The Mean Girls of fourth-wave feminism
Mean Girls 2024 and 2003 capture distinct cultural vibes.
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 that it’s been cleansed of anything that could offend a woman by calling out how things are among us.
Honestly, women deeply dislike me every time I say anything like this, and that’s why I’m saying it. Women need to call it out. It’s very easy to criticize men and harder to recognize where we sabotage ourselves. Men saying these things means nothing to women because men are too easily dismissed as sexists who don’t understand our experience. Women cannot be thus dismissed.
Sluts and Whores
“You have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it ok for guys to call you sluts and whores.”
Tina Fey’s iconic line, along with Janice telling Cady “you are a mean girl, you’re a bitch” were the two clear messages sent by the original, even as it refrained from making a value judgment about sexual activity. The gym coach is supposed to be a ridiculously puritanical figure. And maybe the exhortation to stop calling each other sluts and whores is absent because Gen Z has far less sex than preceding generations.
While the original chides those who would judge girls for their sex lives, the new version appears to valorize the sexuality of teenage girls as beyond judgment. If you do make a judgment, you’re a prude at best and a misogynist at worst. And maybe this is being done ironically - I honestly cannot tell if the line in brown Karen’s song about it being the apex of feminism is for real. I would hope Tina Fey is criticizing internet feminism, which for me equates having sex like a man with living one’s best life. I’m not sure how much life satisfaction this has brought women. It has brought me nothing other than regret.
In a liberal society, people are free to live how they want, but that doesn’t mean some choices aren’t better for you than others. We live in a world in which it’s considered morally reprehensible to pass judgment on anything, especially anything women do, and it’s stifling. My (harsh) judgment of my behavior is how I got my life on the right track. What happens when the macro needs of society are in fundamental conflict with the desires of individuals? For me, this increasingly seems like we’ve leaned too far into our desires and care less and less about the social fabric or the psychological consequences.
The word ‘slut’ appears nowhere in the movie and is juxtaposed with a Karen who is even more promiscuous than Amanda Seyfried’s Karen; it is mentioned at least twice that she’s slept with 11 guys, which is both an increased attribution of promiscuity to the character in comparison with the original while carefully avoiding making a judgment about a teenage girl’s sexual behavior. Admittedly, it was truly difficult to tell what was ironic and what was a reflection of the changed culture in which making any judgment about a woman’s behavior is verboten. This grates on me, and I can’t understand excusing half of society from any behavioral judgment.
Fourth-wave feminist ‘liberation’
“This is modern feminism talkin'
I expect to run the world
In shoes I cannot walk in
I can be who I want to be”~Closing lines of “Sexy”, Karen’s song
I can only hope those lines were mostly ironic, but I cannot tell for sure because that true sentiment is in the culture from which this movie emerged.
The Halloween party which the original movie observed as “the only night a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girl can say anything about it” is not only made sluttier with “Sexy” but is again insistent that you not judge any of it. I can’t refrain from judging it - and this is where I may be accused of slut-shaming, though I do not think that’s what I’m doing, especially because I’ve experienced it myself. It’s one thing to shame women for sexual behavior and another to encourage the sexualization of girls in the name of feminism.
Say we go down the path of maximum sexual expression à la Regina or Karen. All that’s happening is subjecting them to the male gaze earlier in life. Should men gaze at teenage girls regardless of how they’re dressed? No, but they will no matter how we wish the world to be. For me, this is not feminist liberation. Maybe this is residual from how I was raised, I will grant it. It is one thing to shame women for having sex and their preferences; it is another to consider the macro effects of that behavior and question it. As
noted in her excellent essay about “Zoomer Girl Derangement”, we as a class both covet and fear the male gaze, sometimes at once. But either posture is bad for the psyche and young girls.There’s a certain kind of girl who grows up a little too fast: her shirts are a little too low cut, her manner of speaking a little too flirtatious. This kind of girl instinctively understands the power her sexuality can command; she knows little of how it can invite danger.
But her mother knows, and she will have her change her top before she leaves for school. This kind of “policing” of young women’s bodies violates progressive sensibilities. “Minors shouldn’t be sexualized!” they say, as if such legal technicalities prevent men from looking at a pretty pair of breasts. What progressives miss is that these kinds of boundaries set by parents, schools, and the larger community serve an important protective function, they safeguard young girls from acting in a manner they may later regret.
