Mean Girls and Media Models

How pop culture shapes relational aggression

I hate to bring up White Lotus again, but it's just so good. So good, in fact, that it has created this cultural moment when everyone is watching the same thing at the same time and talking about it—a piece of monoculture that is so rare in our fragmented media world.

One of the many things that makes White Lotus so great is the character development. Mike White writes people who are so rich and multidimensional. This season, my favorites are the three women. I know I'm not alone here. So many people have remarked that these women seem real: their conversations are so relatable since that's really how women speak to each other.

And on some level, yes, that's true—in a depressing way.

The three women are really mean to one another. They are so competitive, and their friendships are marked by so much schadenfreude. And, in those ways, they are perfect images of what we have come to expect from relationships among girls and women.

I wonder what's the chicken or the egg: Do these characters reflect our inherent meanness? Or are we mean because that's what we see modeled, and it’s what we believe society expects?

Like many of you, when I was growing up, I was served images of cool girls demonstrating so much relational aggression. The aspirational models we had were simply not nice. We had movies like Clueless, Bring It On, and Cruel Intentions and TV shows like The O.C., One Tree Hill, and Laguna Beach. They emphasized popularity hierarchies, makeover narratives that required changing someone to fit in, frenemies and false friendships, manipulative use of gossip and rumors, social exclusion as power, and competition for male attention. As teenagers, with high baseline insecurity and not yet knowing who we really were, these models were meaningful. We wanted to be like them. No wonder we thought it was cool to be mean.

This trend has continued with Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Riverdale, and more,¹ compounded by influencer feeds that document and amplify conflicts. So, of course, these dynamics continue to play out in real life. Sometimes I am struck by the level of meanness among the teenage girls I hear about at work. I routinely hear stories of girls feeling intense competition with one another, sabotaging one another, excluding one another, and calling one another truly horrible names.

But, thankfully, I am now an adult, so I know this isn't how it has to be.

Now, in my 30s—less insecure, less susceptible to and more discerning about models–I can appreciate the value of niceness. I have amazing friends, and we support one another, not only helping each other when things are bad but also being genuinely happy for each other when things are good. And we don't have to define ourselves by friend groups; we can cast a wide net and have lots of different types of friends. I try to sell all this to the teenage girls at work and tell them that the coolest girl in the room is the one who is kind to everyone, who transcends cliquey social dynamics and can fit into any friend group, who gets invited to any party, and who everyone has good things to say about.

But unfortunately, my advice can only go so far. I'm too much of an old fart to really serve as an aspirational model for teenagers.

It’s clear that we need to change our media diet to serve teenage girls images of kindness. We must create and promote characters who are the sort of people we want our girls to emulate. Until we change what we celebrate in our media, we'll continue raising generations of girls who believe that meanness is the path to social success. And we'll continue being surprised and sad when that meanness manifests in real life.

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We’ve been listening to this sleeper hit on repeat in my house!

1. Sorry if my references already seem dated but I really just can’t keep up