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The Media Framing of the 'Mean Girl': Implications of the Race,
Gender, and Class Constructions of Mean Girls as Explored in the
Glenbrook North Hazing Incident
Shayla Thiel, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
DePaul University
Communication Department
[log in to unmask]
2320 North Kenmore Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60614
Phone: 773-325-7659
To be submitted to the CCS Division of AEJMC for consideration
The Media Framing of the 'Mean Girl': Implications of the Race,
Gender, and Class Constructions of Mean Girls as Explored in the
Glenbrook North Hazing Incident
ABSTRACT
The influx of literature about "mean girls" that culminated in a
popular film of the same name has done much to further stereotypes
about race, gender, and class within popular culture. This paper
focuses on the infamous Glenbrook North High School shown worldwide
on videotape. It uses the notion of framing to explore how the
Chicago newspapers covered the incident, leading to its own readers
understanding the stories through those frames and reifying the
notion of the mean girl as white and wealthy.
The Media Framing of the 'Mean Girl': Implications of the Race,
Gender, and Class Constructions of Mean Girls as Explored in the
Glenbrook North Hazing Incident
In the spring of 2002, the New York Times magazine ran a cover piece
that generated a lot of buzz among parents of adolescents: "Girls
Just Wanna Be Mean," a profile of Rosalind Wiseman, a 32-year-old who
made a living holding workshops to help girls deal with the meanness
and cliquiness that is middle school. Talbot's article followed
Wiseman through a day at the prestigious National Cathedral School in
Washington, D.C., observing girls who were either "queen bees" or
"wannabes" in the social stratification. Within the following few
months, three books on the topic of mean girls hit the markets:
Wiseman's own best-seller, "Queen Bees and Wannabes;" Rachel
Simmons's ''Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in
Girls;'' Emily White's ''Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of
the Slut;'' and Phyllis Chesler's ''Woman's Inhumanity to
Woman." "The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do -- Sex
Play, Aggression, and Their Guilt" by Sharon Lamb, had been released
a few months earlier. Further solidifying the construction of the
mean girl within popular culture was a 2004 film titled "Mean Girls,"
that starred teen screen queen Lindsay Lohan as a girl who
inadvertently became the queen bee at a typical high school.
These cultural texts each constructed a couple of specific types of
adolescent girls. The first type appeared to be popular, confident,
and often sexual, and willing to not only boss around any girls who
were willing to listen but cunningly keep other girls from becoming
as popular as herself and her clique. The other type was a wannabe,
who was often boy-crazy and either willing to do whatever necessary
to become a member of the popular clique or happy to worship from
afar while suffering in anonymity. The world of the adolescent girl
is rife with bullying and backstabbing, and the authors attempt to
guide parents and their daughters through this unkind social landscape.
While the books and film are astounding similar in their
constructions of mean girl, they are also astoundingly similar in the
way that the mean girl is almost always a Caucasian member of upper
middle or upper class. Although this point is not addressed
explicitly in any of the books, it is important to question the mean
girl's tie to wealth and whiteness because of the suggestion that
these are the girls who are allowed to wield social power, as opposed
to their classmates of color and lower-income levels. Furthermore,
it also suggests that girls in lower income and racially diverse
families would not necessarily be considered simply "mean" but
perhaps far worse. This paper attempts to explore how the new
constructions of the mean girl are linked intrinsically to race and
class by investigating a well-known real-life story about "mean
girls," the Glenbrook North hazing incident that took place in a
northern Chicago suburb in the spring of 2003, one year after the
influx of "mean girl" literature. Glenbrook North High School, which
is considered to be affluent predominantly white, became
internationally infamous when media outlets worldwide showed
disturbing footage of drunken high school girls beating and throwing
excrement and trash cans at one another in an annual hazing ritual
that was to follow a "powder-puff" football game, or a game where
girls played one another. The analysis focuses on the coverage of
the incident in both The Chicago Tribune (considered to be the more
"elite", larger circulation newspaper for the region) and The Chicago
Sun-Times (considered to be the more working-class, local newspaper
for the region) in the period of May 2003 through May 2004.
