Girl World Had a Lot of Rules - by Aisling Walsh
My high school experience is bookended by two movies, Clueless (1995) and Mean Girls (2004), both heavy hitters in the teen movie genre. While Clueless has always been my favourite of the two, Mean Girls seems to have usurped its place as the most iconic, most beloved, most quotable and most memeable high school movie ever made. If Clueless, however, presented a rose-tinted (albeit satirical) portrayal of the possibilities for friendship and romance in high school, Mean Girls was exactly the catharsis I needed after six years of social misery.
Mean Girls is a teen comedy directed by Mark Waters, screenplay by Tina Fey and is based on Rosalind Wiseman’s 2002 book ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes.’ Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) is a junior high school student recently returned from an unnamed African country where her parents worked for years as research zoologists. Having always been homeschooled, she is catapulted into the world of upper-class, suburban high schoolers and has to negotiate the arbitrary rules of formal education and the complex hierarchy of cliques that dominate North Shore High. Befriended by ‘art freaks’ Janice (Lizzy Caplan) and Damien (Daniel Franzese), she also catches the attention of the reigning queen bees, ‘The Plastics’, led by Regina George (Rachel McAdams). But Cady soon discovers that being friends with The Plastics is fraught with manipulation and treachery. She, Janice and Damien hatch a plan for Cady to infiltrate The Plastics and ruin Regina George’s (Rachel McAdams) life. Cady, however, becomes more plastic than The Plastics themselves, hurting her friends and most of her junior class in the process.
Mean Girls has a classic ‘fish out of water’ premise where the outsider, Cady, is granted a privileged perspective on the absurdities of schooling, popularity and social hierarchies. Cady is very much a neurotypical girl who would have slot perfectly into high school if it were not for her unusual socialisation (a homeschooled jungle-freak) and her limited knowledge of fashion and pop-culture. Nevertheless, her lack experience of school and girl-world, as well as her failure to understand so many of the unspoken rules, codes and norms of behaviour, feels very resonant with the autistic experience.
Each time Cady pisses off one of her teachers for reasons she cannot fathom, fails to understand a joke, misreads a social interaction or fails to keep up with Regina’s bombardment of questions, is a terrifyingly accurate reflection of how it feels to negotiate the social world while autistic. You know you’re getting things wrong, though you are not quite sure how, and people would sooner sneer, make fun or chastise than explain the rules or expectations to you. You’re just supposed to get it.
If high school is a hostile and confusing environment, then girl world is even more so. The rules of the game are even less clear and the social consequences of a misstep can haunt you for the rest of your school life.
Made out with a hot-dog? That was one time!
Many autistic girls muddle through primary school, passing unnoticed because we manage to remain quiet and well behaved in a world where the rules are relatively clear to us. The transition to high school, however, in the midst of raging hormones and a whole new social setting with new people and new rules, can be overwhelming. We are no longer little girls, but teens, and are supposed to act accordingly without ever being told what that really means. Cady at least has her guides, Janice and Damien, to explain the basic functionings of the North Shore social scene.
As pupil at to a co-ed, public community school in small-town Ireland with nary a mall in sight, my high school experience was almost unrecognisable to the worlds of Cher Horowitz or Cady Heron. Our school housed it’s fair share of burn-outs, grunge kids, jocks and nerds, but cliques did not exist in the same, well defined, sense as those of North Shore or Berverly Hills High. A dull but functional uniform minimised the opportunities for the daily catwalk through the corridors and the possibility of being singled out for our poor clothing choices. (Though you could always find mean things to say about someone’s hair, or shoes, or coat or back-pack or make-up.) Even so, Mean Girls, succeeds at capturing some of the horrors of negotiating girl world in high school as an undiagnosed autistic girl.
Unlike Cady, I was never forced to eat my lunch in the bathroom. But for my first whole year of secondary school I did power-walk the 15 minutes it took to get home, so I could wolf down cup of tea with a banana or cereal or toast in ten minutes, before walking the 15 minutes back to school, arriving just in time for the 45 minute bell. And so I avoided, as much as possible, the pressure of finding someone to talk to for the seemingly endless lunch time.
I did eventually make friends, but not before attracting the attention of the closest thing we had to the Queen Bees in my year: the basketball girls. They took an almost instant dislike to me and engaged in low intensity bullying, mostly consisting of shady comments and digs about my clothes, my hair, my braces or my nerdish tendencies, over the six years we spent together. In some ways I think my autism helped shield me from the worst of their disdain, as I was often simply oblivious, at least in the moment, to their bitchy remarks, or subtle digs. A lot of the time these were so indirect I wouldn’t understand their implication until hours, days or even weeks later.
