06/12/02

Devil in the Daughter

Chloe Hooper

Sydney Morning Herald

The girl-on-girl bullying from my schooldays, all acid glances and hot-headed notes in bubble writing, now seems positively remedial. At the time, however, I recall being extremely impressed by a peer who'd happened upon this old standard: Girl A is locked in the classroom's stationery cupboard; Girl B is invited into the room for a frank discussion about her schoolmate-in-hiding. Unfortunately, though, a problem emerged. Due to the cupboard being so small, only the very thin or contortionistic could satisfactorily be ripped apart. In the end, the system was abandoned as undemocratic.

It's a neat trick, recasting the hench-girls as incompetents, then bathing old miseries in the warm glow of farce and thanks to two new American books it's easier than ever. Both Odd Girl Out, by Rachel Simmons, and Queen Bees and Wannabes, by Rosalind Wiseman, include case studies so rich in adolescent humiliation they seem to bear the mark of a scriptwriter. Forget your old, amateurish stunts. These books detail techniques at the forefront of bullying and can be read as manuals for today's schoolgirl hoping to practise in the parlance of the experts alternative aggression.

Consider the sheer intricacy of the following plot's sadism: a Queen Bee comes to school devastated. She tells a Devoted Sidekick that over the weekend her mother has passed away. This sympathetic girl whose popularity is slipping spends her day tending to the bereaved: she organises condolences; speaks to teachers who've yet to hear the news; and tries, at any opportunity, to offer comfort; "I thought, 'She finally needs me' ... I was so excited." At the end of the day, the faux orphan surrounds her victim with a large group, revealing that the whole school has known of the "joke" ... she's been, as it were, sucked in.

Much has been made of the atmosphere behind the veil at girls' schools, thick with unspoken jealousies and resentments. "So many have suffered quietly and tried to forget," claims Simmons, whose style tends towards the polemic. "It's time to break the silence." Ironically, she is reticent to name names, viewing girl-bullies as "good people who'd done bad things". Wiseman, however, feels free to point the finger. Queen Bees and Wannabes, subtitled, Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends & Other Realities of Adolescence is, by its own definition, an excruciating read. This is not to diminish Wiseman's skill at deconstructing the make-up of the teenage court in all its Byzantine detail. (Opening her handbook was like being kidnapped and taken to a dark-hearted land, where I soon realised unfortunately I spoke the language fluently.)

After the entangled roles of Queen Bee and Victim have been assigned, the other parts up for grabs include: the Queen Bee's offsider "she lies for the Queen Bee," says a damning eighth-grade informant, "but she isn't as pretty as the Queen Bee"; the wannabe not the most coveted role, but apparently the most common; and the floater, a girl who seems to meet the threshold requirements of different cliques, then plays her own game on the side. The casting is not necessarily inflexible. At some girls' schools, students are together for so long their fortunes take manifold turns. I remember strong starters who found themselves, after a seemingly minor offence forgetting to shun choir, remaining obsessed with horses demoted forever. Others, who'd been kicked around for years, sometimes rose from the ashes with a newfound megalomania.

In both of the writers' models, the Queen Bee is conceived as the most beautiful, charismatic and manipulative girl in the pack. They were mesmerising for their lightness and secret knowledge of alchemy; in other words, a certain gold-plated vacancy. The following, slightly elliptical testimony from a ninth-grade princess, in Odd Girl Out, suggests this quality was actually unblinkered narcissism:

"I think that being perfect was [my] way. You have to go up [in status]. You don't even look. Your peripheral vision is you don't even care about the people next to you because you have to be better than them ... In some ways you know people are looking at you. And you're kind of like a show for people to see. You know when you walk down the hall that people are like, 'Oh, she's cool.' But you don't realise they're like, 'Oh, and she's a bitch, too' ... You should know it, but you don't know it because it's a normal thing to do and if you don't do it you're out of there."

If you were struck by the quote's reflective tone, note that the speaker had just been dethroned in a brutal coup. Looking back, in an environment where meanness was a sign of intelligence, the queen-makers were often more interesting than the queens. For most of my school days I regarded these girls with a kind of petrified awe. Their reign of terror reached its peak in year 9, when one of them organised for all of her classmates to sit through the lesson of a particularly highly-strung teacher, humming; eventually the teacher went on leave, having had a nervous breakdown.