Literature Review and Historical Context
While many professed that the cattiness of adolescent girls was
nothing new, the onslaught of literature was a remarkable turnaround
from the books flying off the shelves only several years before that
proclaimed adolescent girls were slowly dying in their quest for
physical and emotional perfection in the eyes of their parents and
peers. These books, including "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of
Adolescent Girls" by Mary Pipher (1995); "School Girls: Young Women,
Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap" by Peggy Orenstein (1994);
"Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls" by Myra and David
Sadker (1995); and "Meeting at the Crossroads" by Lyn Mikel Brown and
Carol Gilligan (1992) each painted a bleak picture for girls,
alerting adults that girls should be treated differently from boys
because they experience adolescence in completely different -- and
far more turbulent -- ways. In "Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and
Life in Junior High," Margaret Finders (1997) explored how class and
race figures into adolescent girls' relationships with parents,
though the dominant message of the book dealt with girls' reading
preferences as a socializing agent.
The switch from saving girls from society to saving girls from each
other did not appear to happen gradually. Much scholarly research was
published on adolescent girls and their media portrayals and uses in
the 1990s and will be addressed in the next section. It can provide a
contextual backdrop to understanding how local news stories and
editorials framed the Glenbrook North Hazing incident and the
perception of what it means to be a "mean girl."
Theoretical Framework: Media Framing and Media Constructions of Girls
This article uses the concept of media framing to understand how race
and in particular, class, play into the common media construction of
the mean girl. Goffman (1974) first described the idea of framing in
relation to social psychology with the major presumption being that
the means by which messages are organized and packaged may affect
their receivers' subsequent thoughts and actions. As humans, we
constantly and "actively classify and organize our life experiences
to make sense of them." Each of us has a "schemata of interpretation"
that enables us to make decisions and to "locate, perceive, identify,
and label" based on how messages are presented to us in relation with
our own prior knowledge (Goffman, 1974).
There are different means to interpret the effect of framing,
however. When psychologists discuss framing, they usually refer to
the relationship between context and information as it determines
meaning. Minsky (1975) defined a frame as "a template or data
structure that organizes various pieces of information." The
constructivist approach to framing, however, focuses more on the
actual organization of the information as it's tied to the way frames
categorize accounts of events and issues and place them within larger
narratives for individuals. This approach is more common in
communication and sociology research, especially in the work of
Gamson and Modigliani (1987) who say frames are the "central
organizing idea or storyline that provides meaning" (p. 143) or "a
central organizing idea for making sense of relevant events and
suggesting what is at issue" (1989, p. 57). They view frames as an
omnipresent discursive apparatus that work to channel the audience as
it constructs the meaning of particular messages or communicative
acts. Defined more broadly, frames provide interpretative structures
that set particular events within the broader context within culture
(Gitlin, 1980, 1994). In mass media, then, frames would guide
journalists' and readers' selection, arrangement, and assessment of
information by placing the seemingly unique phenomena into neat,
easy-to-understand categories. Gitlin wrote:
Media frames are persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation,
and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which
symbol handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or
visual. (Gitlin, 1980, p. 7)
Framing can also be seen as a means by which essential problems are
defined as they pertain to particular political or social issues and
how it can outline "a set of considerations purportedly relevant to
that issue" (Nelson, et al. 1997). More specifically, Nelson writes,
"framing is the process by which a communication source … defines and
constructs a political issue or public controversy" (1997b, p 567).
Ideas about organization and context are secondary in this definition
and the primary outcome of framing to these authors is the conscious
or sub-conscious construction of political issues.
Although the mean girl culture may seem neither political nor
controversial to some, it is important to understand how media
framing perpetuates stereotypes and myths tied to race, class, and
gender. By presenting the mean girl as a specifically white, upper
class construction, the media ignores other possibilities and
furthers cultural divisions. For example, if mean girls can only be
white and upper class, how does one describe and understand instances
of bullying among lower-class African-Americans? Such bullying might
instead be understood as violence that is simply a part of a culture.
