Watching “Mean Girls” with my 12-yr Old Daughter

My husband felt that it was highly inappropriate that I watch this movie with my daughter.

“How can you think it might actually help her to watch this movie? You are just imposing your American neuroses about high school and coolness on somebody who has no relation to those neuroses whatsoever.”

Growing up in France shaped my husband’s perspective on high school and what it means to be a geek or cool. The most prestigious schools in France are public and those schools start to select students at age 16. The most nerdy kids are not only guaranteed the best jobs in the public and private sector, but higher pay than non-graduates of the Grandes Ecoles. They can also expect a fast-track career to the top of their chosen company or field. When you no longer interact with the subset of “cool” people in 11th grade and the reason for that is that most those people have been segregated into lesser tracks that prepare them for the second-tier opportunities they can expect in life…it’s easy not to be intimidated or impressed.

My fellow students in my private American preparatory school had other reasons to expect the choicer outcomes in Life.

“That’s alright. That’s ok, you’ll work for us one day,” they would cheer when we inevitably lost football games to the large county public schools. To the school’s chagrin, having the football team with the highest average SAT score in the state of Georgia did not translate into the winning-est football team in the state of Georgia.

Undoubtedly the “John Knox Institute” students behind that sour grapes cheer picked up the Class prejudice and un-sportsmanlike tone from their parents. Officially the school did everything to discourage such behavior. Along with the Protestant religious tenets underlying our education, the centerpiece of the school’s pride in producing morally upstanding young ladies and gentleman was the Honor Code – one of those pacts where you not only swear that you have not cheated on a test or assignment, you swear that you have no knowledge of such behavior on the part of your peers.

Well the TJKNI students weren’t perfect. Some of them did cheat. And, since time immemorial ratting out your peers (or “narking” as we called it) is about the surest path to social suicide -- it didn’t take long for your average student to figure out the Honor Code and the student Prefect System (basically a popularity contest) was a load of crap. If adults weren’t smart enough to figure to out the Honor Code wasn’t compatible with the emotional maturity of your average high school student, they were dumb.

Worse, if they did realize the flaws in these expectations, they were indoctrinating us in moral hypocrisy. The parents were often the administration’s willing partners. If TJKNI demanded that the students exhibit the same behavior off campus that they did on campus – basically don’t drink, do drugs, screw around and do the generally dumb-ass things teenagers do, the parents were often the first to lie on their child’s behalf.

The John Knox Institute kids not only felt superior to the children outside their school, many of them also felt superior to most of their classmates. My first introduction to the other students at The Institute, when I transferred in 7th grade, was a friendly “student ambassador”-type phone call from a girl I had vaguely seen around because her parents lived next door to my grandparents. She only had one question for me: “Are you popular?” My convoluted explanation of how, while I was not exactly popular, I did have a group of friends who didn’t think I was a loser didn’t convince her. I don’t think she ever said another word to me in the six years we went to school together.

Does that sum up my whole experience of TJKI? Of course not, I did make good friends in high school, I had some wonderful teachers and I received an excellent education. However, yes, I can definitely relate to the movie “Mean Girls.” Unlike the movie’s main character, the good girl played by Lindsay Lohan (how ironic is that) I never became close enough to these people for them to 1) notice me 2) think I was important enough to humiliate.

Regardless of how many times I watched “Sixteen Candles” in the hopes that I would come back in the fall and have it be my cool year or how many hours I babysat to buy that bitchin pair of acid-washed Guess jeans with the zipper on the ankles, I did not have what it took to be part of the cool group. They seemed to fall into two categories: DNA or attitude. Under DNA, appearance was most important for the girls and athletic ability was most important for the boys. Attitude was the trait that was more confusing for me to understand at the time. Self-confidence was central. Granted, it’s pretty easy to develop self-confidence as pretty girl or outstanding athlete in high school—people just naturally want to be around you. However, not all the girls in the group were that pretty and not all that boys were sports stars, yet they still managed to dominated people with their attitude. Sometimes, this was with good qualities –they might have had a great sense of humor or who were genuinely nice to everybody; sometimes they dominated with negative attitude.

