"You Still Can't Sit With Us" (Mean Girls Extended Edition)

So I figured I might as well pop back around and do the second half of the post I started like a million years ago about Mean Girls, now that several weeks have passed, and nobody is Googling it anymore. I have a person problem with not wanting to write about things that are topically relevant, so this should be way more comfortable for me now, I'm guessing.

So toward the end of Mean Girls, there's a scene where Tina Fey stands at the front of a gym full of female students, Betty Buckley style, and delivers a series of regurgitated culture-of-female-aggression critiques about how adolescent women are backstabbing, two-faced, and manipulative, and the solutions to their (our) problems is to start banding together and supporting each other more instead of being so flaky. Lots of these points are probably salient, but the way they're presented within the larger context of the narrative made me really think about the way female gender identity specifically is often presented in media like this.

As in the real world, male gender identity in Mean Girls pretty much doesn't exist. Though the egotism and stupidity of male characters is occasionally lampooned, the actively predatory characters are all women. The movie is concerned only with the action of being female. The female characters are actively female; the male characters are neutral. In fact, one of the things I didn't like about Mean Girls, from a purely formal perspective, was how dramatically unsatisfying the neutrality of the male characters was. Aaron, for example -- the movie's dumb jock love interest, who constantly waffles back and forth between Cady and her Satanic arch nemesis Regina -- was a really, really boring character. This wasn't just unsatisfying -- it became, at a certain point, problematic. I kept waiting for the movie to take Aaron to task for shifting his alliances so casually, but he just stayed bland and innocuous throughout the whole movie, despite how inherently provocative his character arc was.

Mean Girls acts like it's interested in destroying the concept of constructed, "false" gender. It sees young women's performance of femininity as a shallow way of volleying for social power and distinction, not as a "real" expression of anything. Through its condemnatory dissection of female culture, Mean Girls seemed to be suggesting that traditional gender expression is a dangerous and ugly thing, and that the way women act, think, and see the world as a result of being socialized as women, is the best example of how horrible traditional gender identification can be. This is something that a lot of movies, books, and TV shows are guilty of, even (and sometimes especially) when they are made for a female audience. The concept of "female culture" is almost exclusively negative, something to be feared and avoided, or at least approached with caution (or occasionally, in more affectionate treatments, to be laughed at). When it's not horrible or farcical, it's usually because the "culture" the film or TV show describes is highly non-traditional, or is the result of some sort of self-conscious reclamation.

I'm not suggesting the passive aggressive posturing that Mean Girls depicts isn't real, or that it shouldn't be examined or critiqued. What I am suggesting, though, is that explorations of these problems are almost never as multi-faceted as they deserve to be. Because they're not more comprehensive, more studied, or more sincere, they almost always reveal things they didn't mean to reveal, and unintentionally obscure other facets of their subject matter that could have easily been treated with more resonance and insight.