Has Patriarchy Turned Us Into A Bunch of Mean Girls?

In the 2004 film “Mean Girls” we watched a group of high schoolers maneuver the delicate dance of adolescence. The film shed a comical light on the social hierarchies women navigate when competing for the prizes of patriarchy, that would be men, and no one was a bigger competitor than Regina George. Mean girl extraordinaire, Regina, and her crew of “plastics”, brought down a reign of teen terror all in the hopes of winning back the ultimate prize, a boy. But as competition intensified, everyone would soon realize that there was no victory to be had, especially Regina. The film unintentionally highlighted that amongst women living under gendered oppression, the victor, the villain, and the victim are often one and the same. Although a villain in her social circle, Regina George was no less a victim, albeit an unsympathetic one. And the same can be said for any young woman who believes that her feminine power rests solely in her ability to maneuver men. But we can’t blame young girls like Regina, we all learn fairly early on that boys can either make life heaven or hell for us. And when you ingrain young girls with the belief that the quality of their life is predicated on their ability to be selected by men, other girls stop being advocates and start being adversaries.

What happens when a woman devotes her energy to chasing the spoils of patriarchy? She…