Mean Girls Sociology

Gender inequality is a matter that deals with unequal treatment which revolves around feminism and intersectionality, both of which focus on analyzing gender disparity. The movie ‘Mean Girls’ highlights the notions that constructs female antagonism as deviant. Mean Girls was a high budget teen comedy film, written by Tina Fey, released in 2004. It has been known to be relished thoroughly by the adult set as well as its apparent target audience, teens. The movie centers on a protagonist Cady, who has been homeschooled in Africa all her life and is completely new to the social structure of high school. She moves to Chicago, Illinois, where she first sets foot on the ground of North Shore High School. Two students, Damian and Janis ally with her, but when the Plastics, the most popular girls in the school, contend for her attention, she is sent in as an infiltrator by Janis to scout the Plastics and weaken Queen Bee Regina George’s unkind supremacy. As Cady gradually tries to undertake her objective, she winds up becoming a Mean Girl herself, brushing off her friends, and continuing her life under the influence of the plastic lifestyle. Considering that the movie is female dominant and plunges into issues like resentment, envy and body image ideals, many people acknowledge Mean Girls as a feminist movie.

Mean Girls does not liberate women's rights but instead it contradicts many aspects of gender issues such as, the plight of Cady in a least developed country has unreliably shown lack of civilization, the perception of how girls are the central cause of misogyny and the imitation of Black culture to add racial comedic relief in order to obtain a larger audience.
The protagonist, Cady, is the most compelling character in the movie with an egotistical personality. In school, Cady is labeled as a white homeschooled girl from “Africa” with a complete, vindictive ignorance around American civilization and teenage socialization. And therefore, she is steered by others of how life beyond the borders of Africa is. By showing that Cady comes from another dimension where there is no such thing as a social life, the movie displays a discriminatory image of Africa by narrowing the concept of social structure in a least developed country. In addition, Africa is portrayed as a brutal wilderness, as if all individuals living there are unaware of outer civilization and ethnologies. Throughout the movie, people of color are only visible in minor roles, they would have a one line script like when the principle was introducing Cady as the new girl from Africa, a black girl says “I’m from Michigan” because the principle assumed she was from Africa, which is racially prejudiced. Categorizing individuals as illiterate because of a social concept is a major gender issue that challenges interdisciplinary prospects involved in the expansion of social structure.
In the scene where Cady downsizes her mathematical skills irrespective of her actually understanding the concept taught to her, she continued playing ignorant to get Aaron under her wing and be impressed by her. The movie insinuates that all girls are downplaying their own abilities for men, making its audience especially men, picture that these are the actions that girls in reality do to impress them. The issue is that the movie confirms the dispute that the source of female abhorrence is from girls themselves by providing all inexpedient instances of how girls put down their appearance, ability and treat each other with envy for the sake of attention. On the other hand, men are infrequently shown as having intersectionality in the movie and when they are, it’s pictured as a laughingstock as if men are not sexist. The lack of masculinity suggests that men are not playing important roles in a society. Additionally, portraying such an image of girls conveys a message to the masculine audience, that is, misogyny is woman’s issue not men. The issue of misogyny is pointed at both genders in a genuine perspective which is why it is an element of gender inequality. This also provides a misconception against feminism, showing that women are the issue to intersectionality and inequality. The movie denies the social roles of both genders in a society by its unpleasant scenes.
Unlike the other characters, Asian girls were only as shown speaking Vietnamese and being secluded from the rest of the roles. In the original version of the movie, one of the Vietnamese girl’s statements was incorrectly translated as comprising of the n-word for humorous response from the audience. This does not only seem indispensably racist but it’s also a circumstance where a white writer is mistranslating what an Asian person says in their native language. In addition, this misappropriates Black culture in a comedic way which is exceedingly discriminatory. When a person takes elements of any culture without understanding of or respect of values, it becomes one of the most pervasive forms of cultural delinquency. What’s worse is the notion of misappropriating a culture in a movie that had an expectation of reaching a large audience. This only implies the fact that white people have institutional power over Black people which is an extremely unpleasant philosophy. However, the translated word was omitted from the film and the score of the movie was plummeted.
Mean Girls, has liberated many concepts that undermine gender inequality. These concepts include how Africa is portrayed as an uncivilized region where people living there are illiterate and have no knowledge of the world around them, which completely misrepresents Africans. The outlook of how girls are the dominant cause of misogyny and men are not to be liable and finally, the impersonation of black culture to add a seemingly witty appearance. All these notions demoralize intersectionality and tend to diminish the cultural space that individual still have for one another.