Mean girls. Queen bees. Alpha females. Our culture is full of phrases that label or describe females who partake in behaviors that degrade and undermine other females. It is so prevalent in our society that filmmakers have used this underlying theme for decades. In 9 to 5, a woman draws the ire of fellow coworkers because they perceive her as dressing provocatively and they gossip and spread rumors she is sleeping with the boss. In Working Girl, a female executive encourages her assistant to contribute ideas by referring to them as a team, but then steals the idea of her assistant and tries to pass it off as her own. Mean Girls focuses on a clique of teenage girls who use meanness as sport to torment other females. Social aggression is a common act for females, and therefore it is easy to see why movies focus on the “mean girl” image (Behm-Morawitz & Mastro, 2008, p. 133). It is also easy to see why this depiction in media can be related to stereotypical ideas about female relationships, bias towards women, and the correlation of social aggression to social status (Behm-Morawitz & Mastro, 2008, p. 141), but is this an accurate reflection of reality?
Societal expectations of females cause them to express their
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306) and society’s knowledge of the ramifications of aggression, combined with cultural expectations, helps to control how aggressive behavior is manifested (Eagly & Wood, 1991, p. 311). Females are for the most part not overtly aggressive with each other and are more inclined to use their social intelligence to exploit relationships or undermine other peers they are in competition with (Crothers, Lipinski, & Minutolo, 2009, p. 102). These manipulative behaviors are comprised of gossiping, avoidance, rumor spreading, and stealing of friends or romantic interests (Crothers et al., 2009, p.
Who holds the key of power in your life? Is there a person or group of people that you are allowing to dictate your life choices? The movie Mean Girls brings to life the everyday peer pressures teenagers deal with. Main character Cady Heron experiences peer pressure for the first time, from multiple classmates. Although it is said that a person can not be persuaded to do or say anything without their consent, is this really true? Cady deals with situations in which she is being pressured from two sides of the spectrum. In the end she realized what was happening to her, but the peer pressure she endured impacted the entire school.
In the film Mean Girls, teenager Cady Heron was home-schooled in Africa by her zoologist parents. When her family moves to the U.S., Cady finally gets a taste of public school and learns a vital lesson about the cruelty involved in the tightly knit cliques of high school. She eventually finds herself being drug into a group of “the worst people you will ever meet”, The Plastics; and soon realizes how they came to get their name.
Mean Girls is a comedy film aired in 2004 this film captures the influences on lifespan development during adolescence. The main character Cady Heron was home schooled in Africa and now she must transition into high school where she is tested in different areas of her development. Throughout the film she becomes known as the new girl who is trying to figure out her self-identity. Cady integrates herself into a clique of girls known as the Plastics, soon enough Cady understands why they are known for their name. The Plastics run the school by the norms they have created and must always be followed otherwise it will lead into exclusion from the group. In order to be socially accepted social norms determining attitude, behavior, and status must
The film Mean Girls is about a young girl, Cady Heron, born and raised in Africa by her zoologist parents, who were also her homeschool teachers for sixteen years. When Cady moves to the United States, she enrolls in a public school for the first time. Here she realizes that high school students have the same hierarchy as the animals she observed in Africa. The lowest ranking group in this high school hierarchy is the outcasts, who also happen to be Cady’s first friends in the U.S. The highest on the high school food chain are the “plastics”. The “plastics”, are the most popular girls in school. The plastic’s notice Cady’s charming personality and stunning good looks and invite her to join their clique. In order to avenge her first friends,
This experiemtn showed kids a video of people acting violenctly toward the doll and then passively toward the doll. The kids how saw the doll actedupon aggressively were more inclined to do the same. Now that the impact of violence has been esstablished. It is important to adress how gender effects children.Tv shows and commercials often steroetype women and men into their roles. Generally in the idea of men being ggressive and dominating over women. Leading to young men thinking that being aggressive over women is ok and shows to young women that if a man is like that toward you it is ok and normal. (Earles, K., Alexander, R., Johnson, M., Liverpool, J., & McGhee,2015) This belief is also supported by an interview with Neil Malamuth from UCLA. in this interview there is one statement that is very relevant to this idea "that violence against women is more accepted and thus the acts of violence are more likely to occur." The easy thing to see is the increase in savage acts that has increased in the last few decades.what is less black a white but just as much a problem is how society as a whole has started
In our modern world, sociology has a tremendous impact on our culture, mainly through the processes and decisions we make everyday. For movies and television shows especially, sociological references are incorporated throughout the storyline. A movie which includes many sociological examples is Mean Girls. Mean Girls is a movie based on the life of home-schooled teenage girl, Cady Heron, who moves to the United States from Africa and is placed in a public school for the first time. Cady finds herself in many uncomfortable scenarios and has to deal with the trials and tribulations pertaining to everyday high school issues. Her experiences involve interacting with high school cliques, such as ‘the plastics’, weird high school teachers, relationships,
The movie main character is Cady Heron who is a homeschooled girl. Her and her family lived in Africa for 15 years. They return back to the states and place Cady into a public school for the first time. Cady meets her classmates and finds a few good friends the introduce her to a group of girls called the Plastics. She ends up joining the plastics with the motive of bring them down because her new friend don’t like them very much and thought it would be funny. However, she eventually gets assimilated into the group of three unkind girls and starts to be just like them.