And at an extreme, such cases might be argued and prosecuted
differently within the justice system as a result. A more immediate
issue caused by different understandings of race, class and gender
with regard to mean girls, is a simple societal division among those
of different races and classes. Such cultural divisions -- and even
animosities -- are apparent in some of the media texts analyzed in
this paper's examination of the Chicago newspaper coverage of the
Glenbrook North Hazing incident.
Methodology
The methodology used to analyze the media coverage combines the
philosophies of three scholars whose work is grounded in critical
rhetorical analysis, focusing specifically on the idea of an
ideograph. First proposed by McGee (1980), ideographs are
culturally-grounded, all-encompassing, commanding terms that enact
their meaning by expressing an association of cultural ideals and
experiences in a constantly evolving form within the rhetorical
environment that reifies current cultural meanings. Ideographs'
meaning develops through use and application. However, McGee confines
the use of ideographs to language and actual words (1980, p. 8).
Rose's method of discourse analysis (2001) further contributes to
the methodology of this paper in its urging of readers to look for
"regimes of meanings" through first examining text, then
intertextuality, and finally, context (p. 135). Finally, Foss' (1996)
model of ideological criticism, which identifies the nature of the
dominant ideology in the media text, is useful in looking at both
words and images accompanying them. Within this model, the reader
pays attention both to the interests of the dominant ideology which
supports the artifact or data and the information that is missing or
silenced within the message. In addition to allowing a researcher to
pay attention both to overt and latent meanings within the media
text, it also illuminates the rhetorical strategies that are employed
to support the ideology and position its subjects to further develop
this understanding.
Using the critical ideograph as a conceptual methodological
foundation, I searched the Lexis-Nexus database for all of the
articles, editorials, and opinion pieces (including letters to the
editor, online forums, and contributed perspective pieces) published
by The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times that dealt with the
Glenbrook North hazing incident of 2003. Between May 2003 and 2004,
The Chicago Sun-Times published 80 items and The Chicago Tribune
published 51 items related to the Glenbrook North Hazing incident
(these numbers do reflect different editions of similar and often the
same pieces geared to different zones of readership). These included
news coverage, editorials and letters to the editor, coverage of
school board meetings and court hearings for those accused of
participating in the hazing, and other follow-up articles (for
example, coverage of the graduation ceremony one month later).
Within these articles, I explicitly scanned for terms that might
attempt to frame this incident in a way that pays special attention
to girls as "mean" and suggesting their cultural or physical power in
any way; much of this power was suggested through framing that
suggested their race and especially, class, played a part in their
behavior. Terms included "wealthy," "affluent," "spoiled,"
"well-heeled," "suburban," and "princess," but did not exclude other
terms that suggested privilege. Furthermore, the images included with
the stories were also examined using Foss' model of ideological criticism.
Analysis and Findings
Through general word choice, quotation selection and image choices in
The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times, a number of themes
emerged that framed the story of the Glenbrook North High School
hazing incident as a deplorable act of meanness that inevitably took
place in an affluent suburb among wealthy schoolmates. Three
dominant frames appeared in the news stories, staff editorials, and
images: First, stories in both papers framed the high school as
academically sound and well-financed. Second, the newspapers gave the
impression that the parents of the students were wealthy and lax, and
at least partially to blame for the melee. Finally, the girls are
portrayed as spoiled and "bitchy" -- two specific attributes of the
"mean girl" portrayed in past literature and film. Although the most
charged language in the stories is found in the editorial pieces and
reader-contributed letters and emails, the newspapers also contribute
to the overall frame within some of their stories and image
choices. Ultimately, the readers' responses to the story tend to
mirror the three dominant frames.
