British researchers have found that the tactics of girl bullies are different to those of boy bullies. The girls form cliques and use mind games, and the boys use physical violence. Well, what a surprise. They could have asked that of anyone who went to an all-girls convent school, and not bothered with their research at all. The girls who behave like this are the ones with not much between the ears, who have a nagging sense of inferiority because of it, and who are at the same time furious about it because they feel that they are naturally entitled to be superior. Clever girls, like clever boys, are rarely bullies and have an innate aversion to cliques because cliques impose conformity to the group, which is anathema to the intelligent. Also, clever girls are the ones that clique leaders are most afraid of, because they pose the biggest challenge to their power and dominance. They are a threat even when outside the group, but they would be an even bigger threat within it.
The British researchers discovered that the victims of girl-bullying are almost inevitably the ones who show signs of wanting to join the clique. This gives the clique-leader a tremendous sense of power and she makes the most of it, turning her fellow clique members against these girls and forcing them to perform “tests” on the promise that if they pass, they will be allowed to belong. I would see girls behaving like this at school and wonder why on earth they bothered trying to join some little cow’s petty clique, instead of giving them a two-fingered salute, which was pretty much my attitude. Of course, the more these poor girls demonstrate how much they want to be accepted, the more they are teased, baited and run around with emotionally. And they are never allowed to join the clique.
The only girls that these nasty cliques can’t figure out are the ones who don’t give a damn about them, who don’t admire them, who don’t think that what they do or say has any significance, and who don’t want to be in their gang. That kind of behaviour is really foxing. The clique leaders sniff around girls like this, paw the ground, and after a while, give up and go off. Like animals, they can sense when a girl is only pretending not to care, and when she genuinely does not care about them. The ones who are pretending get the bad treatment. All of this happens because girls, unlike boys, seem to have an innate need to belong to a group. There is argument over whether girls are biologically hardwired for group behaviour, or whether they are programmed to behave like this by society, which for centuries has pressured girls to conform to all kinds of rules and to “behave”. Ultimately, the solution is to raise girls with no compulsion to fit in at all costs. Only this will save them. Parents fear that their daughter will turn out to be what is disparagingly called “an individual” because, to their mind, her inability to fit in with the group will give her grief. They do not see the truth: that it will allow her to make the most of life and her abilities, while all the groupies are hanging around doing little or nothing.
It is because girls are brainwashed from birth to conform to expectations, especially in conservative societies like Malta, that they are especially vulnerable to being sucked in by a group. They go to school, and the first thing they want to do is to conform to expectations there, and to be accepted by one of the many cliques. The net result is that instead of getting a proper education, they are more concerned with maintaining their acceptance by the group. The group consumes all their energies and efforts, and if the group thinks that it is nerdish to do your work and to get good grades, then the girl who wants to fit in will keep her grades low just to conform. This kind of behaviour often carries on even after the girls leave school.
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After 13 years in an all-girl environment, with its bitching, carping, spite, cliquey behaviour, nasty gossip and driving need to compete over the wholly unimportant things (accessories and boys) rather than the important things (exam results), my own personal nightmare is being in an all-woman environment. Let me qualify that: it’s being in an environment of Maltese former convent schoolgirls who have never really grown up. For some reason that I can’t explain, the emotional and social development of many such women has been retarded. I can’t explain it because you would think that even if your parents exerted controlling pressure on you until the age of 23, and your clique likewise, surely by the age of 35 you should have been able to shake off all this? But no, it seems not. The net result is that in early middle-age, these women still behave more or less as they did at school, with the same friends, the same cliques, the same gangs, and the same konfoffi and “shall we include her?” or “u no, xi dwejjaq, let’s not.” They even talk about the same things, and in the same way with the same terminology – but let’s not go into that. If you have spent your school years wasting time in cliques instead of planning a career – or worse, planning a career that consists of a husband with money, a large house with a swimming-pool and children who will grow up to repeat the pattern – then it’s obvious that you’re not going to get very much done with your life. So now, instead of discussing in earnest the latest decorated pencil case from La Rinascente, or brand-ishing a new Benetton jumper which will be worn to death as clothes were in those days, they are comparing notes on what they’ve bought and what they plan to buy with the money their husbands have earned. They are only one step away from being Stepford wives.
Yes, there are women who, 25 years after the school-gates have clanged shut behind them for the last time, still have to do everything with the group. They go skiing with the group every winter, they go to a holiday resort with the group every summer, they spend every Sunday at a sports club with the group, they throw parties and invite the group, they play cards and tennis with the group, and they socialise only with the group. It’s all a hangover from schooldays, because if you scroll back in time, you will find that the group consists mainly of girls they hung around with then. The vice-like grip that the group has over the individuals within it is quite fascinating. Try as I might, I can’t understand how this form of group behaviour is more enjoyable than the adult alternative of living your own life as you deem fit, wearing and doing what you please when it pleases you, and seeing your friends every now and again when you feel like it, while making new friends on the journey from childhood to middle age.
