I never really felt like I was “in.” I seldom dated, I was invited to few parties by the popular kids, and my close friends actually spanned a cross-section of cliques.

15

I graduate in a class of about 800 (Class of 1982 - gulp, damn near 20 years ago), in a school of about 1500, and was in the “popular” group of students in my class. I also was active in drama and forensic groups, so I had a foot in the artsy group; played golf and tennis, so I had that entrance into the jock world; and worked (and got high) in a restaurant with a bunch of burnouts so I had some credibility with that crowd as well. To this day I’m pretty comfortable in any social situation that may come along.

There certainly were people in my school who would never have thought about associating with people in different social circles. One jock in particular (think Cro-Magnon man and you’ve just about got the intellect, strenght, and vocabulary) had this real hatred of freaks (of course, he hated just about everyone but me - our government teacher pulled me aside the first day of class and told me that my job for the year was to see to it that he passed the course and graduated - no questions asked). I think some of it has to do trying to be individualists in an atmosphere that rewards conformity so much - people can really be torn. Adolescents in general want so much to be independent and their own persons, yet will glom onto a trend, fashion, or idea if they see that others are into the same thing.

Every time I see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Mr. Rooney’s secretary tells him what all the cliques in the school are saying about Ferris’s “illness” I think: I went to that school. She must ramble off about a dozen different cliques, including “the schizoids, who think Ferris is a righteous dude.” I guess I was Ferris.

16

In my High-School, there were all the typical “stereo-types”, but they didn’t interact in the “typical” way. There were 2 things that brought the people from all across the social spectrum together: Beer and Gambling.

We had skate punks, jocks, nerds, cheerleaders, red-necks, and all the rest working together in harmony to take each others money and drink each others beer. The people that ended up being the most successful (popularity wise) ended up being the ones who were funny (to the point of self-deprecation), could stay up late, and had their own car. So much fun . . .

DaLovin’ Dj

17

Based on TV shows and other SD threads, I was beginning to think that US high schools were just a jocks/geeks dichotomy. So TV and movie stereotypes never rang true for me or my friends. In fact, the girls who were popular in TV shows (pretty, bitchy, vapid) were the joke of the school.

I went to a uniform-wearing all-female private school with about 2000 students (300 in the top year level). Very upper middle class with a a faction of working class parents who had saved up enough money to send their kids to the school. Despite that, money was never an issue. Who your parents were wasn’t an issue.

I was of average popularity, I guess. Most people knew me by face or name and I was friends with people from most groups (although they were really loosely defined). Our most popular people were a mix of intelligent, funny and nice (prettiness helped, but wasn’t as important as the others). People with an impressive skill, like being exceptional at art, drama or debating, were also admired.

There were maybe 5 or 6 really unpopular people who didn’t have any friends. Nobody went out of their way to talk to them but similarly, nobody was mean to them. One girl had a birthday party and invited only the popular people (spanning several groups) and almost every one of them showed up. In a movie, it would probably be because they were planning to do something terrible at the party and make fun of her, but at my school, that didn’t happen.

18

Is there a gay-band correlation? Or a supposed one? Just curious.

19

I think this stems from the 17-yr old average sense of humor and tolerance which equates being called a “fag” with being utterly uncool.

We’ve always loved the term and used it as a proud self-identifier (“Band fag! Theater Fag!” Whoo-hoo!) but it didn’t have anything to do with sexual orientation. It’s unfortunate that “fag” = slur, but hey, that’s high school.

20

My elementary and junior high school years bear a very uncomfortable resemblance to Wellcome to the Dollhouse. I was picked on A LOT, for clothes I wore, for getting boobs early, for glasses, for my last name, for being smart. I wasn’t physically bullied, but there was lots of verbal taunting or just plain exclusion - many of the “popular” kids would pretend not to hear if I talked to them or would exchange knowing, eyerolling looks. My belongings had a way of disappearing from my locker or getting thrown out the window of a moving bus. I was made Student of the Week a whole bunch, which called for having a 12x14" picture of oneself pasted up by the principal’s office. Often people drew on it and called me “geek of the week” in the halls. Whoever designed that program as an incentive should be SHOT.

In high school, it went a little bit better. Like Cranky, I had many of the kids in my classes, and it was generally acknowledged by teachers and students that I was intelligent. I was a sought-out lab or debate partner. I grew more into my sarcastic, wiseass self. I’d started doing extracurricular activities in Junior High - music, mostly, and in High School I started running track and cross country, and helped start a debate team. So I knew a ton of people from all grades and walks of life at school. I had my core friends, but I still wasn’t invited to the drink & drug-heavy parties the cool kids had. I would get picked on often because I was so visible - I was the geek who had somehow crawled onto the Prom Committee instead of knowing her place. But I had my friends and got along with most people.

I think the cafeteria of a high school is the true place you can see the pecking order at work. There was a huge, long connected table down the center of mine. That’s where the popular kids of all grades sat together. If you tried to sit there, people would claim you were in their seat or just skip a seat around you and have whispered conversations and give you sidelong looks. I don’t know how everyone knew who was allowed to sit at the table and who wasn’t, but we all just knew.

There were some very cruel people among our popular crowd, and they took delight in verbally tormenting kids, which is sad. One of the most picked-on kids died in a car accident and everyone had the day off school to go to the funeral, and a lot of kids who had tormented him went and got all dramatic and self-righteous about how much we would all miss him, with no admission of how many times they made him cry - threw his books in the trash, gave him wedgies, refused to be partnered with him in gym class, publicly humiliated him, pushed his lunch tray out of his hands…
very sad.

Many John Hughes/'80’s teen films are about the mutual redemption of the geek and the popular love interest asshole - the popular kid becomes less of an asshole through the good influence of the geek, and the geek finally gains romance or entree into the cool crowd. I think the movies are accurate in showing how hard those social lines are for kids to cross. How many times have you seen the newly popular geek dump his/her geeky best friend as the price of admission? That happened to my friends and me A LOT - one of the girls would start dating a member of the basketball team and suddenly there would be this distance between everyone.

For statistical purposes - grades 7-12 in one school, about 150 people per class.