Years after its release, people are still quoting Mean Girls, and not just because the one-liners are off-the-charts amazing (though, let’s be honest, they are).

Recently, I was told that the most powerful comedy is the kind that’s used to skewer underlying truths in our everyday lies and point out the absurdities within them. That’s exactly what Mean Girls does. Tina Fey wrote the movie based on the nonfiction book, Queen Bees and Wannabees, taking the lessons learned about bullying and social status from the book and skewering it on the Big Screen. The movie raised a bunch of questions amid the laughs, namely: Why?

Why do Mean Girls exist?

Why are their awful, horrible ways tolerated?

Alexandra Robbins delves into this in her book, The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth, identifying two main categories of “meanness”: overt aggression and alternative aggression. Overt is the pushing, shoving, in-your-face kind of mean; alternative is the Regina George variety, which focuses on excluding people, spreading rumors, shunning, sneering and gossiping.

Robbins also reveals two kinds of popularity in her book: Sociometric popularity—how much a person is liked—and perceived popularity, AKA how much people think another person is popular. Researchers found that (surprise, surprise) nobody actually likes the mean girls, but their perceived popularity is through the roof.

So it’s all smoke and mirrors. People see the meanness, nobody stands up to it (because nobody wants to be the subject of it), and everyone around sees that girl—or guy—as the Alpha Student.

For many students, being mean is the safe choice. If you’re popular and enjoy your popularity, people often start to consider you stuck-up, according to a Ball State University study in the book, and while being stuck-up has no positive qualities, being ‘mean’ can mobilize people (largely, in my mind, because it intimidates people into doing what the head Mean Girl—or Guy—says). And if you’re nice, you treat others as equals, which threatens your ‘popular person’ status.

They also found that Mean Girls are nice to those who don’t threaten them, reinforcing the idea that if you follow their manipulative ways, you’ll be safe.

So basically, girls act mean to rise in popularity and protect their status. Not exactly groundbreaking, but the difference between perceived and actual popularity is fascinating—it shows that these people build themselves on a lie, and if others rose up against them, their popularity would collapse pretty fast.

It’s an empty popularity; a shallow and lonely one, when everybody thinks you’re liked, but nobody actually likes or wants to spend time with you. It’s one message everyone in school should remember any time they’re picked on or thrown shade: People don’t actually like the mean girls—they’re just following the leader to avoid being caught in the crosshairs.

Maybe it’s time to (collectively) push back.

 

This post is part of Life Between Weekends’ Tuesday Takeaway series. Every Tuesday, we’ll share the most compelling insight we’ve gleaned from a book, movie, tour, documentary or article to inspire you during the workday.