Margaret Talbot's 'Girls Just Want To Be Mean'

Many parents believe that kids who tease each other is just a part of life and should not be blown up into proportion. However, when does teasing turn into bullying? When does a simple act of aggression that some parents believe is essential to a child’s development become an act of violence and manipulation? Middle school girls are getting emotionally and psychologically bullied because of parents’ influence on the bully and the bully’s need for power which cause the creation of programs that teaches bullies how to be more empathic to their peers and the need to create a more educated generation of kids who will stand up bullies. Middle school girls are prime targets of bullies. Stop Bullying, a federal program government website managed
One of the most famous empathy programs that deals with bullying is the Empower Program. Margaret Talbot’s article “Girls Just Want to Be Mean” chronicles her research into Rosalind Wiseman’s Empower Program and the insight Talbot gained from observing Wiseman and her program. Wiseman’s program “is about gossip and cliques and ostracism and just plain meanness among girls. But perhaps the simplest way to describe its goals would be to say that it tries to make middle school girls be nice to each other”(Talbot). The program has the best intentions, but the ones who are suppose to apologize for being a bully, dubbed Alpha Girls, the Really Mean Girls, or Queens Bees, are “the most resistant to the exercise and the most self-justifying”(Talbot). It’s the victims who are the ones apologizing in some twist of submissiveness. When the Queen Bees do apologize in Wiseman’s class, the apology is almost always “contains a hidden or a not-so-hidden barb”(Talbot). Once the aggressors start crying, they’re either trying to apologize and are relieved or “using the apology to dump on somebody all over again”(Talbot). This type of bullying is considered “‘relational’ aggression [...] which [is] the constellation of ‘Heathers’-like manipulations and exclusions and gossip-mongering that most [people] remember from middle school and through which girls [...] tend to channel their hostilities”(Talbot). The definition mentions the movie “Heathers” which features a group of popular girls, all named Heather, who bully other students through subterfuge tactics where the protagonist, Veronica becomes ostracised from the group and plots their downfall with her manipulative and psychotic boyfriend, Jason Dean. The movie reference in the definition gives a more in depth look at how relational aggression works as “Heathers” is basically an entire movie based on lies,