The Mean Girls of fourth-wave feminism

Mean Girls 2024 and 2003 capture distinct cultural vibes.

©Paramount

I was 16 when Mean Girls came out in 2003, and at the time I thought it was an accurate, if slightly exaggerated, the portrayal of ‘girl world’. As the old Cady points out, all the fighting has to be sneaky, and the normal rules of behavior don’t often apply in Girl World. This is also true of Woman World. There was a clear critique in the original of queen bees and their enforced hierarchies, and Karen wasn’t valorized as a win for representing anti-intellectual white women.

Films are cultural texts reflecting their time, and Mean Girls 2024 reflects a flattened culture in which feminism means everything and nothing. The question of what feminism stands for in the 2020s has been constantly on my mind. Not only does the movie refrain from obvious value judgments on the behavior of girls, but it excises the term ‘mean girl’ from the film entirely. What made the original ring true is nowhere to be found, and one wonders if the screenplay went through sensitivity readers such th…