Progressives want the world to be a certain way, but it never will be. I used to get angry at my mother for policing my clothes and associations, but I truly get why she did it now and appreciate it.
You can’t sit with us!
The movie also ignores how girls form a social hierarchy even as the story itself is about how a social hierarchy is psychologically harmful. The term “queen bee” is also absent, which is quite a feat given that the original is based on a book about girls’ social hierarchies named Queen Bees and Wannabes. This absence to me also indicates an unwillingness to deal with the very subject matter of the original movie. When you make a copy of a copy of a copy, meaning is lost.
The elimination of certain lines from the movie reminds me of how the Indian film censor board cuts out sex scenes and anything that would offend religious sentiments. Comedy, similarly, has lost everything that used to make me laugh because we’re not allowed to state anything subversive out loud anymore. The cardinal rule is that no one must be offended, even if comedy is supposed to offend. The reason people laugh is because comedians express truths that we’re not supposed to say in polite society; it is a context that sanctions transgression. Transgression is no longer culturally allowed, so nothing is truly lol-worthy anymore, including this movie and most comedy routines (white male comedians have largely retained this transgression; I’m here for the Bill Burrs of the world).
We can have a world in which we prioritize kindness and allow people to state uncomfortable truths. But, 2020s feminism sees the statement of these truths as inherently offensive, and there is no objective Truth regardless. There are only subjective truths, but within this fallacy resides a deep sensitivity to making observations about the world that don’t conform to bourgeois feminism.
On anti-intellectualism, affluence, and representation
On the one hand, it’s pretty accurate to make one of the plastics an Indian-American, because the same bourgeois culture that creates white Karens prevails among Indian-American women. This is more a function of class than anything else. The feminine behavior that we associate with the Plastics is born of affluence and having to worry about nothing. Popularity, affluence, and the freedom to not perform academically go hand in hand.
I recognize that most Indian-American women will disagree with me on brown Karen because women shouldn’t be required to be intelligent, or ‘book smart’ (itself a pretty silly term). I vehemently disagree. There are differences in intellectual orientation among people, but the argument is that Indians are always portrayed as smart, and this is essentialist at best, and racist at worst. Pigeonholing people according to how their group is perceived by white people is one thing; hailing the presentation of an Indian-American woman as a proud idiot is entirely another matter. It offends me as a thinking woman, and it was pretty painful to watch. No concept should be taken as a sacred cow, and many related to race and gender unfortunately are treated as such.
Representation as a concept is shallow, and I’m not convinced that seeing a woman or a brown person doing x or acting in y role is something we should care about as a proxy for social justice. It’s symbolic, not material, and the material matters more to anyone’s life. The only people who don’t care about money are those who have it, and concern over symbolic victories is a distraction from the need for material change. Attention span and willpower are finite resources.
I will take Kevin G. over brown Karen because the former is a more representative character in life and I identify with him. I’ve met Kevin Gs, including one who rapped in my high school talent show. I’ve never met anyone close to a Karen Shetty; despite differing intellectual inclinations, no desi friend of my generation has been proud to be seen as a bimbo.
Let’s not forget, back in 2005 Kal Penn’s character in Harold and Kumar also broke stereotypes. He was supposed to be a doctor but was a massive but smart stoner instead.1 You can break stereotypes without leaning into another one, and that’s what Karen does. The archetype which usually has white skin has brown skin this time, and there’s nothing different about her. What we mock a white woman for is valorized if the skin color is different.
From the actress Avantika who played Karen:
“To this day, we’ve aligned our perception of popularity and glamour with Eurocentrism and whiteness. And so, seeing someone visually and thematically in the movie be placed on a pedestal despite being Brown, which is something that we haven’t aligned with beauty and popularity and glamour and fame in Hollywood, I think it boggled people’s minds a little bit.”
I’m not sure that the issue is that we haven’t seen Brown women be glamorously presented in Hollywood. Never Have I Ever has multiple beautiful women who are intellectually capable and don’t depend on their beauty to get ahead. Several Bollywood characters, including the iconic Poo, are glamorous. The above quote still equates beauty with fitting an Instagram mold, so how is it exactly breaking with stereotypes for a brown character to look and act like any popular white girl (whom we would otherwise mock)?
