Are Girls Mean?

Best-selling author Rachel Simmons slumps on a couch before giving a talk to a group of girls. "I'm wiped," says the 27-year-old. With her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing jeans, chunky jewelry and a knee-length black jacket, she looks almost as youthful as the girls she is here to see.

No wonder. The frenzy over so-called mean girls, the subject of Simmons' book, "Odd Girl Out," as well as a spate of other books just out (Rosalind Wiseman's "Queen Bees and Wannabes"; Emily White's "Fast Girls"; Phyllis Chesler's "Women's Inhumanity to Women"), is building. She recently appeared on Oprah -- for the second time. Newsweek just put a mean girls story on the cover. And for the second week in a row, she was listed on the New York Times best seller list. (Last week she climbed to number 6.)

Buoyed by a wave she doesn't entirely understand, Simmons has come to conclude that the interest in her topic is linked to the concern over adolescent bullying provoked by the Columbine high school shootings, whose perpetrators had been ostracized by their peers. While Columbine involved boys, Simmons says, "it was only a matter of time before girls were discussed."

The link may seem tenuous, but it is true that many people, remembering their own tortured adolescence, responded viscerally to the despair and rage felt by the Columbine shooters. Just as many now are responding viscerally to the powerful examples Simmons uses to prove her point that girls engage in aggression that is indirect but at least as damaging as that of boys. A group of girls tormented one poor soul by sending her flowers under the name of a boy she had a crush on, sending him a sexually explicit letter under her name and telling a teacher she was cheating on tests. These examples provide a darkly fascinating portrait of the incredible lengths to which girls will go to humiliate other girls.

Yet there's also a way that Simmons' book and others like it are generating heat by playing into ongoing debates about gender and kids. First came a wave of books in the early to mid '90s, like Carol Gilligan's and Lyn Mikel Brown's "Meeting at the Crossroads" and Peggy Orenstein's "Schoolgirls," that looked at how girls lost confidence during adolescence. The books chronicled how girls started to feel pressure to conform to notions of feminine demureness, how they began to perform less well academically, particularly in subjects of math and science, and how they engaged in destructive behaviors like eating disorders. And they launched a movement to address the problem that sparked a crop of new girls schools around the country.

What about boys?, shouted a subsequent spate of books that seemed to be a reaction to the burgeoning interest in girls. Michael Gurian's "Wonder of Boys" and "Raising Cain" by Daniel Kindlon and others argued that boys' emotional lives were being ignored or misunderstood, and that there was a misguided attempt to turn boys into girls rather than channeling their testosterone in productive ways. While the books didn't necessarily counter the books on girls, they drove home a message: Girls aren't the only ones who have problems, so do boys.

Now comes a new rush of books that fits right into the cultural dialogue created by the previous waves of books. At first hearing, the new books sound like a postscript to the tomes demanding attention for boys: By the way, girls are mean too, not simply virtuous angels deserving of constant concern. At least that's how they could be interpreted and possibly one reason for their appeal.

So it's no surprise that revered feminist scholar Carol Gilligan, who has a new book, "The Birth of Pleasure," worries that a backlash against girls is afoot. Gilligan says she has mixed feelings about the mean girl books. She feels that Simmons' book in particular is an "excellent" attempt to air an undeniable problem. But she is suspicious of the larger uproar Simmons' and other books have created. "At a point when people have started to look at girls and see their strength, suddenly this comes up," Gilligan says.