Frame One: Glenbrook North is an Elite Institution
Stories about the incident were careful to mention that Glenbrook
North High School is the kind of institution that takes its academics
seriously. A Sun-Times article mentioned it is "rated as one of the
top ten public schools by the Chicago Sun-Times for its academics,
and in another article, says "Glenbrook North is one of the top high
schools in the country, populated by smart and privileged kids,
almost all of whom will go on to college." The newspaper also
published an entire story about how students expelled for hazing
might lose out on chances to attend such schools as Harvard,
Northwestern, and the University of Illinois -- all highly-rated
universities. Such a story has never been published about students in
the inner-city Chicago Public School system who were involved in gang
violence that caused them to be expelled from school. The reporter
assumes that the Glenbrook North students -- even those who throw
fish guts and punches at one another -- aspire to the Ivy League,
while students surrounded by less "privileged and smart" kids do
not. Furthermore, the high school is wealthy, described in one
Sun-Times story as "well heeled," and its district was profiled in a
Chicago Tribune story that mentioned the hazing incident as one of
fewer than a dozen high school districts in the country with a
Standard & Poor's rating of AAA, based on "very high wealth and
income levels, excellent financial management and exceptional
financial operations with high reserve levels."
While a description of Glenbrook North as a school that is high
enough caliber to send many students to Ivy League schools is germane
to an article on how its students also haze each other in violent
ways, these subtleties work to frame readers' understanding of the
incident. Through this description, a reader may be led to feel far
less sympathy for these students than they would for students at a
school that graduates fewer seniors and sends most to the employment
office rather than Harvard.
Frame Two: The Parents Were Affluent and Therefore, Lax
The parents of the students involved in the hazing were called in to
question by sources throughout the stories and also were subtly
painted to resemble the prototypically lax parents portrayed in the
John Hughes teen flicks of the 1980s -- Ferris Bueller's unwitting
parents, Macaulay Culkin's folks leaving him home alone -- too
occupied with maintaining yuppie status quo to care about their
children. A line in one Sun Times article said the students involved
were "using a network of cell phones and pagers, many of the
participants weren't told the location and time of the event until an
hour before," leaving the parents in the dark about the location of
the hazing, suggesting that these kids, who could all afford their
own cellphones and pagers (or have them provided by parents), called
their own shots. Another story discussed Cook County State's Attorney
Dick Devine "scolded North Shore residents in general" for refusing
to help police locate the parents who supplied the students with
booze. And an editorial in the Sun-Times started, "Let's be honest:
It's especially enjoyable for us city folks to be able to stick our
collective noses in the air and look down on the monied suburban crowd."
The Tribune, too, ran a full-length feature story follow-up that
quoted numerous sources who said affluent children generally might be
given wrong messages from their parents, placing them (as a
subheading in the story said) in "a cocoon of privilege." One of the
sources suggested the parents who were suing the school district on
behalf of their children (a few of whom were suspended even though
they were on the receiving end of the hazing). A social worker who
works with troubled teens, said she thought lawsuits sent mixed
messages. "I think it's consequences -- the ability to own up to
what their part in it is. I understand parents protecting kids from
consequences that will harm them for life. But they might interpret
that as feeling special and different from the rest of us." The final
quote of the story was from a psychologist who said, "You will find
most of that senseless behavior often comes from more affluent
adolescents. These are privileged children. They are young people
thoroughly indulged. We are overprotecting the poor little dears."
Again, when violent incidences take place with adolescents of color
from low-income neighborhoods, rarely do psychologists and social
workers weigh in on how well they were parented or on how much they
were indulged as children. This omission of similar stories about
adolescents from less affluent neighborhoods seems to imply that
lower income adolescents who commit violence were not expected to be
parented well or spoiled, and therefore, it is less surprising when
they commit violence against one another. Conversely, it also
suggests that wealth and affluence suggest a lack of caring about the
actions ones children and that the lawsuits some Glenbrook North
parents raised against the school for the expulsion were further
evidence of spoiling their children and "cocooning" them from consequences.