“Queen Bees and Wannabes” explores the negative strategies girls use to intimidate their peers; often with the perverse outcome that the meaner the dominant individuals are, the more people want to be liked by them. This experience is not limited to high school and junior high girls. My work experience in the online mostly male-dominated, geeky software blogging world had its share Queen Bee and Wannabe behavior too. In "Sixteen Candles”, Anthony Michael Hall’s nerdy character isn’t any nicer to his geeky friends than the cool kids are to him. He humiliates and dominates them in his bid to be “King of the Dipshits” or, better yet, increase his social standing by leaving them behind.

Enough of me, I’ve gone way off course. How did this movie help me communicate with my pre-teen daughter?

She isn’t really acting like my friend.

No kidding. This girl constantly undermines you to make herself feel better. Her only interest in having you around is to have a courtier for her queenly presence.

But she can be so nice.

Yes, they can. It’s known as a “frenemy”. Or sometimes the nice girls in elementary school morph into little snots when they hit Junior high. In that case, she used to be your friend.

She’s so full of herself

Take a preteen girl and have enough adults tell her: “You should be a model” enough times. It’s a miracle if it doesn’t go to her head.

But she told me to do it.

Grow a spine. Evaluate the consequences of your actions. Learn to say no.

Everything about my appearance is wrong.

Let me spell out. There’s a downside to everything you claim you wish had.

Want be taller? Well, so and so is shorter than you and I’m also pretty sure that hasn’t stopped her from being a kick-ass dancer. Try finding a date in high school if most the boys are shorter than you.

Think your hair is too curly; well I’m sure plenty of girls complain that their straight hair is too limp and stringy. You want boobs? Do you really want “that” kind of attention from a bunch of Junior High boys? Want to be a well-endowed adult woman? For you, most the heterosexual “men” will morph back into good old Beavis and Butthead. Oh and do you really want to go jogging with two sports bras and have to worry about back pain?

You look just fine. And, anyway, its not like you can do anything about it, you got all that stuff before you were born, in your DNA. And, don’t dare think about blaming your father and me, because those same genes make you good at Math and a great runner. Stop worrying about how you look. You want people to look at you? Why don’t you DO something worthy of that attention?

The adults around me are less mature than I am.

Mean Girls don’t always happen in a vaccum. In the movie, the Queen Bee’s mother is portrayed as the “I Just Want to Be My Child’s Friend” archetype. We all know this type of woman. She is more invested in her daughter’s popularity than the girl is, herself. This is the kind of woman who boasts about a social life that involves partying like a 19-year old college freshman. Sorry Mrs. “She’s still pre-occupied with 1985,” the rest of us have left the snake-skin mini-skirt and the 80s behind us. You are your child’s parent. By definition you are not cool to them, the fact that you try just makes it worse. They may not be able to express it now, but your kid doesn’t want you to be their “friend” they want you to be their parent.

Some parents simply check out of the child-rearing process altogether or choose to remain willfully clueless. I call them Ostrich Parent. Their child or other parents may try to talk to them, but they just bury their heads in the sand. “Not my child” is their motto.

Thank you Amy Chua. If it hadn’t been for you, the rest of us wouldn’t have a name for the other kind of emotionally immature parent we find so obnoxious (as does your child) – Tiger Mom or Tiger Dad, also known as Helicopter Parent aka that rude parent at some run of the mill kids’ athletic competition who shouts coaching instructions to their child the whole time and then gives the child a 15-minute public critique of their performance…after they win! So often, the person shouting, “You gotta master that back-hand slice” to their child is the person who couldn’t hit a backhand slice if their life depended on it.

Things I didn’t like about “Mean Girls,” the movie:

I love Tina Fey to death, but sometimes the Saturday Night Live humor is out of place in a movie, destined to appeal to teens.

Lots of swearing. I’ve always been a fan of a creative and well-placed swear, but not when it doesn’t add anything, and not in a movie for my children. The girls in the movie call each other “bitch” and “slut” a lot. On one hand, girls really do say these things. On the other hand, the movie barely addresses whether they should and how this might just be reinforcing the images that boys, and later men, use to put them down. I think some women view the word “bitch” like rappers view the n word: it’s ok if we use it among ourselves, but wrong if a man calls us this.