Ephemeral concerns and attachment to the body
Beauty doesn’t last. We have a culture now that does not allow (bourgeois) women to age; I know that if I do allow myself to age, I’ll be in the minority of my peers who are already getting cosmetic treatments. I get the hair on my face removed monthly, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to resist Botox when the time comes. The point is that we’ve fallen into a trap of making the body a site of both consumption and labor. If in an alternate universe, I were to participate in the creator economy, it would be all about my body. My brain will last longer than my youth, and it’s harder to accept it if your primary source of self-esteem is your body. The creator economy has not only put the beauty industry on steroids but it’s also helped us adhere to the fiction that we don’t have to age.
“There’s just something really liberating and really freeing about playing someone who just says what she thinks, and more often than not, she’s not thinking very much,” Avantika shared.
Not a win, not a person I see myself in, and having a proudly idiotic brown girl on screen is not something I’ll ever celebrate. The loss of an actual critique of feminine behavior from Mean Girls 2024 makes it as vacuous as Instagram has made feminism. I think we have a culture that has gone so far to eschew judgment that we’ve lost any ability to examine our behavior and scream at people who might do so.
The irony, of course, is that this rejection of the concept of judgment and hierarchy among women is a denial of either thing existing even though it emphatically does, and is reinforced by Mean Girls in life. This is evident every time we come for each other on social media in the name of “social justice”. A woman doing exactly that finally spurred me to put my writing out there, and another woman doing so led me to quit social media. These harmful tendencies should be named and dealt with, and it’ll never be fetch to do so. But if we don’t, we’ve undermined our own stated progressive goals. We’re too obsessed with perceived harm based on luxury beliefs to recognize the harm we inflict on others.
All we can do is try our best to not be mean girls and recognize the behavior when we are because we all have done so a non-zero amount of times and avoided the responsibility for it in the name of feminism. If feminism conceptually tolerates bullying, is it liberatory at all?
Whether you enjoyed this or hated it I’d like to know - I write because I want to encourage discussion and hone my thoughts, impossible to do without soliciting others’ perspectives.
If you know me, you know that I identify with Kumar and not Karen.
That’s really good to know. I thought that these ideas had only infiltrated the second generation of Indians born in the US - they think we’re oppressed even though Indians are so rich, and I don’t get it. You’re right about this thinking preventing loving yourself. Sometimes I wonder if several of my friends think I’ve lost my mind, but I feel like I’ve found the obvious problem keeping us from loving ourselves that no one wants to admit is THE problem.
I also didn’t realize the reluctance to criticize religions not your own for being harmful to women’s psyches had been exported, which is deeply unfortunate. I’ve noticed this tendency, and I’ve had it myself, whereby if your own religion is oppressive, you’re far more willing to criticize that than any other religion, especially anything about Islam. Now if there was consistency here it would be one thing, but the left is willing to criticize Christianity here but no other religion for anything, which is why we have leftists for Hamas.
Finally, I think it’s kind of crazy to refuse to criticize anything while claiming you’re critiquing dominant structures. We’re not tearing down the disempowerment born of thinking about the world this way and instead are tearing down all that might have made the world livable before the age of the smartphone - religion, community, family, etc. All of these things are under attack, and I don’t mean to be hyperbolic and sound like Tucker Carlson, but these three pillars of human life can’t be abandoned. We’re seeing the effects of doing so in the west, and I don’t like the results.
Oh dear! Speaking truth in our modern culture? You shall be summarily canceled :-) -- not by me. Glad you're asking these questions. Has anyone noticed the mental state of young girls today - teens and 20-somethings in the modern (western values abiding) world? Not good! And the modern world has never been less sexist, more willing to accommodate what women want, so what gives? No one wants to ask/tell/know...
PS> In case you think I'm some sort of traditionalist, I grew up, went to engg college in india in the '80s - one of 2 girls in a class of nearly 300 - considered myself a harcode feminist; never thought I'd shake my head at "feminism" but it's been distorted beyond recognition. I now say I'm just an old school feminist.
PPS> The other strange phenomenon... A LOT of work on behalf of women remains to be done in the medieval fundamentalist/ fanatical circles of certain regions/ religions... but strangely mentioning the issues in cultures that clearly need questioning on behalf of their women, is also verboten! I can't make sense of any of it anymore.