Getting Discomfortable with Mean Girls: Part 2

This week’s podcast is actually a video! You can still listen to the podcast version if you prefer, or you can watch the video version below (or here) complete with footage ripped from the classic teen comedy, Mean Girls (2004).

Watch Part 1 here.

In Part 2, Cady develops a hopeless crush on Aaron Samuels, the ex-boyfriend of her frenemy Regina George. Regina uses this secret to her advantage by rekindling things with Aaron in a cruel display of social dominance. With the help and encouragement of Cady’s new friend (and Regina’s ex-bff) Janice, Cady wages an all-out shame battle to take Regina down, while still pretending to be her friend. So basically it’s just high school as usual. Watch Part 2 here:

This episode looks at the use of slut-shaming as a weapon both amongst the girls themselves and the culture at large. As Halloween rolls around, the rules of what is and is not “slutty” seem to change, revealing how arbitrary and mercurial shame really is. On a regular day Cady would be shamed for dressing “slutty”, but on Halloween Cady feels shame for not dressing “slutty”. Meanwhile, Cady calls Regina a slut for getting back with her ex (the guy Cady has a crush on) and we see Cady tumble down a shame spiral in real-time.

The film does a great job of dramatizing how shame triggers our threat response, sending Cady into fight, flight, and denial. Instead of literally attacking Regina for stealing Aaron, as Cady is tempted to do in ruminative fantasies, she satisfies her fight reflex in another classic way by concocting a shame-back scheme. A shame-back takes the shame and pain we perceive someone as having “caused” in us and throws it right back at them. It feels like justice but really it’s vengeance. The shame-back just perpetuates the endless pinball game of shame and reactivity spreading like a virus through the school and our culture at large.

Part 3 drops next week!