The underlying connotation of “bitch” is a woman who stands up for herself – positive—but does it in an off-putting way – negative. I prefer bitch to slut. At least a bitch does. A slut is done to. The most negative thing about “slut” is not so much the sexual mores of the girl in question, but the fact that she doesn’t respect herself enough to make men respect her. It’s not just a question of her actions but the how and why, behind her actions. Boys in my high school were a lot more creative. They didn’t just call a girl a slut, they said things like “When X gives you a bj you have to pull the sheets out of your ass” or “She’d jump anything, even a whittled stick.”

The sad thing is I can remember those associations if I run into or hear about those girls years after high school.

Not only did the swearing not add anything, but the scene where the football coach gets caught having sex with two different high school girls did not add anything either. It wasn’t particularly funny. The most positive thing I can say is that I don’t think my daughter really caught what was going on, in that part.

Conclusion

In conclusion, did I use Mean Girls to exorcise some of my own memories of high school? My experience at The John Knox Institute did have an impact, even when I use it to define the things I don’t want for myself, or my children. I remember a conversation where The JKNI name came up as it inevitably would in a state where they are the academic reference – send more than 20 kids to the Ivy League a year, etc. My husband got tired of what he calls “people gargling themselves with their moral imperatives” and summed it up: “Yeah, yeah I get it: your mission is for these kids to get a good education like TJKNI, but not be dicks!”

Don Raaaaamiiiiiiro

As I wait for my child by the entrance of our apartment building, I notice Don Ramiro walking out. The eighty-year old man in his pressed suit and tie, heads off to whatever pretend job he goes to, the kind where the “girl” fetches him coffee while he does the crossword puzzles and plans his lunch dates with his Franco-era cronies.

Is the middle-aged man deferentially following Don Ramiro a new man-servant? Could the old codger be getting more feeble? I discuss it with my husband. He’s doubtful “Nah, the bad ones hang on forever. Their toxic personality acts as a preservative.” I have another theory. “Maybe they’re secretly afraid of Hell?”

Don Ramiro is a machista who thinks he’s a gentleman. He feels immensely superior to women and to foreigners. He hates children. He has neither manners, nor education, nor culture, nor any professional distinction that I’ve heard of. He did, however, have enough common sense to marry the daughter of a president of a national bank. This means that he manages his wife’s inheritance, which includes three apartments in our building. No self-respecting third world dictator presiding over his domains takes himself more seriously than Don Ramiro executing his responsibilities as head of the Building Association of Serrano XX.

In this capacity, he once dragged us to court and tried to kick us out of the building on the grounds that our uncivilized American habits caused us to wake up too early in the morning (7am) and our children made too much noise.

Don Ramiro, if we have to leave this building, I hope the next tenant is an Arab or African soccer player. If it’s a childless Spanish couple. I hope they have lots of parties, smoke crack and play really loud music. I hope the next renter decides to use the apartment as the locale for his thriving Casa Putas. Don Ramiro, when you get older and more infirm, I hope the poor third world woman taking care of you isn’t very nice. I hope she forgets to change your diapers and lets you sit in them. I hope you sit there powerless in your wheelchair while she watches her favorite telenovelas every time there’s a Clasico or Champion’s League soccer game on TV.

And when it’s your time, I hope the chasm of Hell opens up and the demons drag you down while the orchestra plays the finale of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

Trebuchet

Dear God,
When it comes time for my 8-yr old son to take the SATs, in about nine years from now, could you please do me a favor and make sure it includes the word “trebuchet”? He has not sat down at the piano willingly to practice at any time this year, except for 7:30 the morning…after his 12-year old sister’s sleep-over party…when the girls had gone to bed at 3 am. When this failed to impress the girls, he and his twin moved on to streaking.

However, he has a very impressive knowledge of medieval siege engines due to many school bus hours playing Age of Empires, Age of Kings on the Nintendo DS. I believe this is teaching him some basic notions of cash flow, as well. Recently, he learned that his feudal village rents were not bringing in enough income to support his war-mongering proclivities. He has an impressive smattering of Roman military knowledge (Thank you Astérix! ) and can describe the Siege of Gondor (Lord of the Rings) at length.

Sometimes we non-tiger mothers need a break.

Nathalie

Dear Sexist Media,

Can we please have more photos of these fellows shirtless please?

