Girls Don’t Have to Be Mean, Do They?
I rarely watch movies, but all the TV offerings didn’t look great when I was bored on a recent Sunday afternoon. Hulu is my favorite streamer for mindless entertainment, so I poked around looking at personalized recommendations. A movie called Suncoast came up. Laura Linney usually chooses interesting characters, so on that basis alone, I pressed ‘play.’
In the movie, the main character, a high school senior girl, is an outcast at her Southern religious school. Nevertheless, she makes a classic coming-of-age move: inviting the popular kids to her empty house for a party the audience knows will be full of drinking and wild behavior. Her female classmates show up in very bralettes and crop tops. I held my breath and waited for the expected moment when they said or did something awful.
Like a girl being chased down in a horror movie, or a record spinning to show time passing, pretty girls in tight tops are a signal for mean behavior. But something unexpected happened. Her classmates weren’t mean. Instead, they slowly accepted her into their group and treated her with warmth and kindness.
I had to pause right then and google Laura Chinn, the movie’s director. I came across an interview in Time magazine where she talks about the decision not to have girls turn on each other.
I remember having a similar moment when I was writing Judged. In that book, Olivia Grant has a spell where she’s out of her mother’s house and living with her father. He’d had a girlfriend and as happens, her soon-to-be stepmother is doing a lot of the caretaking. In one scene, Olivia’s in a bathtub recounting what’s happened to her and Valene Winstead does the unexpected, comforts the girl, and goes to bat for her against the social workers in the juvenile system.
That turn was one I struggled over. The inspiration for the scene was one from my own life. The second and last time I saw my stepmother, I was taking a bath in my father’s bathroom. For the life of me, I can’t remember what I did or said, but she slapped me hard across the face.
Until then I’d never really seen girls or women turn on each other and to say I was shocked was an understatement. Unfortunately, it’s a theme so prevalent in entertainment. Did we need a remake of Mean Girls? Do the women on The Bachelor need to engage in endless spats and one upmanship?
After my experience with my stepmother when I was seven or eight, girls and women were both friends and enemies. Whether motivated by envy, jealousy, or patriarchy, I’ve dealt with women who’ve wished me harm or strove to cast me from groups and cliques. Most of them are no longer in my life.
I’ve made a concerted effort to surround myself with supportive women. It has been one of the greatest joys of my life to have these kinds of people in my orbit. It was a similar joy to see this kind of relationship represented in film.
We don’t ever have to be mean.
Aime Austin is the author of the Casey Cort and Nicole Long Series of legal thrillers. She is also the host of the podcast, A Time to Thrill. When she’s not writing crime fiction or interviewing brilliant creators for her podcast, she’s in a yoga pose, knitting, or reading. Aime splits her time between Los Angeles and Budapest. Before turning to writing, Aime practiced family and criminal law in Cleveland, Ohio.