"Mean Girls" Stereotypes
A Rant by Mila
I recently watched “Mean Girls” (late to the party, I know) because I’d heard it referenced a lot and I thought it would be, if not a good movie, an entertaining and comedic one. It certainly had its moments, but honestly, it was more cringe-worthy than funny to me. Of course, my opinion is a 2022 perspective on a 2004 movie, but I am still confused at how the blatant stereotypes and harmful ideologies in that movie slipped by everyone else. They were so prevalent that the movie was hard to enjoy, honestly. So, here’s this week’s article: A Rant About Mean Girls (coming from the person who’s already trashed High School Musical)!
For those of you who haven’t watched this movie, it’s basically about a girl named Cady who’s just moved to a city in America from Africa, where she was homeschooled. She knows nothing about how American high school works, and the entire movie is centered around her interactions with other cliques at school, primarily the ‘Plastics’, the mean girls that the title of the movie is referring to. The story follows her journey in and out of that clique. That’s all I’ll say so I can avoid spoilers - if you’re interested in this article but don’t want to watch it, read the summary of the movie online somewhere.
Let’s go into stereotypes. Honestly, the biggest thing that angered me about this movie wasn’t even the gender stereotypes and depictions, despite the fact that the movie is called ‘Mean Girls’. That should say something about how bad every marginalized-group portrayal in the movie is. The worst part of the movie, for me, honestly, was probably the racial stereotypes.
Here’s a list of the race-related issues:
One of the main plot points of this movie is that our protagonist, Cady, has been homeschooled her entire life and has no experience with normal public school at all. Why? Oh, she lived in Africa. First of all, she has an American style, an American accent, and looks like she’s lived in suburban towns her entire life. Second of all, the way she talks about Africa is just so cringeworthy. She likens girls fighting around her to ‘animals at the watering hole’ (which are definitely not the only thing in Africa, not even close, definitely not something a ‘typical city girl’ like her would see around a lot). The movie shows a reductive and dehumanizing view of Africa, reducing an entire diverse continent to descriptions given by Cady that are more apt to a two-week savannah trip. Not to mention, when Cady sawa black girl, she immediately assumed that she was from Africa. It came off as super weird, and it was just completely looked over after the obligatory ‘comedic effect’ pause. How was that okay in any way?
Around the beginning of the movie, when Cady finds herself her first two friends (outcasts named Janis and Damian) they give her the ‘typical high school lecture’ about where to sit and who to sit with. This is where the racial problem begins. One of the tables is labeled “Hot Aggressive Black Girls,” naturally leading to the stereotype that all Black women are hot and aggressive, which is obviously not true - plus, it’s a completely unnecessary distinction, the table being made up of ‘hot aggressive girls’ would have been enough. I guess the stereotype used to be more prevalent, but it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
The saga continues: two of the tables are “Asian Nerds” and “Cool Asians”. Not only is this implying that Asians are split up between cool and uncool in such a polarizing way, it implies that they’re a class of their own, to stay separate and never interact with any other races at school. This doesn’t make any sense to me, honestly, and it just seems like a joke that aged horribly. I don’t even see how this would have been appropriate in 2004! This is reinforced later, when there’s a giant girl-wide fight over the contents of a “Burn Book” that contains insults about every girl in school. The two Vietnamese girls who were part of the brawl fought and yelled insults like ‘sl*t’ at SOLELY each other - in Vietnamese. Why are they using Vietnamese at an American school where they are required to know and use English, and why didn’t they fight literally anyone else? What is this, ‘Asian Isolation Syndrome’?
I want to mention that literally all of the ‘Plastics’ and almost everyone else of significance in the movie is white. Janis, Cady’s outcast friend, is the only positively-presented racial representation I can think of, as a Puerto Rican.
There’s one more significant stereotype that I can think of - it pissed me off the most out of everything else I write in this article. That’s ‘Kevin Gnapoor,’ the only Indian character in the show. I hated him from the start - and everyone else did, too. He’s the captain of the Mathletes (ah, look, the ‘Indians are good at math’ stereotype makes a comeback!) and he’s also a fairly sexist idiot who frequently makes sexual jokes. These are all stereotypes Indians, primarily men, have been slapped with - and even in other articles calling out Mean Girls, I haven’t really seen this mentioned anywhere. It pissed me off quite a lot.
Okay! Moving on to gender stereotypes! Yay.
