When Bullying Becomes a Laughing Matter

“You can’t sit with us!”

I giggled as I, along with the 20 or so other girls in my high school health class, sprawled out on the classroom floor and watched Mean Girls. Gretchen Wieners had just told Regina George she couldn’t sit at their lunch table because she was wearing sweatpants­­. We’d all seen the movie countless times before, but it didn’t matter. The scene was perpetually funny.

Maybe we thought so because of the way Gretchen impulsively shrieked out the line. Maybe it was because we frequently quoted it at lunch as a joke. Or maybe it was because we thought something like that would never happen in the real world––especially at our school.

I mean, we went to an all-girls school. Research showed that single-sex environments were good for us, right? We were all supposed to be extremely comfortable being ourselves and accepting of each other since boys weren’t there to distract us. Bullying wasn’t an issue.

Except that it was. It was just so subtle that most didn’t notice it.

“Who is she trying to impress here with all that make-up on?” girls would whisper. “Is she a lesbian or something?”

“Why does that girl wear jeans on every single out-of-uniform day?” girls would groan. “There are no guys here––who is she trying to look good for?”

One afternoon, students gathered in the theater for a presentation. We prepared beforehand, stealthily sneaking our cell phones into our uniform pockets so we could amuse ourselves for the hour of torture. Speakers from The Ophelia Project, a national, nonprofit organization committed to creating safe social climates, were there to talk to us.

We rolled our eyes. It was another bullying talk––much like the discussion we had after watching Mean Girls in health class. We peeked down at our cell phones.

But despite our wavering attention spans, a new term had ingrained itself into the mind of every girl in the audience––relational aggression.

Later that day, I remember accidentally bumping into one of my friends in the hallway, dropping all of my books onto the floor.

“OH MY GOSH, I’M SO SORRY,” she squealed sarcastically. “I SWEAR IT WASN’T RELATIONAL AGGRESSION.”

Girls had turned what they learned from the presentation––something incredibly serious––into a laughing matter.

And while I was well aware accidentally bumping into one of my friends wasn’t relational aggression, the actual cases of it––the girl people whispered about because of her hair highlights, the girl people rolled their eyes at simply because she carried a pink purse around school––still went unnoticed, as most girls left the presentation unfazed.

Because, they weren’t bullies, they’d tell you. “Relational aggression” wasn’t something that happened at our school, they’d argue. “Mean Girls” was just a movie. That stuff didn’t happen in real life, they’d say.

Except that it does.

Butler is a Wisconsin college student majoring in English and journalism.