Frame Three: Wealthy Girls are Spoiled and Mean
Every Chicago Tribune story covering the incident and follow-up
about the incident included a similar statement to describe and frame
the event, which read as follows: "During the hazing, senior girls
dumped buckets of urine, hair, animal entrails and other filth on the
juniors. Some seniors are charged with also kicking and punching the
juniors, who paid $35 or more to attend the annual event originally
billed as a powder-puff football game." The statement provided a
historical context to the incident but also reminded the violent and
disgusting nature of the hazing, and it emphasized that there was a
monetary exchange involved -- details that tend to frame the incident
in a particular way that emphasizes both the particular meanness and
the aspect of wealth that would lead a high school student to have
$35 or more on hand to pay for the privilege of playing something as
trivial as a "powder-puff football game" (or drink beer from a keg).
Although four of the 32 expelled for the hazing were boys (one of
whom was accused of kicking a junior girl in the head until she was
unconscious, which was mentioned in a story covering one of the
students' hearings), stories generally referenced the girls' actions
and did not mention boys were involved, further emphasizing the fact
that it was girls leading the violence at Glenbrook North. Follow-up
stories also emphasized the fact that girls were the main
perpetrators of the hazing. One Tribune story in particular quotes a
student who was not involved in the hazing but was dismayed at the
taunts football players received at games the following fall,
including, 'Watch out, they play like the girls.'"
The editorials provided more scathing remarks as reflection of public
sentiment. The following is an excerpt from a Sun-Times editorial by
Neil Steinberg:
But as the week progressed, I was surprised how vehement people were
about those videos, as if long-locked memories of their own high
school days, and their own cast of unspeakably vile popular girls,
began awaking from decades-old slumber.
The other day I was striding toward home from the Northbrook train
station with a neighbor woman--some kind of banker in her
mid-30s--when the issue came up.
"Those bitches!" she spat. I wasn't sure if she was talking about the
girls in the video or the girls in her high school or popular girls
in general. But it reminded me that scars linger, and this issue must
rip at the scabs.
(Chicago Sun-Times, May 16, 2003)
The column and quote demonstrate that the hazing incident tapped
into a much deeper public sentiment regarding mean girls, a sentiment
that perhaps was dredged more fully thanks to the books, media
coverage, and films on the same topic. This framing of the Glenbrook
North hazing incident as a product of "bitchy" girls trivializes the
actual violence involved, which sent many to the hospital -- one girl
with a broken ankle and another with many stitches. Furthermore, this
emphasis on girls just being mean works to further marginalize them
within our culture. Because they are mean and now seemingly as
violent as boys, they must no longer deal with issues of self-esteem
or sexual harassment, and they no longer face turbulence in
adolescence. As a case in point, a Sun-Times editorial by Debra
Pickett begins with the question, "Can we officially stop worrying
about girls now?" and cites the Glenbrook North incident as evidence
that "teen girls seem to be doing just fine." The following is an
excerpt from the column:
They are proud of their bodies, showing off all manner of bellies
below their baby-sized T-shirts. They play sports and make excellent
grades and fill the campuses of elite universities. They make
fabulous plans. They are so excited about life, they can barely stop
talking. They also, apparently, spend the occasional Sunday afternoon
in a forest preserve, pounding the crap out of each other.
But seeing girls--especially well-off, suburban, white girls--get out
of control, now, that's interesting. Interesting to people who are
not or have not recently been teenage girls, anyway. The girls
themselves are not at all surprised. They're kind of amused.
Their response to the supposedly scandalous video? A resounding "Whatever."
I did a completely unscientific survey of several very cool teen
girls Thursday. It revealed unanimous agreement that teen girls
beating up other teen girls is simply not news.
What did we all think they did in their spare time? Play with
body-image-destroying Barbies? "Puh-lease," said one.
Now that everyone has seen the video of a bunch of Northbrook girls
getting themselves into a big mess, grown-ups feel obligated to make
stern statements and issue firm punishments. It's arbitrary adult
justice at its best: You kids made us look clueless--Who had any idea
girls were up to such things? We were too busy trying to repair their
self-esteem to notice--and now you're going to pay. We're going to
make examples of you.
