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Mean Girls reading response
“Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized by Regina George.” Okay, behind Mean Girl’s comedic, dramatic and plain exaggerated ideas of what it is like to be in High School, it really made me realise how lucky I am going to an all girls’ school. The film makes me smile every time I watch it because of the way high school is portrayed. After watching this movie, I did start noticing how at my age, girls are very insecure about the way they look and only talk about that. The idea, beauty is only skin deep is often very true in high schools and to fit in, and I learned to not always judge people on how pretty they are on the outside- but how pretty you are on the inside. People always assume that
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This really made me think about how when people are younger, you do not realise what is pretty or not, what makes you cool or not and how pretty girls have an ‘easier’ life. It is only once you grow older where you find out these things. Kady soon adapts to the way high school works and gradually throughout the movie, becomes a plastic. When all you want to do is fit in, you aren’t yourself therefore do not have self acceptance. This is shown through mean girls because it explores how people are bullied for their flaws. “I don’t hate you because you’re fat, you’re fat because I hate you” and “I’m sorry I called you a gapped tooth bitch, it’s not your fault you’re so gapped tooth.” For example, Janis is different, she is herself which means she is labelled- she has to be a ‘lesbian’ just because she is not afraid to express who she really is. “I guess it’s probably because I’ve got a big lesbian crush on you! Suck on that.” This message stayed with me because all these labels really mean nothing. Behind this entire name calling, we are all just people. Why would it matter if she was lesbian anyway? This is vivid in everyday society, people bullying others because they are either bored of their own life, are need a distraction from their own flaws. I’ve always hated bullying, because I’ve seen what it does to people and Mean Girl’s just
In the movie “Mean Girls”, there is a new girl named Caty that moves back to the United States from Africa. She was home schooled all her life and never experienced the high school life. There were two people that befriended her when she first started her classes. They showed Caty the in’s and out’s of the high school. Some examples would be which table to sit at during lunch, who the popular people were, and what was considered social suicide. These were the typical lessons each adolescent learns as they go through high school. Three examples I picked out from the movie were great examples that mimicked what adolescents go through.
She then insisted that the trans woman "stay in her lane", when in fact, as a cis woman, she was outside of her lane by attempting to define what is or is not transphobic. Her first reaction was to defend her ego.
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,
"Cold, shiny, hard, PLASTIC," said by Janice referring to a group of girls in the movie Mean Girls. Mean Girls is about an innocent, home-schooled girl, Cady who moves from Africa to the United States. Cady thinks she knows all about survival of the fittest. But the law of the jungle takes on a whole new meaning when she enters public high school and encounters psychological warfare and unwritten social rules that teen girls deal with today. Cady goes from a great friend of two "outcasts", Janice and Damien to a superficial friend of the "plastics", a group of girls that talks about everyone behind their back and thinks everyone loves them. Adolescent egocentrism and relationships with peers are obviously present throughout the film. I also noticed self worth in relationships, parenting styles, and juvenile delinquency throughout Mean Girls.
In an interview with Piers Morgan on the Piers Morgan Tonight show, King went in depth when describing the struggles she went through when she decided to come out as a lesbian. Beauvoir describes how the biggest obstacle a lesbian women will go through is the act of coming out and admitting that they are actually lesbian, and Billie Jean King completely agreed with this claim. In the interview, Piers Morgan asked her what the biggest challenge of her life was and she said that it was in 1981 when she came out and admitted she was lesbian to the public. King lost all her sponsorships overnight and said that most of the companies called her names such as “slut” and “whore” which affected her greatly. King lost all her money overnight and entered what would be the most difficult years of her life. King did not came out on her terms because she got sued by a former female lover which forced her to go out in public and admit the relationship and that she was actually a lesbian. King says that this made everything more difficult because she believes that a women who is lesbian should come out when they feel 100% comfortable with themselves and with the public knowing who they truly are. This goes hand in hand with Beauvoir’s philosophy when she says that a women has the choice to feel either trapped or
Mean Girls is about a girl named Cady Heron, who relocates from being homeschooled in Africa to high school in the United States. At first, she is naive to the status hierarchy of cliques that are prevalent in the school. But what turns from innocent sabotage of the school's top-of-the-food-chain clique known as "The Plastics" with the first friends that she met upon arrival to the school, becomes her transformation into their cold, hard, shiny, egocentric world.