I want to start by mentioning that the entire PREMISE of this movie is centered around ‘Mean Girls’. Let’s talk a little bit about the male representation in this movie. There’s Aaron, Cady’s love interest. He’s originally portrayed as a stereotypical jock, but he is actually the person to snap Cady out of her ‘Plastics’ persona, telling her that she’s no better than the ‘mean girls.’ He subverts male gender roles, and I’m glad for it. However, the girls are not so lucky. Despite boys/men being just as capable of the kind of cruel, backstabbing behavior that is portrayed in the movie as girls/women are, only girls are depicted in those roles and boys seem to have no connection to any of it. Honestly, I’m sure this kind of cruelty and exclusion happens just as much in male circles as in female ones - it’s just overlooked more because people believe that men don’t usually exhibit this kind of behavior. I mean, I knew what I was getting into, the title is literally “Mean Girls,” but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Let’s talk about sl*t-shaming. There’s SO MUCH of this going on in this movie. Girls calling each other that and wh*res constantly, throwing those words around like we’d throw around b*tch. Two reasons this is bad: first of all, these girls were putting each other down for men constantly. That’s the core of these words, right? “Oh, you’ve dealt with a lot of men.” “Oh, I’m better for men because I’m not [this].” It is made fun of in a way, occasionally, but it just wasn’t enough. You’d be hard-pressed to find five consecutive minutes of that movie in which some girl did not call another girl a sl*t. It really sucks as a model for young girls. And of course, the second reason this is bad is sl*t-shaming in general. Everyone has the right to make decisions about their own bodies and what they want for themselves, and this shaming is not okay in any way. These words are not valid insults, they don’t make sense as insults at all, and portraying them in that way… not a great message to send. Of course, things were a little different in 2004, but those scenes definitely didn’t age well.
There’s also an inordinate obsession with being ‘pretty’ in this movie. In the infamous montage of lunch groups at the movie’s beginning, there’s a quick once-over of ‘girls who eat their feelings,’ presumably plus-size girls who seemed to eat a lot of junk food. Regina (one of the main Plastics) talked continuously about ‘wanting to lose three pounds,’ and that was actually one of the main tactics Cady used to undermine her - feed her 3000-calorie bars so she’d put on weight. Regina’s ‘hot bod’ was actually listed by Cady as one of the reasons she was so popular and so many people liked/feared her. Everyone in the movie who wasn’t a complete nerd/outcast was obsessed with their hair, their makeup, their appearance, all of that. Cady became obsessed with these things as well after spending long enough with the Plastics. Look, all of this is to be expected, given the topic of this movie, but really, these portrayals were very exaggerated and no one in real-life high school cares enough about their appearance to worry about it on the scale of the Plastics.
I have a question to do with my above topic. Why, in this movie, is female prettiness inversely proportional to their intelligence? The more Cady falls into the trap of the Plastics, the less bright she gets and the worse she does at school and math. Pretty girls are airheads (see the Plastic Karen) and smart girls (and smart boys for that matter) are physically unattractive, awkward and dorky. See the problem here? The movie doesn’t even address this, since Cady just ends up ‘realizing’ that intelligence matters more than physical attractiveness. (They’re both on completely different scales, they can’t be measured against each other, plus you CAN worry about both or neither depending on who you are and what you want.)
Let’s talk about sexuality. *jazz hands*
Meet Damian, our “too gay to function” token LGBTQ+ character. He’s portrayed as - guess what? - a single, nerdy, socially awkward only-friends-with-girls flamboyant pink-wearing designer-brand-loving guy. Honestly, I wouldn’t even call him a ‘token character’ because his gayness was really represented horribly. It feels like they just wanted a character for Cady to be friends with, but realized that he didn’t really have any stereotypes attached to him yet, so just ‘let’s make him gay!’ Simple solution. Most gay people don’t act like that. There’s no blueprint for being gay or having any identity in the queer community. You like what you like, act like what you want to act like. Whether you like pink or blue or lime green or any other color, whether you wear designer brands or put on the first thing in your closet, whether you are nerdy and awkward or confident and cool or anything in between, your identity is your identity and it doesn’t change your personality (or change WITH it). Damian’s ‘gayness’ really got flanderized in the movie.
Not only that, but homophobia also comes into play in Mean Girls! Janis, Cady’s first friend along with Damian, is frequently called a ‘lesbo’ as an insult by the Plastics - that’s what’s written about her in the insult-filled ‘Burn Book,’ and that’s a rumor that Regina (queen bee Plastic) spread about her before Cady moved to town. The problem here is that, after Janis vents out her frustrations with Regina for tarnishing her reputation, the rumor is completely ignored. In essence, ‘lesbo’ is treated as an insult parallel to calling someone a ‘sl*t’ or even a slur of some kind. It implies that being lesbian is undesirable, just like sl*t-shaming indicates that promiscuity is a bad thing. I’m sure it’s obvious why exactly that’s problematic.
Anyway, that’s all I have for today. I’ve already written a whole essay for this article, so I’ll keep my closing remarks short. Thanks for listening to my stereotype TED talk, and I hope you enjoyed it!