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Jessica Bennett
By Jessica Bennett
Ms. Bennett is a contributing editor in Opinion covering personalities and politics. She spent much of last year following a group of eighth-grade girls.
For a certain breed of millennial like me, Tina Fey’s “Mean Girls” was gospel — a movie turned cultural phenomenon that put names and labels to the kind of bullying that any woman who’d been to middle or high school would recognize. The beauty of the film was that it got at just how vicious, but coded, the dynamics among girls could be: full of slights so subtle and underhanded that they had eluded social scientists for decades. For a long time, researchers just thought girls didn’t bully as much as boys.
Then in the early aughts, a handful of books brought the concept of girls’ “relational aggression” into the mainstream. And that kind of aggression, it turned out — with its manipulations and exclusions and rumor-spreading and death stares from across the lunchroom — also happened to make for great comedy: “Mean Girls,” in fact, drew on one of those books, “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” for inspiration.
But much has changed in the 20 years since the original “Mean Girls" movie came out. Adults and teenagers alike are more aware of the importance of inclusivity and more attuned to the seriousness of subjects that used to be treated as fodder for jokes. So when Ms. Fey returned last month with her musical movie “Mean Girls” — her latest twist on the original, starring Reneé Rapp — it was inevitable there would be some changes.
For starters, the social hierarchy. The cliques at North Shore High still include the theater kids and the Plastics, but they are no longer segmented by race. And, predictably, the sexual misconduct: Coach Carr, the P.E. teacher now played by Jon Hamm, is most definitely not making out with any students. Gone are the jokes about Janis Ian being a lesbian — because “even Regina would know what wouldn’t fly,” Ms. Fey said in an interview, speaking of her infamous Queen Bee, Regina George. Instead, the beloved goth misfit, whose sexuality was ambiguous in the original (she reveals at the end that she’s Lebanese, which she may in fact be, but that word has also long been code for “lesbian”) is now out as queer.
As the trailer announcing the new film put it, “This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” and indeed, it isn’t. Regina no longer uses the R-word, nor calls her friend “dyslexic”; her followers are no longer derided as an “army of skanks.” Even the infamous Burn Book is now nicer — or, if not exactly nicer, at least avoids particular rhetorical land mines: “fugly slut” is now “fugly cow.” Dawn Schweitzer, once a “fat virgin,” is now a “horny shrimp.” (What is a horny shrimp? Don’t ask me. I spent way too much time asking teenagers if there was some joke I was missing.)
This is meant to be reflective of the real world, of course, where ostensibly we no longer say these words, where we accept all body types (yeah, right) and have learned to be attentive to people’s feelings, differences and “residual trauma,” as Regina says in the new film. And it sort of is: As someone who has spent a lot of time around teenage girls recently, it’s true that they don’t use labels like “nastiest skank” to describe one another, as Regina — and my friends and I — used to.
But what the movie misses, by simply stripping out the nastiest language, is a chance to really update itself — to fully reflect on girl world in 2024. Because if the hallmarks of “relational aggression” are things like cutting friends out, spreading rumors or exclusion, today’s technology has created innumerable new ways to enact that adolescent torture. The movie doesn’t ignore the internet — when Regina falls on her face in the talent show she goes viral, sparking a TikTok challenge — but it doesn’t fully capture the way it functions among real teenagers.
So what does this stealth meanness 2.0 actually look like? Well, some of it would be recognizable to earlier generations. A middle schooler in Washington state told me there’s a group called The Crops at her school — not quite as mean as the Plastics, but still judgmental, and in crop tops. But Plasticlike behavior is no longer just whispers in the cafeteria or analog Burn Books, but also anonymous “tea accounts” on platforms like Instagram — like tabloid blind items, but for school gossip.
And that societal shift to new, more inclusive language? It can be weaponized — a tactic familiar to anyone who has observed the rise of the term “toxic.” One teenager I spoke with last year, in Colorado, told me she’d been publicly called out by a friend on Snapchat for “fat shaming” — which is arguably worse, at her school, than actually being called fat. She claimed she hadn’t done it, but it almost didn’t matter — she didn’t have Snapchat (her parents wouldn’t let her), so there was no way she could defend herself.
But other forms of bullying have gotten even more subtle — hard for adults to monitor, even harder for would-be researchers to measure and yes, challenging to capture on film.
Passive aggression isn’t just “No offense, but” before delivering a stinging insult. It’s a soft block (blocking, then unblocking, on social media, so that the person no longer follows you and then wonders why) for just a hint that you’re mad, or removing someone from a “close friends” group on Instagram, so that they can no longer view your Stories — but without ever telling them, so they are left to wonder what happened.
People get dropped from group chats or are abandoned as new ones are started. Stealth meanness can be as covert as tagging someone in an unflattering photo or as clever as posting a celebratory birthday post for your bestie — but one that’s purposely less effusive than the one you posted for your other friend.
“The phones make everything more exclusive,” said Poppy, 13, of New York. “When people leave others ‘on read’ even for a little” — she’s talking about having a text sit unanswered — “it can hurt the other person’s feelings even if that’s not the intention.”
Hearing about the unwritten rules of today’s cafeteria dynamics made me almost pine for the simplicity of “you can’t sit with us.” A teenager in Michigan told me she unfollowed a classmate on Instagram because the girl had “liked” what she posted too quickly. It was “too thirsty,” she said. Another teenager, in Maryland, explained how a former friend would use their text chats as a way to constantly shift from hot to cold — acting friendly at school, then leaving her texts unanswered, then texting all night in minute-to-minute flurries, then ghosting her for days on end, leaving her on her phone and in her feelings, ruminating (something girls are more prone to) on the unanswered messages.
Emily Weinstein, a social scientist at Harvard who studies how technology is shaping adolescents’ lives, notes that it’s the ambiguity that can make this kind of aggression so much more insidious, leading to a “perpetual state of second and third guessing.”
Perhaps what’s even more disturbing is how so many of the design features on our devices seem to amplify this sort of self-doubt. “Read” receipts can elevate the sense of being left hanging; screenshots or message histories can ensure no social slip-up — or slight — is ever forgotten. Platforms like Instagram enable users to create subgroups that receive different content, prompting a kind of litany of cliquish secondary audiences.
It’s worth noting that such behavior is by no means limited to girls, or even to teens; we grown-ups aren’t much better. For teenagers, though, there’s a developmental aspect to it, too. They’re in a stage of growth where they are loosening their ties at home and strengthening their peer groups, said Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist — and part of that process can involve behavior meant to distinguish between in-groups and out-groups.
Still, there’s something a bit strange about updating a classic movie by pretending the world has just gotten nicer while not acknowledging the ways it’s also gotten nastier. The original “Mean Girls” was meaningful precisely because it was like seeing our own lives, and the confusing rules and pressures that come along with being a girl, in movie-comedy form — the sort of fiction that can make the challenges of being a real-world teenager a little easier to face and to laugh at. But this? This feels like a sanitized fantasy.
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Jessica Bennett is a contributing editor in the Opinion section of The Times. She teaches journalism at New York University and is the author of “Feminist Fight Club” and “This Is 18.” @jessicabennett • Facebook
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