Mean Mean Girls

On Friday night, I watched Primetime's report. Yes, I know it was Friday and I should have been out gallivanting, but I don't gallivant anymore. OK, maybe once in awhile, but really hardly ever these days. Too tired.

Anyway. They called this report 'Cruel Intentions', obviously trying to sort of link it to the movie of the same name to give people (people who saw that film, at least) some sort of clue as to what the report was about.

So if you haven't seen the film, you have no idea what the report was about. Maybe if you'd seen Mean Girls. Oh well. It was about how mean teenage girls are. I know this doesn't really seem like news, though, does it. If you were once a teenage girl (or boy), you know they've always been mean.. horrible even. Well take comfort... they're worse! And they're technologically savvy. Bigtime!

Oh this can't be good!

I can sit in front of my PC and find out the oddest things... like who's the biggest ho-bag, the fattest cow or any other insults and rumors that an easily amused female teen mind can manufacture about her peers. Peers that quite possibly, she's only pretending to be friends with to their face.

That's right. These days websites are made to tear down fellow students. Often detailing every exploit of their targets.. mostly made up sexual escapades, but really.. anything embarrassing would do. Camera phones are used to humiliate their peers who get perhaps a little "friendly" at parties or perhaps merely have a really bad hair day. Kids tear each other up on their blogs, threaten each other even. Many of them aren't even anonymous threats.

The mean girls don't just abuse technology to flog their peers, either. They also use it to tease boys their age or older by posting borderline pornographic photos of themselves to get attention.

It's so much worse than when I was a teenager in the 80's.

Many people will tell you that it's not, but it really is. How can it not be worse? The tools to turn the LOCAL shitstorm already existing in that little vacuum that we call high school quite literally into a GLOBAL shitstorm. Overly dramatic there? Maybe. But think about it. Say my name is Mary Smith (common name, blah blah.. just an example, ok) and someone somewhere... say... Iceland, for some reason does a search for some girl he just met with the same name. I assume he'd be able to figure out, based on details that I'm not HIS Mary Smith, but if there's a website out there smearing me because some guy liked me and not the girl who created the web site about me... Mr. Iceland will read all about the time that I had sex with various farm animals.

I'll never meet or hear from Mr. Iceland, so fine.. but say a prospective employer googles Mary Smith...

Yeah.. not good. One assumes Mr. Employer can smell bullshit even through a PC screen, but still. It's bad, m'kay.

I got picked on to a degree, but it never got to me overmuch. I mostly had to deal with rumors about me and I figured that anyone in school who truly cared about me would laugh their asses off KNOWING anything bad they heard about me was untrue. I quite literally was one of those girls who didn't give a crap what people thought about her. Having said that, it does wear on the nerves after 5 years of stories.

One of the sections in the report featured was that of a teenage boy who killed himself after a teen girl pretended to like him only to turn around and humiliate him later on. He'd also had prodding to kill himself from a then anonymous e-mail pal as well.

The teen girl was interviewed as well and was even referred to as remorseful a bunch of times, but... well, maybe *I* am just a Mean Girl, but I didn't see any real remorse from this lip-glossed, mostly smiling little turd. To me, if you're truly sorry, truly upset that someone killed themselves in LARGE part due to things YOU did to them... then sorry. You can't sit there all smiles when being interviewed about it (which she did).

Primetime, along with experts (sociology experts) did a Role-Playing Experiment with a dozen 13-17 yr old girls by letting them join a chat room with other kids (also part of the "test"/study, who were slightly older and referred to as "the popular kids") and watched/listened in horror as the 13-17 yr old terrors made sure the online conversations turn nasty, insulting, extremely personal and quite sexual (these are 13 yr olds, keep in mind) almost immediately.

When later asked why they acted the way they had, most of the mean girls shrugged it off... trying to make it seem as if they weren't being truly disgusting to the older group of girls whilst vying for the older boys attention.

At one point, the older girls were so shocked and disgusted that they actually had the adults send one of the mean teen girls into them in person so they could ask her what the hell was up because she was really sticking out and excelling in meanness. Probably scared out of her tree, the little mean girl denied everything. However, the TV screen flashed up every bit of text that the older girls called her on the carpet about. Still.. she denied it all.

What did this report tell me?

These little chicks KNOW how they act & the horrible things they do to eacother & say about each other are just plain wrong, however, they just don't really care.