It’s not really that simple. If you go around being a jerk to people, most likely you’ll just get shunned. Or punched if you do it to the wrong person.
When we are talking about being Popular, we aren’t talking about a person who is necessarily well liked by people. A lot of Popular people are actually disliked by all but a few people. What we are talking about is someone who people are attracted to for some reason or another. Maybe they come from money or throw wild parties or have access to great drugs. Maybe they are really athletic or good looking or famous. Whatever reason, people are attracted to them simply because they feel being around them enhances their status.
They can get away with being mean to people because people aren’t into them because of their sparkling personality anyway.
Now if you are a LITTLE bit mean, cocky flippant or sarcastic in a funny way, people will respond to that because it shows confidence. You are demonstrating that you don’t need to cowtow to other people or need their approval.
I came here to recommend this book. You need to read it. Then you need to have your daughter read it. It is exactly about your problem. It explains the whys, the whos, and the hows of this exact situation. Once your daugher can recognise the underlying mechanisms and the roles each girls is playing, she can navigate this scene much more painlessly.
I think it is a combination of several things, the top two being:
The gender hierarchy and cultural/structural oppression of women. Very well depicted, but in racial terms, in the classic documentary “Blue Eyed”.
The human social/biological consequence of us being a flock animal. Meaning our innate predisposition towards defining groups. You’re not like us, and by channeling our groups aggression towards you we strengthen the group. We are also predisposed towards a contempt for weakness because ‘weak’ flock members endanger the group.
Good question! I know how your daughter feels. There was a girl who was over weight and wore glasses that used to get picked on until I stuck up for her. I know it was in grades one or two. I have always been empathetic to people being picked on.
Bullying has long been a problem at schools and it always will. It isn’t a girl problem per say. It has to do with the mindset of the bully. A bully has to put someone down to feel good about themselves. They actually have self esteem issues. When you don’t like yourself you will usually not like others or take it out on yourself. “Hurt people, hurt people”. Also I have heard bullies described as egomaniacs with an inferiority complex. She may have issues going on at home?
Your daughter is actually showing empathy toward this girl being bullied and it is up to her how she will handle it. If she herself has good self esteem she may tell the bully to back off. The best weapon against a bully is the truth and to stand up to them. I’m not saying fight them but refuse to accept the behavior and walk away. Be the bigger person.
My cousin ran with the popular crowd at school. She told me that there was one girl in the group (the leader) who was untouchable, the rest of them could become the target of the group’s bullying at any time. As much as they teased outsiders, they teased each other just as much. If you were the target, your best recourse was to try to shift that role onto someone else. Everyone in the group was looking for someone to tease, so that it wouldn’t be them.
I liked her getting hit by the school bus better, as a more healthier response. Regina is not gonna change, given enough time , she will return to her plastic ways.
This is not how my high school was like at all. The most popular people were almost all genuinely nice. There were a few dickheads among the popular crowd, but they were rare. Even today, I’ve run into a few of the popular people as adults and they still seem genuinely nice.
The assholes and bitches were usually the stupidest people or the drug addicts or the ones who just liked causing chaos. They all banded together, so they had a lot of friends, but “popular” they weren’t.
Same here. But only with the people above my graduating class, and maybe one tier below. By the time you get to the class of 2005, the popular people are all jerks.
And even the rare jerkish popular person is usually a really nice person now that they are out of school.
Then again, I was one of those people who got along with everyone. My problem was that I assumed that happened to everyone, and still had so many self-esteem issues that I had a lot of acquaintances, but no real friends.
I experienced the majority of my classmates growing up as very nice people who seemed to like me just fine (even though I was highly weird) and had few issues resolving situations where people tried to bully me or my friends (like your daughter I often ended up the white knight of the girls everyone tried to alienate as I prefer other weirdos and very gentle people). But many of the people I grew up with experienced bullying and emotional abuse, from many of the same people that I found perfectly pleasant individuals. It’s more about who you are, as a potential victim, than how everyone else in the school is IME. There’s a pecking order and the kids who end up at the bottom for a variety of reasons are tortured in one way or another by nearly everyone (actively by a few, and more passively because kids with less social power are too scared to go against the ringleaders for fear they end up in the same position as the victims). It’s terrible but it’s just life. Large groups of children are more vicious than most animals. I’ve read some research on the subject and it seems to be true in many cultures that little girls use their more advanced social understanding and language skills to dominate and hurt each other much more than little boys, from a very early age. It’s not just a matter of socialization, there is biology at play here as well.
I feel for your daughter and all the other people I’ve known who’ve gone through this, but I don’t have good advice. It’s good she can confide in you, and lots of talking and reading about the subject might help her get a better grasp on how she can handle it. Good for her for sticking up for what she knows is right even though she’s terrified she’ll be alienated forever.
What worked for me was a]not letting people’s bullshit get to me, b]never showing it for a second if it did get to me, 3]never backing down (they want to say mean shit? I can be meaner if they want to go there). That seemed to nip all manipulation in the bud. But it’s hard or impossible for most kids to project true self-confidence in these situations.
I’d say that’s accurate. There were two kinds of popular in my high school (class of 1991 for reference). You had the typical cool preppy people who were jocks, cheerleaders, kids with more affluent parents and other kids who just “fit in”. For the most part, they were usually nice and polite, if somewhat snobby at times.
Then you have the fraternity of fuckups. All the druggies and jerkoffs who took shop classes and always seemed to be in trouble. They all sort of banded together in the smoking section.
For the most part though, most of the people I went to high school with weren’t really assholes. But that’s from my perspective.
Actually, it seemed like I encountered many more assholes in college. Most of the guys I went to school with were these entitled frat guy and sorority bitch types from affluent familes. The entire social scene revolved around fraternities and sororities (there were like 40+ of them for a few thousand students). It was basically a system designed to be clicquey and assholeish.
Tell your daughter that whenever one of the mean girls gives her a dirty look or shuns her or something she should twitch & cry things like “Please stop the demons from pinching me!” and “I saw Goody ‘Insert-Name-Hear’ consorting with the Goat-Man last fortnight under the full moon!”
This matches my experience. The popular kids were nice enough…as long as you weren’t one of a half-dozen or so people who went through school with a perpetual invisible “Kick Me” sign on their backs. If you were one of those kids, they ignored you if you were lucky. If you were unlucky, they went out of their way to fuck with you and hardly anyone believed it when you listed their various assholeries because “they’re so nice to me.”
I don’t know that girls are any meaner or more prone to teasing than boys, it just takes that form a lot earlier. I mean, when a girl is getting barked or mooed at, it’s usually not girls doing it, ya know?
This is important. Boy bullies are generally thought to have somewhat low social skills. Girl bullies, on the other hand have higher than average social skills and associate well with adults. This allows them to manipulate people & organizations to their benefit, while discrediting the person who complains of abuse. Girl bullies normally have numerous defenders of their “niceness” when complaints arise, including adults in positions of authority.
There is a girl like that in my daughters class IN SPADES. The girl’s who she has befriended and betrayed, their parents know. Everyone else thinks we are so mean to her to exclude this girl from parties and invitations - because she is SO nice (there are family issues, too, so the grownups feel sorry for her). Teachers tend to know because they talk to one another - but she’ll get a fresh start in middle school and she’s had plenty of practice at not betraying herself to adults.