I have been watching Kid 2's first few weeks in high school with interest. She's gone from a tiny, co-ed primary school, 5 minutes walk from our front door, to an inner city girls' school with 100 girls in her year (there were 9 in her last year of primary).
So far, it's been pretty good. She's loving it, she's made lots of friends, and the school has worked very hard to make us, as a family, feel like part of a community.
A friend asked me the other day whether I'd thought twice about sending Kid 2 to an all girls' school. I said that no, honestly, I hadn't. 'But what about the bitchiness?' the friend asked. Well, that got me thinking.
Yes, there have been moments. One day a couple of weeks ago she came home and said, 'Mum, J told me she 'got' [a bit like getting a puppy?] a boyfriend over the weekend and then she that I'll never get a boyfriend.' 'Oh', I said. 'That's a rather silly thing to say - what did you say back?'. 'I told her that wasn't very nice and then I didn't speak to her until lunch', said Miss, apparently unfazed.
When I recounted this story to a friend, she laughed and said 'Oh, I'm glad I've only got boys, girls are so horrible'. I was about to agree, but then I stopped myself. I'm pretty sure that my high school experience was a fairly standard one - I had friends, sometimes we fell out, sometimes people said nasty things, and sometimes feelings got hurt. But I honestly can't remember any seriously awful behaviour.
So why do we say this? Once I started thinking about this, I kept seeing it everywhere - the idea that teenage girls are unkind, even cruel, and that it's simply innate and we should just shrug and let them get on with it. I don't buy it. Yes, adolescence is a rough time for everyone, male or female, and working yourself out as a person - especially in relation to other people - can be tricky. No one is kind all the time. But casual accepting or assuming that teenage girls are necessarily 'bitchy' just normalises behaviour that is pretty much unacceptable in any other context. It's also a cop-out as a parent to say 'oh, they're just like that'.
Well, that's what I think, anyway ... Ask me again in a few years, I guess.
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5 comments:
Good for you. I don't think anybody should ever say girls are worse than boys. It really really depends on the individual, right?
I agree. Much more useful to validate your daughter's common-sense response that her friend's response wasn't very nice.
But then she might like to know how we project our anxieties on to others. Her friend has probably picked up some idea that much of her worth depends on having a boyfriend, and she's probably thought she might not ever have one. Your daughter's lucky enough to have a different context. . . .I think girls may often resort to what seems bitchy behaviour because some of the social expectations of them are pretty tough and they aren't often given skills to decipher their responses to those. Your daughter's really lucky to have you! And her friend may benefit from that good luck as well.
OWW, I think what riles me more than just the 'boys aren't as nasty as girls' idea is the expectation that girls behave in a competitive and unkind way and that's just the way it is.
Mater, you're right about the expectations placed on girls too and how they (we) project these onto others. I'm hoping Kid 2 can maintain her commonsense attitude, but I'm guessing there are going to be some tricky years ahead.
I work as a teacher in a public high school and let me tell you there are many girls that are really, really hurtful to each other. i could tell you stories that would pain you. Seems to me your daughter has good self esteem and will be allright.
Thanks for your comment, bb. I do realise that there can be truly dreadful bullying in schools - I think what bothers me is the assumption that it's 'normal' for girls to be nasty. The flipside is the tendency - which I've seen in schools - to call very minor silly incidents 'bullying', which can obfuscate the real, systematic bullying that is actually happening elsewhere ...
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