Of course, the violent girls who hurt others deserve to be punished.
But they don't deserve to be burned at the stake of tragically
troubled girlhood. They don't deserve to be treated any differently
from the generations of boys who've engaged in similar behavior.
They've learned to play like the boys.
And, because they're acting so much like middle-class fraternity
boys, they should be given the same punishment those guys so often
get. A lecture. A temporary loss of some privileges. And a second
chance. Just like we should quit over-protecting girls, we should
also refrain from overpunishing them.
(Chicago Sun-Times, May 13, 2003)
Pickett's opinion and analysis of the hazing, while taking a stand
as "pro-girl," does much to disparage the complicated negotiations
adolescent girls face daily. Even the mean girl literature does not
equate violence with feminism and equality, but as a piece included
in the Sun-Times' overall coverage of the hazing incident, it serves
equally to frame the Glenbrook North girls as simply mean -- and
possibly assertive.
Furthermore, the images run with the bulk of these stories are of
somewhat defiant looking suburban girls involved in the hazing
incident. As they are shown leaving the courthouse, flanked in most
cases by both parents and attorneys, it is easy to see that they are
wearing the latest fashions from Banana Republic or Bebe, and
carrying namebrand bags from Louis Vuitton and Prada. They appear
meticulously made up in the contributed yearbook photos -- a strong
juxtaposition with the videotape of them scowling, shouting, and
pummeling one another in the videotaped sequence that was shown on
television stations throughout the world. Even the images work to
construct the girls as both spoiled and mean.
Race: The Unmentioned Variable
Only one column in the milieu of coverage mentioned race as an issue
in the coverage of the Glenbrook North incident. In her column,
"Glenbrook North justice beats what Decatur kids got" (Chicago
Sun-Times, May 22, 2003) , Mitchell takes the Glenbrook North school
board to task for trivializing the incident as one member initially
called it "dumb" and "stupid." She contrasts their punishment
(expulsion for the remainder of the school year and being allowed to
receive diplomas) with the punishments handed down to students in
another infamous videotaped melee, students who brawled at a Decatur,
Illinois, football game (who were expelled for a year and not allowed
to graduate from their high school). She suggests the Glenbrook North
teens -- who were all white -- probably would be able to continue
with their lives and "not miss a beat," while the Decatur teens --
who were predominantly African-American -- would pay for their
mistake for the rest of their lives. She writes the incident is a
point for reflection: "Still, we need to consider what has occurred.
Did these well-to-do white students on the North Shore get away with
thumbing their noses at the rules because of race, socio-economic
status or clout? We need to address the problem because Chicago youth
have another blatant example of how the system works for some and not
for others."
Another column, written by national author/priest Andrew Greeley,
also briefly addressed the disparities between treatment of persons
of different races. "If they were black or poor whites, they would
spend some time in jail," he writes. "Their lawyers will doubtless
plea-bargain for some lesser penalty like 'community service.' Will
any one of them even go so far as to say that they did something very
wrong and that they are genuinely sorry? Don't bet on it." Neither
editorial sparked news stories or other editorials that dealt with
race, class, and gender, but they did provoke a huge response from
Sun-Times readers. These responses, among others, will be explored in
the next section.
Readers' Understanding of Framing and the Mean Girl
Citizens' voices, along with hired editorial writers like Pickett,
while clearly marked as views not necessarily shared by the
newspaper, were often included with the editorial coverage of the
Glenbrook North Hazing incident. Astoundingly, the readers' opinions
expressed in emails and letters to the editor in both The Tribune and
The Sun-Times effectively echo the previously-mentioned frames
exactly. In doing so, these voices not only echo the subtle messages
and ideologies expressed by the frames, but also reify the notion
that class and race influence the construction of the mean girl.