I’ve no doubt this situation could have escalated if I had been truly alone. But I was lucky to find my own a little band of nerds, geeks and art freaks, who kept me going through the best of times and the worst of times.
As a fairly androgenous young teen who always preferred comfort over fashion, Cady’s journey from cords and flannel shirts to mini-skits, crop tops and increasingly bad make-up, was also, unfortunately, all too relatable.
With speculations over my gender and sexuality used so often to shame me, by classmates and strangers, I made sporadic attempts to perform more acceptable femininity. These usually ended in failure. Like the year I wore platforms and a skirt that was literally shrinking with every wash (I discovered half-way through the year it was dry clean only) and would regularly fall over because I could barely walk:
Or when I attempted to use make up that made me look more like a drag queen than anything else and was told as much by my classmates. Or when I wore a bikini to be told I was both fat and ugly. Or all those years I dressed as scary or weird, instead of sexy, for Halloween. These incidents usually prompted a swift retreat to a make-up free face and my gender-neutral baggy tracksuits or grunge-wear that hid any hint of my changing body. I spent my teenage years oscillating between the desperation to be noticed and accepted and also wanting simply to disappear.
If being a woman is hard, then being a teenage girl is hell. The rigid conformity to gender norms which I never fully understood, much less accepted, exerted by the world and policed by your peers, can be suffocating. The consequences of nonconformity, intentional or otherwise, often consist of bullying and social exclusion, which at 15 or 16 can feel inescapable.
As her popularity skyrockets, Cady’s confidence in her abilities to infiltrate and even manipulate The Plastics also grows. She comes to believe she has cracked the codes of ‘girl world’ and that she controls everyone around her. What she does not realise is that she remains blinded to many of the subtleties of their interactions, power dynamics and the social hierarchies that govern the stability of her world. Swept along in her performance of hyper-femininity, popularity and her mission to destroy Regina George, she loses herself. She forgets she is not only good at, but likes maths, and ignores her real friends as she is consumed by the toxicity of The Plastics.
I have lost myself many times in trying to be adopt a ‘cool girl’ (never quite the popular girl) persona, letting myself get swept along with the crowd and engaging in problematic, or even harmful behaviour, I’m certainly not proud of. But just like Cady, I never quite succeeded in getting this right, never fully understood the rules and, most importantly, the limits of acceptability in any clique. In my failure to see and comprehend all those shades of grey, I wonder if the harm I caused was worse? I never tired to make anyone gain weight, ruin their friendships, steal their boyfriends nor push them front of a bus, but there was lots of bitchiness, talking behind peoples’ backs, finding ways to exclude people or make them feel small. I knew how to do all these things because they were done to me, I was bullied and I bullied back, trying to feel better about myself all the while masking a debilitating insecurity and lack of self-esteem.
Cady carefully calculated plot spins out of control, with consequences she never imagined. Regina George may be a lot of things, but she hardly deserves a spinal cord injury. Cady ends up alienating everyone around her: Janice and Damien, her teachers, her parents and her whole junior class. The pain of realising she has gone too far, said and done the wrong things, hurt people and made people hate her, is all too real.
But Cady gladly takes her rather sizeable serving of humble pie and tries her best to repair the damage she has done. In this world at least, she is forgiven and allowed to move on and finish high school in relative peace.
Ultimately, Mean Girls is meant to be a lesson in sorority and why girls should stick together rather than tear each other down. How it communicates that message, however, is not without problems.
It’s still hilarious, still infinitely quotable and Damien is still a queer icon (I stan!).
But, 20 years later, these are all tempered by the repeated slut shaming, body shaming, homo/lesbo-phobia, problematic racial tropes, ableism, liberal use of the ‘R’ word and making a sexual predator, Coach Carr, into a joke (we had one of those at our school too, yay…)!
I really only explore the movies covered in AutCasts through a neurodivergent lens, focusing on how the characterisation or plot may reflect some aspect of the autistic experience. For a more complete intersectional analysis of of all the ways Mean Girls fails in its gender and racial politics as well as all the reasons we can still enjoy it, I highly recommend checking out these episodes of This Ends at Prom, The Bechdel Cast and Black Girl Film Club.
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