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February 10 - February 14, 2021
Women went to step classes or, worse, book clubs. The
(like how female friendship is represented on greeting cards with pictures of stilettos or glasses of wine)
Men told us not to rely on our own sex—and turn to them instead.
gives lectures and runs workshops around the country to teach women how important it is to have friends and to go out with them regularly.
At the time the movie was released in 1988, there weren’t many films about women at all.
Many of the movies and television shows in the 1980s that had two female characters showed them not getting along. They were usually rivals, often fighting over a man.
Afterward, CC asks her husband, “What will I do without a best friend?” “You have me,” he says. “It’s not the same,” she says.
“What I’m talking about is how girls fall in love with their best friends,” Blume
I knew it from the beginning but I didn’t realize how much people would struggle to see themselves and others beyond labels.”
“I think it’s a way to minimize and make cute something that people don’t really want to look at, which is girls do have feelings of aggression and desire at that age, and they’re not always behaving as they should be. They’re filled with yearning and anger and all of these things. It seems diminishing to me. If you look at those two words, ‘mean,’ which is sort of a very light term. It’s not saying ‘evil’ or ‘dark’ or ‘wild.’ It’s almost sweet. And then ‘girls’ of course, not young women. I think it’s the whole package. It feels like a pat on the head like, ‘Oh, you mean girl.’”
“relational aggression has received an abundance of media attention. Books, movies and websites have portrayed girls as being cruel to one another, thus creating and reinforcing the stereotype of ‘mean girls.’
“That girl thinks she’s the queen of the neighborhood / I got news for you, she is!”
It’s not surprising. Waves of feminism are always followed by these backlashes, as Susan Faludi noted in her landmark book Backlash. So we had this wave suddenly saying, ‘Oh, by the way, guess what? Girls are mean.’”
With the rise of the term “mean girls,” we’re strangling teens with the notion that they are all mean and should keep busy doing the backstabbing that they were born to do.
And how small a part of a woman’s life is that.”
But at the time, I was always conscious of being a woman, in a way that I hadn’t been in high school or college, when I wasn’t so convinced that my sex might be holding me back.
“My femininity is my white noise, the creaks and groans of the house that is my body.”
What women cared about, I thought, was embarrassing and bad. What men cared about mattered. Any interests they had should be taken seriously.
think, comes from the same place my refusing to befriend other women at the office did: the fear that only one woman can be promoted. We’re made to believe that it’s impossible to rise together. The only way up is to be the one woman who’s worthy, whether that’s by ingratiating yourself with the guys, like I did, or by cutting off all other female contenders.
It’s making it so the women who do get ahead don’t trust other women enough to lift them up too.
was conscious of the way I was sitting, of how much I was talking, of nodding a lot when someone said something Dan was into, and of laughing only when the rest of the room did.
“Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together, day after day, bound not by sex or physical attraction or money
or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going.”
begin. I’d moved beyond viewing marriage as a platform to take flight from—and I was getting further from seeing it that way each day.
Cocreator Larry David’s credo was “no hugging, no learning.”
our friendships make us bigger than ourselves. “It’s
possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship,”
Strangers stared.
As we get older that prominence that a best friend holds can fall away—adult women are more likely to be asked if they have a boyfriend than a best friend and to wear an engagement ring instead of a BFF charm.
“She is the mother I never had. She is the sister everybody would want. She is the friend that everybody deserves. I don’t know a better person.”
“I think that we’re seeing some different depictions of friendship. Do I think that it’s going far enough? Or that we’re seeing too much of it or even enough of it? No, absolutely not. There’s always room for more and on this particular topic there’s room for a lot more. The fact that there’s not really a model of family that’s not very heteronormative is really insane.” —
And frankly, many people [in the United States] treat their partners in ways that they would never treat their best friends and allow themselves to say and do things that no best friend would ever accept. Friendship does not operate along the same lines.”
When we perpetuate this idea that you should marry your best friend, we’re saying you should only have one relationship in your life, and that ends up eroding any support network you have outside the marriage. It’s this sort of isolating tactic and maybe it’s fine but maybe you wind up cut off from literally everything else and you don’t have anyone to turn to if you need someone.”
Jessica is a boisterous blonde. Lennon is a more subdued redhead.
But the knee-jerk reaction to women together is that we can’t possibly get along, that we’re only pretending to like each other.
But we’re also led to believe that if another woman gets something—a medal, a promotion, or even a committed relationship—then another one of us won’t.
Mindy: “Best friend isn’t a person, Danny, it’s a tier.”
“Ms. Swift has been actively cultivating these friendships as part of her retreat from the tabloids in recent years. Rather than be known as a serial dater, she’d prefer to be thought of as a serial befriender.”
“If it’s authentic, there’s nothing more beneficial or helpful, as a woman, than to have a band of strong women who support you behind you,” she says. “That being said, not every girl is going to fit into this construct of a squad, and I think it can become exclusionary in a way that isn’t healthy or beneficial to all girls.”
This search—and standing with other women—felt more urgent after the election of Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States.
It’s such a testament to towering female strength that you can not only survive this, but you can figure it out. You can give everything you didn’t get to your little girl and then she can go
out and give it to millions of women.
She had so much to overcome, but look at the steel rod she placed in her daughter’s spine.”
“Feminist activists were still out there—fighting for reproductive rights and against sexual violence, joining Black Lives Matter—but the movement that attracted the most attention was the up-the-corporate-ladder kind. Empowerment was catchier than equality. Powerful women in business became the faces of modern (white) feminism, even if they expressed little interest in feminism itself.”
Women are stepping up together, loudly and publicly, like we’ve had to do before and will again, like Dorothy Rodham did for her daughter and like her daughter did for me.