The following emails, printed in the Sun-Times in response to the
Mitchell column about race reinforce the media's framing of Glenbrook
North as well known, wealthy high school:
"There's the Glenbrook debacle--where the first suit is by a young
woman who might miss her prom. Then the Rev. Farrakhan's son, and the
frosting on the cake--the 11-year-old calling in false alarms. It
appears the problem across the board is that someone was caught, not
that their action is wrong."
"1) How it's called an 'incident' because white girls were involved
and not black boys, in which case it would be called gang activity,
attempted murder or some other criminal characterization that would
utterly ruin the lives of the participants;
2) How blacks across the city were so relieved to see that those high
school girls were white and not black because it would have been a
reflection on each of us as individuals;
3) How the school district simply suspended their precious little
darlings while in [central] Illinois (where Jesse Jackson protested),
the school district promptly expelled black students for conduct that
pales by comparison to Glenbrook North's conduct."
The following emails printed in The Chicago Tribune and on its Web
site reflect its readers' similar sentiments with regard to Glenbrook North:
"I am moving from the city to the North. Why? The schools are
highly-rated. Am I second-guessing my decision? No. No matter where
you combine drinking and teenagers, you will end of with a bad scene
or a sad story. Every high school has at least one." -- New Mom
"This has a lot to do with how these kids are raised and the
environment they live in. They are spoiled rotten from the time they
get out of the crib until their wedding day. Mommy and Daddy never
say no to anything and have no clue what their child is doing when
they `hang out" with friends." -- Suburban Sam
Many emails reinforced the media framing of wealthy parents as lax:
"Glad my two children are being raised in the safety of the far
southern suburbs, amongst working class parents who give a darn about
what they're kids are up to 7-days a week. You'd never catch me
living up north. The parents of those kids just buy them off to keep
them happy." -- Southside
"Embarassing. I feel bad for the girls who were doing the kicking and
punching, because they obviously do not have parents who care enough
about them to teach them manners, to think before they act, to
realize what the consequences of would be."-- North Shore No More
"I. As a mother of 3 teenage girls I can tell you that their parents
have no excuse for raising children who would treat anyone else this
way. You can't know what you kids are doing all the time, but you can
raise them to have morals and values." -- Lisa, Palatine
"Send to jail for 6 months to a year, not juvie hall! Those typical
North Shore parents are too self involved to care about their
children. I hope the colleges they are planning to attend revoke
their admissions. Who wants to be roommates with one of those sick
girls?" -- GBN Alum
"I don't thing we need to be concerned about these young ladies (and
I use that term loosely) facing any jail time. You can be sure that
Mommy and Daddy will buy them out of whatever trouble they're in.
Perhaps that's why we have a problem now." -- Disgusted IL
"This has a lot to do with how these kids are raised and the
environment they live in. They are spoiled rotten from the time they
get out of the crib until their wedding day. Mommy and Daddy never
say no to anything and have no clue what their child is doing when
they `hang out" with friends." -- Suburban Sam
"This is horrible. To hear kids hollar "kill her" makes me sick. What
are they raising out there. See these things don't only happen in the
city but do happen in the "money" suburbs. Those kids should be made
to take responsibility for their actions." -- Ginny
"It's all about wealth and lack of parenting -- poor little rich kids
-- no sympathy here -- they should all be held responsible for their
actions, parents (or lack of) should too."-- Sue
"I agree with previous comments, most of these spoiled children are
not raised by their parents, but by nannies. My sister (lawyer) and
brother-in-law (doctor) live in Glenview and rely on a nanny to care
for their token one-year-old son. This child and society will suffer
the consquences." -- Nick
"It certainly is nice to see young ladies maturing into independent
adults. Now all you fathers out there in Northbrook, make sure your
little princess gets that new BMW this year. After all, she certainly
has proved how responsible she can be . . ." -- Dave
" `It's unfair and wrong to blame parents & schools' Wow, isn't
*that* a typical North Shore parent reaction! Who pays the cable
bill? Who lets the kids watch MTV? Who doesn't bother to teach their
children how to interpret what they see there?" -- JL, GBN
Although the frame of wealthy girls being spoiled and mean is
certainly implicit in the comments falling under the frame about
affluent parents being lax, some of the emails specifically commented
on this construction. The first email was printed in the May 14,
2003, edition of The Chicago Sun-Times:
"I live out here in the suburbs and felt like the lone parent who was
appalled by the actions of these shallow kids when my son was in high
school. Worst, they are usually the most popular students. They
receive accolades from the school for their sports abilities and are
cruel to anyone that isn't in their clique. Parents never miss a game
and it becomes their whole social life. I'm glad that it is finally
being exposed also in Hinsdale. Our society is really breaking down.
