From Book Riot:
Mean Girls is coming back, and as the trailer says, it’s not your mother’s Mean Girls! I saw the movie in theaters in middle school and am now an adult who doesn’t have children, so this marketing is maybe not targeted at me specifically. However, it did bring up memories for me of the book that the original movie was based on: Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence by Rosalind Wiseman. The nonfiction book was pitched at parents and teachers as a way to help them understand what teen girls were going through. In the 20 years since the movie, the landscape of bullying and adolescence has changed a lot. But the enduring legacy of Mean Girls shows it still has some relevance for today’s teenagers.
Two of the major points from the original Mean Girls movie are that being a teenager is rough and popularity is corrosive. There’s nothing necessarily easy about adolescence, but popular kids make it look like they have it all figured out. That’s one of the reasons Cady strives to be like the Plastics, even though she is secretly working against them. Despite knowing that they are mean, she wants to win at high school. She gets obsessed with outdoing Regina and feels joy when people see her as a member of the high school elite.
The original Mean Girls movie doesn’t write off the Plastics entirely at the end: all the characters are shown to have struggles that inform the way they act out towards other girls at the school. Teenagers lash out for a variety of reasons, and though some are inexcusably awful–Regina George using lesbophobia as a tool to exile Janis is gross–we can learn how to be better and be kinder to each other.
When celebrating the 20th anniversary of Mean Girls (Hi old!), you can read nonfiction about teens and how to raise kids in a way where they won’t be as mean and also read a variety of fun books about cliques and teen popularity problems.
Link to the rest at Book Riot