Mike's Share: Mean Girls - Tracy Vaillancourt

I didn’t think this would spark so many thoughts for me! Thank you for sharing Mike! I found this idea of young gilrs been jealous interesting and wondered if this applied to other cultures? I don’t remember this being the case in France where I grew up, but it was a long time ago so my memory might be failing me. I also am not competitive in the slightest, maybe this is something that comes with sports? (Again, France doesn’t focus on sports nearly as much as anglo saxon countries… Crazy, I know!)
Made me think of a good conversation starter: “is being competitive a good thing or not?”
Loved when the professor pointed out that all too often “perfectionism is confused with conscientiousness”
Also wasn’t convinced that women don’t like attractive women… Again I don’t think that’s always the case. However I have noticed women often “police” /judge what other women wear !!? I wonder why we do that. Who cares??!!
As I listen to this, a dear friend sent me this quote - serendipity…:
“There is no competition in Art - the only competition an artist should ever have is with themselves and their previous work and process” - Art Basel Director 

This is why I became interested in this community in the first place; it’s unlikely that I would have come across Perry or her podcast otherwise! Thanks for sharing and additionally musing about what societal or communal structures are in place to help girls grow into good women.

It might help to know first that I was raised in a Catholic household during the 1970s/1980s in Detroit, Mi by a chauvinistic, first generation Sicilian and a passive, 2nd-3rd Irish/German mom. Maybe this is why I felt so defensive from the get-go. To my ears, the conversation and tone felt pejorative from the get-go, as if Perry wanted a researcher to confirm that women are bitches. I kept listening, though, to challenge my initial feelings. Here are some additional thoughts I had while listening…

- the idea of scarcity behind the tendency for girls to be jealous of “tall poppies” was interesting…I’m not sure if this is what they meant, but I wondered whether girls are aware, subconsciously or not, that being capable isn’t enough to guarantee access and success? The reality is that only a limited number of capable women ever receive the same opportunities as men.

- I was disappointed that the conversation seemed to stall on the individual scale, rather than mention the cultural barriers, social conditioning, and systemic bias against women. Instead, the podcast seemed to suggest that it is the responsibility of individual women to work against the centuries of deep social conditioning passed from one generation to the next, such as when Vaillancourt said she “should have known better.” Individual women can’t individually solve the problem while still living in the system that created the problem in the first place. Can they?

- Don’t agree that sports is the best analog in which to make all of these sweeping generalizations about girls vs. boys. (By the way, hunters weren’t actually always men…gender is a social construct that didn’t exist in that way.)

- Somewhere in the second half, I really began to wonder about the irony of two women framing most women as “bitches” while ostensibly looking down on female in-fighting. There just didn’t seem to be much awareness of their negative tone, especially in casting women as “too sensitive.” Being sensitive is more about the soft skills that women tend to offer society, such as empathy and compassion. Being able to endure a difference of opinion between friends is not sensitivity - it is a social skill that needs to be taught.

- These were many other moments where I found myself furrowing my brow or rolling my eyes. When I looked up Louise Perry afterward, it began to make sense. It seems that Perry is a proponent of gender essentialism. I am not. (As the parent to a trans young adult, I happen to know more about gender theory than I ever anticipated knowing and I can tell you that “empirically,” there is no historical basis for gender essentialism.)

I did appreciate the conversation tidbits that encouraged us to become aware of our unconscious biases, reactions, and responses. For this, I recommend the book, “The Person You Mean To Be” by Dolly Chugh. She looks at unconscious bias through the lens of a growth mindset — i.e., trying to be a “good person” places the emphasis on our identity…in practice, threats to our identity as a “good” person can make us defensive and prone to becoming less of the good person we mean to be. Adopting a growth mindset, however, and according to Chugh, places the emphasis on our behavior which makes it easier to identify blind spots, modulate behavior, and incrementally find the humility to release bias.

None of this addresses your question…what societal mechanisms, institutions, or faith traditions are still available to guide young women? In my opinion, morals aren’t gender-based. Nor are values. I also believe it’s possible to be an upstanding citizen of the world without a faith tradition. I wish so much of it wasn’t placed on the shoulder of parents, and I wish local communities were stronger and third spaces more available but my personal experience is of having had to model a lot of it on my own. I tried to find other likeminded parents and families, volunteered to walk the walk and talk the talk, and served as a counter culture as much as I could at home to counter the toxicity of social media and other influences on my kids, all the while knowing that my kids are as much a reflection of me as they are of the moment and culture to which they were born. Are you familiar with “On Children” by Khalil Gibran? I used to read it a lot when my kids were little...here is the text:

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.