In Odd Girl Out, subtitled The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, Simmons suggests that clique assaults find their most skilful practitioners in middle-class white girls. This demographic learns early that overt aggression is frowned upon: to be feminine is to be demure, modest and that strangely bland effect nice. Anger and competition therefore find expression in extraordinarily sophisticated ways. When one considers girls inhabit a world of shifting alliances; gossip and rumour spreading as a form of "border protection"; and sudden, painful "clique expulsions", it does raise the question: why aren't there more women in politics? The musings of Nikki, an American eighth-grader, show the pollster's warped pragmatism a snap election could be called at any time, and morality is a numbers game:

"If I'm mad at someone, it's just a lot easier to tell everyone else and turn them against the person because then I'm the one who's right. If you just tell the person, one-on-one, then the two of you are out there to be judged by the whole grade, and you can't know if you are going to be the one who's considered right by the others."

Joining a clique, it turns out, can be like joining a political party. It offers protection and, perhaps, a sense of belonging, but one must adhere to party rules, which can be fantastically bureaucratic. The following explanation of a group's selection process, included in Queen Bees and Wannabes, demonstrates a chilling appreciation of red tape:

"If you want to invite someone to lunch [from outside the group] you have to formally invite them and the group has to vote on it. We do this because it's like buying a shirt without your friends telling you whether you look good in it or not. You may like someone, but you could be wrong. If three or more people in the group really like her, we offer the girl an extended invitation for a whole week. That's a trial period it's like getting a dog at the pound and trying her out before you get her a licence and call her Fluffy."

There's a terrible irony in girls' schools trying to engender confidence and success skills in their students, who, behind the scenes, are actually policing each other; using ever more ingenious forms of torture to make sure no one thinks she's smarter, or prettier, or more talented than any of her friends. There can be an inherent socialism among girls, with all the system's darkest intonations. They regulate and imitate what each other wears; the types of food and how much they'll eat; whom they'll speak to and in what manner. By being ostracised one can actually be handed the lucky ticket: an exit pass.

Simmons, however, argues that for many women it takes years to counter the damage of bullying. Reading these books, I thought about a girl I'd barely known. We were all 14, we shared no classes, but it was plain to all she was the year group's sacrificial victim. Her name was considered unfashionable. She was teased about her hair, too frizzy. She was teased for her weight and for developing earlier than us. Her bra straps were snapped. She was teased for being slow in class, a symptom, possibly, of having been so mercilessly teased, or, rather, harassed. I still remember the force of the venom levelled at her. And how she radiated docility and misery.

I was perhaps only a step-and-a-half above her status myself. (Around this time a friend confessed she was being picked on for talking to me, and would have to sever the connection.) I was never cruel to the even less popular girl, but neither did I make any effort to be kind. Finally, she simply stopped coming to school.

My resentment at having been drawn back into this world surprised me. Such is the banality of bullying that girls' sense of guilt, at another's persecution, declines according to the number with whom blame can be shared. Perhaps I thought possession of some fine stories regarding having been bullied, would count against the charge of complicity. Actually, they made my trial more serious: apparently children who are bullied are more likely to become bullies themselves, and I started having flashbacks. I remembered, aged 13, laughing at a recently arrived Egyptian girl, who didn't know the meanings of words as basic as "cow" in my schema I was laughing because she had bad English, not because she was foreign. The racist element of much of our aggression was, however, gruesome to revisit. Even when we were all 17 it was considered somehow acceptable for the Queen Bee's thugs to bait a particular Asian student who always erupted in a weird fury, made impotent through her language difficulties. Her distress left them in fits of laughter. To defend her was not to be able to take a joke. Or to invite becoming another target of derision.

Writing all this down, it's a struggle not to change the details until I make a story I find bearable: I never laughed at anyone and all bullies' paths are lined with banana peels. Luckily, many of the episodes these books dredged up are being neutralised by time. I now only half-remember crucial details of who did what. Holding up a recollection, so as to examine it more closely, it seems to slip away.

The one carnivalesque, rageful day, when I remember schoolgirl aggression being freely sanctioned, was the sixth formers' very last. Girls took scissors to their school uniforms, outfitting themselves in rags. Then, armed with eggs and silly string and coloured hairspray, they went after anyone they could find. On my final day, I sprinted out the gates faster than I've ever run before, or will again, as a girl with an aerosol of shaving cream chased after me. I didn't know her particularly well, and beyond turning to measure our distance, I've never seen her again.

Strangely, as time passes, however, my relief diminishes. I wonder what's happened to her. I wonder what's happened to all of them. Some of my former classmates I think I keep meeting in women who bear the mark of having been a high-school princess, or a lady-in-waiting, or a courtier, or a jester, or a thug, or an untouchable. Although of course I'm fooling myself, because all my prototypes have changed revenge fantasies are redundant, kindnesses withheld made terribly invalid. Now when I meet girls from school, these women seem exotic to me, transformed completely, and I can hardly believe we were once in the same hothouse, straining for more light.