Savvy 18: How about another word?

Help! This is an Op Ed that I wrote with Lyn Mikel Brown that didn't get air time. So we are, as they say. . . Going Viral with this message: "Mean" is a label that our daughters, sisters, and friends working hard to compete can do without. We think that strong girls and women might be called something other than mean. What do you think? If in doubt, How about, um, Strong? or Outspoken, Opinionated, Assertive? Here's our piece: Please pass it on freely.

“We find what we expect to find, and we receive what we ask for.”
Elbert Hubbard (American editor, publisher and writer, 1856-1915)

In the early 1970s, we were told that we could play. Since then, we have believed that our teams mattered and our sweat counted. In the 1990’s, we were told that we were smart. We were urged to raise our hands and our voices. We spoke our minds. We dared to feel powerful.

Our parents told us, “You can do anything.”

And we believed them.

We took to sports fields, classrooms, stages, and boardrooms with renewed vigor because we knew we could. In the past thirty-five years, girls and women have won gold medals in Olympic sports that didn’t used to exist, attended college in record numbers, started their own businesses, wrote plays and directed films, headed colleges, run for president, and run fortune 500 companies. We have competed against one another, and we have worked together to confront problems ranging from violence to AIDS to hunger and the environment.

We took our parents’ words to heart, and our parents discovered that their words mattered.

They still do.

So what are we saying to our daughters now? Are we saying, “You are powerful? Yours is a soaring spirit? You are part of a great sisterhood, a fundamental source of humanity? Are we telling our daughters that they can be whatever they want to be?

No. We are telling our daughters that they are mean. That we are “on to” them, that we, as adults, need to tame and fix them. We are telling them that they can’t trust their sisters and friends, that they should put more stock in reality shows like The Hills and Bad Girls than the reality all around us that affirms how much friendship counts to girls, how real and important their relationships are, how brave, creative and powerful girls can be together.

We are ignoring hundreds of thousands of glorious playground moments of triumph and companionship, sportsmanship and activism to affirm the media’s contention that girls are essentially violent, cruel and back-stabbing. From Fox news’ 24/7 coverage of the spectacular and horrific behavior of six Lakeland, Florida cheerleaders, to the cover of nearly every popular teen magazine, to sit-coms and PG 13 films, girls hear the trumpet call of “She Devils” and “Watch your back”. They are told that girls and women are untrustworthy, shallow, and manipulative, and that to compete in this brave new world they have a choice: they can use their power as sexual dynamos or as beautiful monsters.

In order to help our daughters navigate this labyrinth, we are reading books that label girls “queen bees”, that assume “dirty tricks” and “girl wars.” We are buying curricular materials and attending hugely profitable national conferences, including one in Orlando this June, that relies for its viral marketing on two simple words: “mean girls.” By doing this, we are not only telling our daughters that distrust and disloyalty define their relational lives and so it’s wiser to be on this journey alone; we also are telling them that the social risks of speaking out, of raising their voices, of competing hard are too great. It is safer to be exhaustingly, conventionally, supernice than to be labeled “mean,” so don’t rock the boat.

Our mothers told us that we could do anything, and we did. They told us to be brave and we were.

Now we are telling our daughters, “You are mean.”

What if they believe us?

Our daughters are imperfect, dazzling, ever-changing, persistently human, beings. We don’t get to decide who they will become. But we do get to decide some of what they hear as they make their journey. We get to decide what we’ll focus on and imagine for them. Let’s not choose the media circus surrounding girls and violence. There’s too much at stake.

Instead, let's teach them our history. Affirm their wisdom, their strengths, their collective power. Let’s tell them what we hope for them, not what we fear. Most of all, let's take a break from talking and listen. What we hear might surprise us.


Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D., is Professor of Education at Colby College, co-creator of the nonprofit, Hardy Girls Healthy Women (www.hghw.org), and co-author (with Sharon Lamb) of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers’ Schemes.

Peggy Moss is a former civil rights attorney and the author of two award-winning books for children, Say Something and Our Friendship Rules, with co-author Dee Dee Tardif. She runs www.SaySomethingNow.com