Cause when you look like this,



and you’re not as smart as him (Dial a hooker),
then maybe you have to stoop to assaulting the woman who cleans your toilet and changes your bed linens.

In the words of French electropop singer and sometime philosopher Yelle:

…Alors les filles on se promene
Ouais on va aux chippendales
On navait pas prevu de passer la soiree avec des rigolos
On voulait voir des pectoraux, des mecs montes comme des taureaux...
Yelle, Je Veux Te Voir

Difference in French, American Attitudes comes to forefront in DSK Arrest

It's hard to miss the culture clash in the differing coverage the American, British and French press give the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK), the French IMF-head who was arrested in New York city after allegedly sexually assaulting a hotel maid.

The French journalists and public are particularly upset about the perceived lack of dignity with which Strauss-Kahn is being treated. They feel the pictures of him, unshaven and unkempt and handcuffed after his night in jail, are degrading to his individual dignity. They proudly point to French laws that forbid photographing suspects before they have been formally convicted of a crime. They feel that allowing journalists in the courtroom, undermines the legal process and turns the proceedings into a media circus.

The Americans, and to a lesser degree the British, feel the French press is to blame for a so-called "conspiracy of silence" that protected a "sexual predator." The French respond that the private sex lives of public figures are not their concern unless this somehow unduly impacts the manner in which those public figures perform the jobs they were elected to fulfill. For instance, not interested that former French president, Mittérand had a long-standing mistress and a love-child. If he had been using public funds to maintain his mistress and love child it would have been another story.

Apparently, DSK's third wife, Anne Sinclair, is not bothered by her husband's reputation for running after women. In public, she proclaims that she is proud of it and that it is "important for a politician to be able to seduce." I agree with the French press' restraint in reporting on this aspect of politician's lives. However, they need to understand that if the US press seems to go too far in the other extreme, it is because American politicians, are held to a different standard. In the US, for better or worse, demonstrating an upstanding personal life is part of how many politicians, especially those of the conservative Republican stripe, sell themselves to the American people. So it does make sense, that if the politician has campaigned on a "family-values" platform, which, in the US, means marital fidelity, or supports a very anti-gay conservative platform, then is revealed in the act of picking up men in airport restrooms, it makes sense to expose them. Meanwhile in the case of US politicians who did not campaign on the conservative "family values" platform or pretend in anyway that their personal life was a mirror for their qualities in government, I feel we should leave their private lives alone. While I did not like his equivocation on a lot of other issues, I never felt Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky was a matter of interest for the American people and the American government. His election campaign was based on the economy, not his upstanding private life.

The conservative American argument is that a person's personal life is a reflection of their probable probity in public office. I disagree. While it would be nice to believe that having a reproach-free private life guarantees the ability to successfully govern, it's just impossible to demonstrate this correlation based on historical examples. Presidents like FDR and JFK were arguably successful presidents, and fidelity to their wives was not their strong point. Meanwhile, I have never heard any real reproach on Barack Obama's qualities as a husband and father, yet that doesn't stop American conservatives from lambasting his presidency. On the contrary, they supported John McCain, who emerged from his POW experience to find that his wife who had remained faithful and supported him the whole time of his imprisonment had become handicapped and aged badly. He promptly divorced her to marry a much younger heiress with a politically-connected father...yet this never seemed to bother the "family values" party.

Back to DSK, what does shock me from the French media analysis is their failure to differentiate from consensual sex and sexual aggression. They wash their hands of DSK's past, saying that they never investigated French journalist, Tristane Banon's account that DSK tried to rape her when she met him for an interview almost a decade ago because the alleged victim never formally denounced her aggressor. Apparently they all knew this was DSK, even though his name was deleted from the report. I disagree with their failure to investigate. The most most cursory glance at Miss Banon's profile would suggest that her mother's affiliation with the Socialist party, her family friendship with DSK's daughter, the fact that his second wife was her godmother and her position as a young journalist who did not want to be identified as "the woman who had a problem with a politician" explain why she did not denounce him. Her own mother counseled against it. However, the violence of Ms. Banon's account and the fact that she had so little personally to gain by making the accusation (rather the reverse) should have inspired them to look further into the story. One interesting contradiction I noted is that the American press and legal system is more solicitous in protecting the privacy of the alleged victim. They have not published her name; whereas the French press has.

