About the author: Anne is a senior in the College from the great Midwest. She strongly encourages you to add this blog to your newsfeed and comment regularly. Read more from this authorI first heard of Rachel Simmons through a profile in Time magazine.
We’ve all heard the stereotype that girls treat each other with greater underhanded cruelty than boys treat each other, à la Mean Girls. Instead of attributing such behavior to biological differences, Rachel Simmons makes the interesting argument that this actually results from girls facing greater social pressure to be nice than boys face. She seems to suggest that because the repressed hostilities need to have expression somewhere, they come out in the manipulative and catty behavior that we recognize.
She writes:
“the pressure girls face to be nice all the time leads them to repress some of their most powerful emotions and deprives them of skills to express those feelings. As a result, a lot of anger gets expressed indirectly, like online or behind someone’s back, earning girls a reputation for being sneaky and cruel. Again, that’s not about girls themselves but about the culture that they’re growing up in.”
While we’ve all noticed that girls can partake in those rituals, I am not sure myself whether I would agree that it is culturally conditioned—or maybe I just never noticed it myself. In my elementary school (and for me, elementary school in Chicago is 1st-8th grade) girls did place indirect social pressure on each other to be nice. I heard my peers say, “Laura is the nicest girl in the class… Michelle is the second-nicest,” as if it were some competition. It did make it seem like niceness was something to aspire to.
On the other hand, I didn’t interpret it as something girls had to aspire to more than boys, but I guess the boys weren’t standing around trying to compare who was nicest (maybe because women are expected to be more nurturing?). I suppose teachers may have been complicit in the stereotype that girls are the nice, well-behaved ones, and there’s a greater expectation that boys will misbehave, but those descriptions never seemed prescriptive to me. I am personally wary of the suggestion that the social pressure pre-exists the stereotype, because I never felt that I had to try to be nice BECAUSE I was a girl. It just seemed like the basic human-being way to behave. Even if boys were thought of as the troublemakers in class, I didn’t feel as if teachers were more lenient towards them when they misbehaved; I didn’t sense a different standard for behavior between boys and girls. Then again, there are limitations in drawing conclusions from personal anecdotes.
Simmons’ generalization about Asian girls and families in the last paragraph also makes me uncomfortable, especially since I find it untrue of my extended family. Furthermore, Asia is such a large continent that such a sweeping generalization cannot accommodate either the subtle or pronounced cultural variations that occur (besides, when I think of Asia, I think of Uzbekistan). It is not clear to me why she thinks she has the authority to make the statement in the last paragraph either, since on her web site she doesn’t seem to have any specialization in Asia-related matters. Even if she had restricted her writing to a particular region of Asia, such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Asia Minor specifically, I think there is still considerable variation within those subregions. I have found that other journalism about psychological or social attributes about Asians also neglects to take into account noteworthy variations in Asian cultures.
However, I was still curious about her other writings, so I decided to look up her book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. She writes about girls’ underhanded forms of aggression towards each other, the result of societal pressure to be “nice.” I don’t find the prose or the content especially engaging, but I thought these lines were interesting:
“Annie was so afraid of isolation that tolerating abuse seemed like her only option” (61).
“Annie tried to please her friend at any cost, wanting only to save the relationship. Her unremitting focus on staying friends with Samantha allowed abuse to take over the relationship” (61).
“With meanness so intermixed with the relationship, Annie lost the capacity to tell the difference” (61).
Simmons suggests that girls are under a lot of pressure to be nice, regardless of how they are treated. Is the relationship she describes above true of girls? If so, are girls afraid of isolation because it is intrinsically unpleasant, or because they feel social pressure not to be isolated? Is the stigma of isolation worse than the intrinsic negative effects? Which is the greater motivating factor that keeps girls in abusive friendships with each other?