No one takes responsibility or answers to anyone and everyone is miserable."
The following emails, contributing to the reification of wealthy girl
as mean frame were printed in the May 15, 2003, edition of The
Chicago Tribune:
"This is exactly what gangbangers do to initiate their members. The
only reason it made headlines is because these are spoiled, white,
yuppie children whose parents are naive to the fact that this could
happen to their 'precious, innocent angels.'" -- Jim
"We are all to be blamed -- just read our comments: city people are
quick to trample on suburbanites, poor on rich, etc. etc. When
incident happens in some poor neighborhood, this all goes the other
way. And we are surprised that our kids behave this way?" -- Ashamed
"If this incident occurred on the South side, it would not even be a
story. Many of you are using this as an opportunity to bash the
wealthy. You have completely lost focus! A teenager is a teenager, no
matter what their financial status!" -- confused
"An awful lot of comments are being made about `spoiled little rich
kids.' This has nothing to do with money. Parents should be held to
some responsibility, but ultimately these CHILDREN should learn that
every action has a reaction. The kids are responsible and should be
punished." -- Amy
Conclusions and Implications
Gender is constructed and performed in repeated acts that are a
product of dominant cultural discourses, such as those perpetuated by
the media (Butler, 1990). This media construction of the mean girl
that has seeped into the cultural mind is not useful on many levels.
First, it does not take into account that mean girls are not simply
spoiled upper-class Caucasian girls who act out as a result of their
affluent upbringing and irresponsible parents; the behaviors of "mean
girls" acting out -- specifically in the violent ways shown in the
videotapes recording the Glenbrook North hazing incident -- should
not be discounted as trivial or just kids being kids. It also implies
acceptance of this particular construction of gender within our
culture: the idea that the mean girl is simply something that every
generation must live with, regardless of how violent she may be. The
construction does not problematize the culture within which
adolescent girls now live -- a culture that still glorifies a perfect
body (Brumberg, 1996) and sexiness (Durham, 2003) in adolescents
whose bodies and minds are still maturing -- but seemingly has
forgotten that adolescence is a very turbulent time for most of them
(Pipher, 1995). Second, this construction of the mean girl
intrinsically links whiteness and wealth with meanness and at the
same time implies that mean girls of color or lower economic status
may be more than just mean and in fact, dangerous.
While the literature on mean girls and bullying among adolescents is
important -- especially in light of violent incidences that take
place both in and outside of school (in addition to the Glenbrook
hazing incident, school shootings often take place when the troubled
kids who had been bullied use extreme violence to get even) -- it is
also important to take a step back and reflect specifically upon how
this literature has contributed to a rather harmful stereotype of a
girl. Constructions dictated by culture and media do affect the
discourses available to adolescent girls, and discourses like these
certainly are not only harmful to their image but they are harmful to
them. Whether a girl is Caucasian and belonging within the upper
class or of color and residing in the lower classes, the construction
of the mean girl does little to solidify a more respected position
within culture and society, and it does little to contribute to a
more positive construction of gender within the world of adolescent
girls. When the media can only further reify these constructions by
framing its news stories with harmful stereotypes and harmful
cultural images, it also serves not to represent its readers and
their concerns, but to re-present old images in the same harmful,
historical ways.
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