The film “A League of Their Own,” depicts a fictionalized tale of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League. This league was started during World War II when many of the Major Leagues Biggest stars were drafted to the war. MLB owners decided to start this league with hopes of making money while the men were overseas fighting. Traditional stereotypes of women in sports were already in force before the league even begins. One of the scouts letts Dottie, one of the films main characters she is the perfect combination of looks as well as talent. The scout even rejects one potential player because she is not as pretty as the league is looking for even though she is a great baseball player. The player, Marla’s father said if she was a boy she would be playing for the Yankee’s. Eventually Mara’s father is able to convince the scout to take Marla to try outs because he raised her on his own after her mother died. Her father says it is his fault his daughter is a tomboy. In this case the film reinforces the traditional stereotype that mothers are in charge of raising their daughters and teaching them to be a lady, where fathers are incapable of raising girls to be anything other than a tomboy. The focus on beauty also reinforces the traditional stereotype that men will only be interested in women’s sports when the females participating in
Dakota Hoffman Changes and Choices Mrs. Srittmatter. Have you ever felt like you were socially awkward? Well in the book of the perks of being a wallflower a kid named Charlie has a hard time knowing what to do to socialize, in the movie Mean Girls a girl named Katy comes from Africa and also doesn’t know what to do socially, so they both have similar social skills, both causing them to be social outcasts. In the book Charlie starts his freshman year out friendless and he is not really sure on what he is to do to make a friend. But he meets Sam and Patrick and just goes with them because he feels comfortable around them.
Crimes that have been classed as particularly “male” crimes are now being committed more and more by females. These crimes include drug abuse, robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, and murder. Girls also resort to punching, kicking, cutting off another girl’s hair, and burning with a cigarette as forms of assault (Carrigan 186-188). The 1990’s has also seen the rise of female gangs, especially in the Toronto area. Girls are seen as just as violent as boys and showing as little remorse. Membership attitude is less rigid since members can come and go as they please, and often include bored, wealt...
Ideology is “a system of meaning that helps define and explain the world and that makes value judgments about that world.” (Croteau & Hoynes, 2014). According to Sturken (2001), the system of meaning is based on the use of language and images or representation. Therefore, media texts come along and select what is “normal” and what is “deviant” to the extent that this hegemony of constructed meanings in the viewer’s head becomes “common-sense” (Gramsci in Croteau & Hoynes, 2014). From this standpoint, what America claims to be pop culture which is omnipresent in media internationally, is a representation, through “politics of signification” of what is right or wrong (Kooijman, 2008). An example of America’s cultural ‘manifestation’ is Mean Girls,
Mean Girls (2004) is a movie that captures the challenging obstacles, excitements, and the letdowns that the adolescents face during high school. Although the movie is greatly exaggerated and does not hold to the true essence of reality, the film portrays the struggles an individual faces during adolescence. The protagonist of the film, Cady Heron, moves into the suburbs after being raised in Africa by her two scientist parents. As Cady is now enrolled into an American high school, she struggles to find her sense of self-identity as she encounters multiple groups of friends and she tries to fit-in by trying to find the status quo of the “American-high-school-way.” The film also emphasizes the development
The movie that I chose to do my analysis on, is Mean Girls because it is my all-time favorite movie. I watched it a million times, it never gets old and plus I know every single line in the movie. The main character Cady, played by Lindsay Lohan, exhibits how to go from being a nerd, popular, hated and rehabilitated all in one school year. It’s hilarious movie about high school but, it also covers many interpersonal concepts that we learned in class like: verbal communication, conflict and relationship dynamics. Before I provide my analysis, I’ll present my brief summary on the movie Mean Girls.
As preteens and teens push for increasing independence from their parents, they tend to turn to their peers for guidance, acceptance, and security. For those who are low in self-esteem and confidence, their safety lies in fitting in and having a place to belong. Most people find a group in which they connect with in a healthy way while others make their way in cliques that give them security but at the price of their own values and individuality. The movie Mean Girls portrays how high school female social cliques operate and the effect they can have on girls. I will argue how if one doesn’t have a strong sense of self-identity, the opinions of others will become their identity.
Behavior, Aggressive Cognition, Aggressive Affect, Physiological Arousal, and Prosocial Behavior: a Meta-Analytic Review of the Scientific Literature." Psychological Science (2001). EBSCO. DePaul Library. 7 Mar. 2008.