I once went to a birthday party thrown by a woman I had known since schooldays, and was immediately struck by the fact that almost every woman there was a friend from those days, except for the wives and girlfriends of her husband’s friends. You can call it loyalty; I prefer to call it incredible that in 20 years she had never felt the desire to make any new women friends and, more unbelievable still, that the cliquey friends she had when she was 12 were still what she needed and wanted at 35.
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The worst aspect of moving around in a clique is that you always have to conform to its pressures, though I suppose in the end this becomes second nature. The women in these social groups dress the same way, talk the same way, and do the same things. Now they are even beginning to have the same kind of hair, which is enthralling. One of my non-cliquey friends remarked the other day that there are more women with straight blonde hair in certain social groups in Malta than there are in Norway. You have to laugh.
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One of my sons, then aged 12, once came home from his mixed gender school to announce: “When boys fight, they hit each other and then forget about it; but when girls fight, they go on and on and on, sometimes even for a whole year.”
He had made his first great discovery about the difference between the sexes. I began to worry that sending him to a mixed school had had the opposite effect of that intended, making him dislike girls instead of like them. After all, that’s what happened to me: going to a girls’ school only served to make me get along better with boys, and later, with men. I told him to thank his lucky stars that he only had 10 girls in his class, and not 30, like I did. I still wake up in a nightmarish sweat, thinking about all that yapping and nastiness.
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The only shortcoming I can see in the British research into the bullying behaviour of cliquey girls is that it stops short at the school years. The really interesting story is what happens afterwards. Stripped of their powerbase and their territory, once everyone leaves school and goes their own separate ways, suddenly these cliquey girls are lost. They have no direction, very few O-levels and no plans. They have short-sightedly dedicated the past few years to the group, without realising that one day, it would all be over and they would have to grow up. This is one of the reasons why girls in this position continue to cling to the group and to maintain its existence, long after normal adult behaviour decrees that it is no longer necessary, and might even retard one’s social, emotional and career development.
The group is maintained in these situations because it saves the individual members, who were accustomed to being the “superior” girls at school, from the need to face the reality that in adult life, acknowledgement comes from achievement and not from being the member of a clique. In adulthood, the clique is, in effect, a world within a world, a protective shell in which the clique members can create their own reality.
A worse fate awaits the cliquey bullies whose groups do not survive beyond the final departure through the school gates. With few qualifications, not much intellectual ability and no ambition to get ahead, they fall by the wayside. Many of the worst show-offs of my generation ended up in a spiral of hard drugs and disastrous relationships. Several of them got their act together and built a decent life; some of them didn’t, and have ended up in life’s dustbin. In a way, it’s inevitable that this should have happened. The girls who stick together in clumps, deriving a sense of superiority from baiting “the nerds” or “the creeps” (in my time, it was the “freaks”) are, by definition, not particularly bright. They are unlikely to leave school with a sheaf of O-levels tucked under their belt and a desire to do something with their lives. Their definition of achievement is being cool or hip, going out with the right boys to the right places, and wearing the right clothes. It is because they are not intelligent that they behave the way they do, and I will go even further and say that they are aware of their lack of intelligence and it frightens them. The more frightened they are, the more they gather together in cliques and bait the outsiders.
This is where I fail to agree with one aspect of the research: it calls these girls “alpha females”, because they are dominant in the playground. The research ignores the fact that there are different forms of dominance. Dominant women don’t necessarily behave like that, particularly not if they are dominant and intelligent. The most dominant personalise in the playground of a girls’ school are those who are quietly dominant, and who establish the fact early on that nobody is going to be allowed to touch them.
In adulthood, an alpha female is one who is good-looking, intelligent, smart and a high achiever. The definition should not be different for those females who are still in the classroom. Cliquey
bullying girls are not alpha females. They behave the way they do because they feel inferior and invert this to superiority, or because they sense that they are somehow inadequate in the brain department. In no way is this alpha behaviour, and while many of these girls are good-looking in the fashion of the time for a teenager, they lack a primary alpha requirement, which is above-average intelligence coupled with the drive towards achievement.
If these really were alpha females in the playground, then they would still be alpha females in adult life – but almost none of them are. Few of them do anything with their lives except battle relentlessly to preserve their physical appearance against the cruel onslaught of time. That’s hardly an alpha achievement, still less an alpha goal. The story of girl cliques and girl bullies is like that of the tortoise and the hare, with no prizes for guessing who loses in the long race called life.