As far as precedents go, most Americans are resentful that the French failed to extradite film director, Roman Polanski. Way to go France, glad you think the fact that he's a great film director and we're such Puritans who fail to "appreciate the pleasures of the flesh" excuses the fact that a 43-yr old man should have stood trial for drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13 year-old American girl.

Only one journalist I came across in yesterday's Libération suggested that there is something wrong when the entire press corp of a country knows that they cannot send female journalists alone to interview a certain politician. In the same issue of Libé, Anne Sugier, President of the International League of Women's Rights is the only person who seemed to express any sympathy for the alleged victim's dignity and status. Meanwhile, French lawyer, Matthieu Bouchier, says that the physical part of the process of being detained and charged with a crime and the prison conditions in France are very similar to those in the US. The difference is that the French are not aware of it, because the media is not allowed to show it.

Frankly I am not at all sympathetic to those who complain about the humiliation to France of showing DSK in handcuffs. Sufficient evidence compelled the New York police to detain him and investigate him for a crime in the US. There is nothing special about the way DSK is being treated, except for the degree of media interest in covering it. Maybe if this had happened to an American of similar stature in France he would have been given more special treatment. This could not happen in the US. The underpinning of the US democratic ethos is that we CANNOT show that one of the most powerful men in the world gets different treatment from a common perp charged with a sex crime (even if this is not really true, once the wealthy person's expensive legal defense kicks in). Welcome to "Law and Order SVU". Nowhere, do I see any French appreciation of a justice system where an immigrant woman with no friends who works as a hotel maid can charge a wealthy and powerful man of a crime and be taken seriously. In fact, in fact they might take a look at the special immunity they give their elected officials, and their privacy and libel laws because there are plenty of financial(not sexual!) misdeeds that occupants of France's highest elected offices seem to get away with over the years.

Meanwhile, I agree that the American legal system is too much of a media circus with judges, defense lawyers and the prosecution, displaying a rather disgusting theatricality and self-promotion. I also agree that the American press is pretty dismal in its reporting in general, with a hyper-local emphasis and that the more respectable press is chasing ratings by digging deeper and deeper down into the "People" magazine and "National Enquirer" territory.

The US public has an insatiable appetite for police and law and order television dramas, and the formula for success there depends on contrasting the high position of the suspected criminal (international banker, wealthy man, possible next president of France) with the lowly status of his victim (immigrant hotel maid, with few friends and no family in the US). The US loves to build people up, but it also loves to take them down. They are not alone in their appetite for schadenfreude. Regardless of his professional competence, long before this latest incident, Dominique Strauss-Kahn came across as a very arrogant man, with a predatory relationship towards women (even if no proven past of sexual violence - much of this would qualify as harassment), whose taste for the luxury life contrasted with his Socialist party political affiliation - he embodied "la gauche caviar" - the caviar left.

Some of this stuff just doesn't translated literally into English. My favorite lost-in-translation? "Hot rabbit" which comes from the French "chaud lapin". The more Classical allusion: satyr -- too educated a reference for everyday American idiom. Frisky animals in English? Common and low-class: "horn dog" or dated: "randy goat". Admiring French ajectival phrase "The Great Seducer". American, Clinton-years reference: "has a zipper problem". Looking at DSK's personal appearance, tempting to reflect on Kissinger's "Power is the greatest aphrodisiac!" What country does DSK wish this had happened in? Italy!

I grabbed the last copy of Le Canard Enchainé at my news-stand yesterday to see what France's premier satirical paper had to say about the Affair. Here are some sample headlines and clips: "Erection, piège a cons!"Les larmes de Sarko-codile". Cartoon on Sarko's UMP party's real reaction to the news: "We should respect a decent period of reserve (with regard to DSK news). At least until the champagne cools!" Week's featured quote: Bernard Henri-Lévy (rather pretentious media-philosopher), we have these too in the US but none of the mainstream public has heard of them. When was the last time somebody outside academia cared what Noam Chomsky had to say about current events? "Do you think for one moment I would be friends with this man if he was a sexual predator?" "Canard Enchainé" response: "Imagine that DSK's lawyer forgot to present this argument to the American judge.

A Day in the Life of Nathalie Mason-Fleury

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