Within this film the sociological concept based around sex & gender is hit quite a few times. Missy, a new comer to her current school, tries out for the cheering team. She is put under lots of scrutiny from some of the members of the cheer squad. She is underestimated due to her appearance and she proves herself to the team. They already had a candidate in mind, but the captain lets the other two team members know that Missy will be on the team. Hearing this noise infuriated them and they called Missy an “uber dyke” which is a sex and gender stereotype. Missy was treated this way all based on the way she prefered to
Bullying has become a major problem facing the United States today. The American Psychological Association reports that roughly 40% to 80% of children are involved in bullying on some level during their time in school. (APA, 2014) The magnitude of the problem can be observed in the statistics. In the United States, a total of 4,080,879 children between the ages of five and 18 have been the victims of bullying compared to 3,892,199 who have reported that they have engaged in bullying someone else. Additionally, 851,755 said that they have been both the victim and the bully. That's a whopping 8,824,833 people in the United States that have been involved in bullying behavior on one level or another. (High, B., 2000 Census)
In our case, Cady is faced with the biases and pressures that occur in at her school, North Shore High. Towards the beginning of the film, Cady continuously knows every answer to the equations that her math, Ms. Norbury puts on the board. Cady soon gets offered to be a part of the North Shore Mathletes, who would ultimately be the only girl on the team. However, being a female who was very good in math was something that Cady ultimately felt wouldn’t seem cool. As mentioned in Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender and Culture by Julia T. Wood, “as females pass through puberty and become more aware of themselves as gendered and sexed beings, many young women shy away from being geeky or seeming overly smart” (Wood, 169). As Cady becomes influenced by her new friend group called the Plastics, the more she feels she cannot act smart around the men she finds attractive. For example, in one scene of the movie, Cady pretends to be totally lost during a class lecture. She asks the boy she likes for help and pretends to act like she has no idea how to do the math equations. After Ms. Norbury realizes that Cady is dumbing herself down to impress a boy she explains to Cady, “I know that having a boyfriend may seem like the most important thing in the world. But you don’t have to dumb yourself down to get guys to like you” (Michaels). Julia T. Wood writes, “Because cultural stereotypes of femininity do not include
The audience can see the other nonverbal right on the cover of the movie. Three primed young girls with attractive features all dressed in pink. The three girls are all using the concept of physical appearance to create a nonverbal message of power and popularity. Physical appearance is how an individual looks and that leads to the judgments made upon that individual. Judgment is a heavy theme in Mean Girls, and where there is judgment, physical characteristics are not far behind. Regina George judges physical appearance when she talks about Janis Ian, “All of her hair was cut off
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
She makes her own way, makes her own rules and she makes no apologies. A Bad Girl blazes her own trail and removes obstacles from her path. A Bad Girl fights and forces her way to the top with style and beauty. A Bad Girl believes in jumping first and looking later. People will love you. People will hate you. Others will secretly wish to be you. A Bad Girl is you” (Season 16, episode 3). The framing of these women shows the image of an immature young women outrageous behavior and broken down structure to womanhood. Furthermore, sends a message to young girls that it is okay to act like a “bad girl” for older women in their twenties and late twenties are rewarded with camera time, a limitless supply of alcohol with a limo to chauffeur them to party’s. Normal behavior is portrayed as uninteresting, undesirable and worthless, and is covered up by the drama, fighting and drinking to advertise more normal lifestyle for the girls. Girls are put into a terrible double blind. They 're supposed to repress their power, their anger, and their exuberance and be simply "nice", although they also eventually must compete with men in business world and be successful. They must be overly sexy and attractive but essentially passive and virginal (Kilbourne
The adolescence is proposing questions of self-identity and trying to understand more of self during these years. Mean Girls emphasizes these self-identifications by capturing different cliques and group of people that the high schoolers associate and label themselves as. For instance in the film, Cady is being accepted by Janis and Damian, but they want Cady to engage in a risky behavior by associating herself as “The Plastics.” This plan started out with the intention of trying to find out more high school secrets and to humiliate “The Plastics,” but Cady turned more like them as she received more acceptance by them. Mean Girls demonstrates not only the sense of self emerging during the adolescent age, but the struggles of all it takes to find a sense of self-identity. Cady eventually put her relationship with Janis and Damian, parents, and acquaintances of school on the line by trying to maintain her “Plastic”
One of the major conflicts is the intrapersonal conflict Cady has with herself. Cady goes from being home-schooled in Africa to entering the “girl-world” in high school. Throughout the movie, Cady is trying to fit in, become popular and to get the attention of her crush, Aaron Samuels. This causes Cady to ultimately lose herself in the process of becoming Plastic. In the effort to take revenge on Regina for taking Aaron back, Cady loses her own self by attempting to be Regina. This gets Janis to notice Cady’s transformation especially when Cady throws party the same night of Janis’s art show and doesn’t even show up to the art show. Janis came to Cady’s house tell her: “You think that everyone is in love with you, when actually, everyone hates you.” Cady then has to decide whether she wants to become a better person or become someone she’s
Bullying is a form of violence, a way to gain the power to repress the weak.