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Teenage Girls Are Now Meaner than the Guys
Thursday, February 28, 2002
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times

The closest thing we have to a Heathers-style predatory face-off are the alpha girls of ABC, Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer, who claw each other over Yasser Arafat.

WASHINGTON -- NYT
A friend of mine, an 8-year-old, asked me the other day if I wanted to see her "glare." She gives good glare. She'll need it in a few years, if she decides to be an alpha girl, or an RMG - a Really Mean Girl.

Alpha girls ruthlessly rule junior high school, à la "Heathers," with cold shoulders, hot clothes and withering looks known as "deaths," jettisoning pathetic Wannabes from their popular Queen Bee hives.

Two articles last weekend chronicled growing efforts in schools to tame pushy alpha girls.

In The New York Times Magazine, Margaret Talbot wrote that the consensus that girls were less aggressive and more empathetic than boys began to change in the early 1990s, when researchers found that girls outmaneuvered rivals with nastiness instead of fists.

There had been earlier signs that females were not necessarily the softer sex. Jane Goodall reported in the 1960s that some female chimpanzees killed the offspring of their rivals to stay on top.

Marion Underwood, a psychology professor at the University of Texas, told Talbot: "Girls very much value intimacy, which makes them excellent friends and terrible enemies. They share so much information when they are friends that they never run out of ammunition if they turn on one another."
(More: International Herald Tribune Online News Source)
2002 © The New York Times.

Dan