Internalized Misogyny
The Modern Day Mean Girl
By Sophia Getz, Maddie Roth, and Joshua Kloss
If you’ve been around for at least the last decade, you’ve likely seen or at the very least heard of the cult classic chick flick, “Mean Girls.” The 2004 film, starring Lindsay Lohan and Rachel McAdams, tells the story of teenager Cady Heron who was educated in Africa by her biologist parents. When her family relocates to the suburbs of Illinois, Cady finally gets to experience public school and gets a quick primer on the cruel, tacit laws of popularity that divide her fellow students into tightly-knit cliques. She unwittingly finds herself in the good graces of an elite group of cool students dubbed, "the Plastics," but Cady soon realizes how her shallow group of new friends earned this nickname.
“Mean Girls” immaculately portrays the American high school queen bee as the stereotypical lipgloss-wearing, designer-bag-toting, boyfriend-stealing, supervillain of its plot. It was iconic for its time not only because of its moral messaging about why unkindness and judgmental behavior were not okay, but it also gave young girls an understandable antagonist. It effectively instilled in us that the dark side of womanhood is catty, conniving competitiveness.
While “Mean Girls” is pop culture satire, it is also emblematic of a larger problem with modern-day feminism. Even as a society still dominated by patriarchal values, there is no denying the great strides that we have made for women’s rights. However, in the quest for liberation–whether that be for reproductive rights, closing the wage gap, or the promotion of women in leadership positions–we seem to have lost our sense of what it means to be a feminist.
What began as “girl boss feminism,” an empowered campaign for a woman’s right to professional opportunity beyond two kids and a white picket fence, has somehow devolved into an averseness to, and even shaming of, the women who choose not to pursue a career and/or chose to adopt more traditional values like staying home to raise a family. The irony lies in the fact that modern-day feminism should regard a woman’s right to choose, but it appears that those choices consist of prescribed ideas of what an empowered woman should look like. Under the insidious guise of progressivism, misogyny has pervaded the feminist movement to pit us against each other and make us believe that the “mean girl” is the woman who is either too competitive, too career-oriented, or too traditional, and perhaps even brainwashed. Internalized misogyny may not steal your quarterback boyfriend or put your name in the Burn Book, but its ability to masquerade as contemporary feminism makes it far more of a threat than Regina George.
If Regina George would have had access to social media, the Burn Book would have spread a lot further than it did in the movie. Social media has played a major role in the toxicity of modern feminism. If you go onto almost any social media site, the wall will be filled with girls posing in scandalous clothes that they bought off a fast fashion website, especially during the weekends. Hundreds of comments and likes will be on that one post, feeding into this idea that if girls keep posting these somewhat fake photos, they are loved by mostly complete strangers.
If this is something you have done before, I pose this question to you: is it worth it? How hard do you have to try to make sure the angle is right? How often do you check on the post afterward to see who liked/commented?
We are all guilty of this. We all want people to think what we’re doing is cool and fun. We want people to love us for who we are, but sometimes that gets lost in the mix of it all. Girls become obsessed with the idea of fake perfection and strive for the attention that others pour down their throats. The more “likes” they get, the hungrier they are to seem even more perfect. If anybody sees them slip up for even a second, everything they have worked so hard for could be over.
But this has to be pure hell for them. Putting on a show for everyone around them has to be awful. Do these girls even know who they are, or are they just another product morphed by who society tells them to be?
There are several studies that show the link between social media and a decrease in mental health. These studies show that the fewer likes a person gets when they post, the lower their self-esteem becomes. Lower self-esteem can lead to self-harm tendencies, like starving oneself or cutting. So much of who we are as people is dependent on how the world sees us through social media, especially women. Next time you’re scrolling through Instagram, like a girl's picture that you wouldn’t normally like. Maybe it will make them smile. Women need to encourage women in order to diminish the stigma of how perfect we have to seem to everyone else, especially men.
And while we’re at it, let’s scribble down “the nice guy” in the Burn Book. Recently, there’s been a shift in perceptions of men and how they should treat women, and some behaviors that aren’t special at all are now treated as emblems of the ideal guy. I would argue that there are some behaviors and actions that should be expected of every single person, including men, such as, asking for consent, treating others with respect, and taking a hint once somebody expresses that they are not interested in you. Yet, men who do all three of these (or maybe even just one or two of these) things are idolized as “men written by women,” and are put on a pedestal. Yes, that is behavior that should be modeled and that others should follow. However, it is also the bare minimum that a man should do: anything short of that is simply behaving poorly and in ways subpar to the normal and expected.
After all, there are so many men who like to paint themselves as the “nice guy,” someone who is so different from other men, simply because he does things such as respecting another woman’s bodily autonomy when she says, “no.” These behaviors are not glorious, nor are they the pinnacle of chivalry; they are how each and every man should act and treat women, without failing to think of other ways that they can behave even better.
Furthermore, women shouldn’t feel obligated to validate men who behave in these ways. If you search, #NiceGuysBeLike, on TikTok, you’ll find countless stories of “nice guys” that behave kindly towards women, all the while expecting a romantic or sexual relationship in return. A lot of women love to show off the kind things their male partner does for them; when in reality it is something as simple as cooking a meal or taking out the trash. I, for one, had a great time scrolling through the posts under the hashtag #BareMinimumTwitter on (you guessed it!) Twitter.
Why are we idealizing the bare minimum? Long story short: don’t settle for that crap, people. Especially in your partner; they’re a partner, after all, not a child that needs positive reinforcement for achieving a task as simple as emptying the dishwasher or respecting your right to say “No” when they want to have sex.
While it’s of course important to acknowledge how far we have come as a society in regards to the rights and opportunities of women and femme-presenting people, we also have a responsibility to identify attempts made to co-opt the movement and therefore disrupt its messaging, and by extension, its mission. There is certainly not a monolith for a feminist, nor should there be a sole signifier for feminism as a whole. But the danger lies in prescribing ideas–ones motivated by culture and by our own preconceived notions–to women who are supposed to have the agency bought by social progress to choose whether or not they wish to subscribe to it. To sum it up, feminism is fetch. Inhibiting a woman’s right to choose based on individual ideas of what feminism “should” look like? So not fetch.