“It’s starting,” I tell my mom friends when they ask how my daughter is enjoying kindergarten. “She loves it,” I say. “But it’s starting.”
No one asks what “it” is. Most women automatically know what I mean. It’s the cattiness that exists between girls, even the sweetest girls, even maybe your girl. It’s the competition that happens between girls to get the queen-bee girl’s attention and it’s the ability of girls to coalesce and viciously tear down those who don’t conform to their standards.
It was interesting seeing this kindergarten dynamic play out on the big stage last week as both Gloria Steinem and Madeline Albright drew a bright line around their clique and said you must wear pink on Wednesdays, or support Hillary, anyway, to fit in.
First Steinem, allegedly a lifelong feminist, threw all her feminist ideals out the nearest window and said that the only reason young women might support Bernie Sanders is because they want to impress the boys.
The dismissal of women’s opinions for the crime of not fitting in with the standard cool-crowd feminism — and doing so by diminishing the experience and opinions of the women who dare disagree with them — is a classic Mean Girl trope. That feminists use it against other women is disappointing, but most kindergartners will probably not be surprised by it.
The idea that women gravitate to where the men are but men don’t do the same is, of course, ridiculous.
Men join all kinds of activities because women might be involved. Many a political campaign has seen men volunteer as a way to meet women.
And a few years ago, a male friend of mine and his male roommate joined the Park Slope Food Co-op after being told at the orientation meeting that there was an “active dating scene” between members. That’s usually about all men need to hear to get involved in something: Women might be there.
But no one says that men support Hillary because women do. That would be absurd — and the reverse is, too.
Next, Albright further closed girl-rank around Hillary by saying there was a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. Carly Fiorina, of course, doesn’t get that kind of “help” from the women of Clintonland because on the playground of life, she played with the wrong kids for too long and now can never be “in” with the it-girls ever again.
University of Ottawa psychology professor Tracy Vaillancourt and her Ph.D. student Aanchal Sharma published a 2013 study in the journal Aggressive Behavior that showed that women were, well, bitchier toward other women when they were around their friends. They viciously shut down potential threats to their power and were more likely to engage in “indirect aggression.”
That’s exactly what happens between girls at school — and it’s what Steinem and Albright engaged in on Hillary’s behalf.
“You tend to do it such that you won’t be detected,” Vaillancourt explained to The Atlantic. “Or you make an excuse for your behavior, like, ‘I was only joking.’”
That indirect aggression is a bullying tactic and Hillary shouldn’t let it be used in her name. Of course, the queen bee usually doesn’t step in to stop her lackeys from attacking people on her behalf. It’s usually up to outsiders, parents or, in this case, voters to say that they won’t stand for that kind of behavior.
There’s a lot of positive female behavior that we should reinforce and hope our daughters emulate. But part of what we have to teach them is to be free-thinking even in the face of pressure from their peers or their elders.
In our lessons to them about kindness, we should also encourage boldness and independence so that they can stand up to the mean girls they come across. And we have to teach them to accept differences in other people, too, lest they end up old and guilting young women into a toxic conformity.