You weren’t popular.

(Image links to Mean Girls Wikipedia page)

I am fascinated by social hierarchies and social inequality, popularity struggles and the ecosystems of adolescence.  I’m also interested in the concept of popularity, which is important for the rest of this post.  ”Popular” kids in middle school in high school are widely revered for whatever reasons, but aren’t necessarily popular by definition because often times they are widely disliked outside of (or even inside of) their own cliques.  And some cliques will reject what the majority views as popular and go by their own mini-hierarchy with their own popularity contests.  Likewise, there are lots of kids who are genuinely popular in middle school and high school, in that everyone likes them, but are not considered part of the popular crowd.  When I use the term in this post, I’m generally referring to the former concept.

I mentioned in a recent post, Individualism, bad books, and conflict resolution, that Spain, or at least Madrid, seems to have a different, more relaxed system of social hierarchies in grade school and university environments.  Groups of 17-year-olds who appear to have drastically different senses of fashion, music, and pop culture preferences are frequent here, groups that are much harder to find in the United States, at least in the under-25 demographic.  Of course the fact that groups are more mixed here is not a bad thing — for youth, fashion senses are often fleeting, tastes in music fickle, and the moment’s popular trends are just that.  Later in life you (hopefully) realize that, while occasionally those things can be indicators of deeper personality traits or compatibility, there are better ways to choose your friends.

Earlier this year with my class we watched the movie Camp Rock, starring the Jonas Brothers and a bunch of other Disney hopefuls.  The plot is classic for the pre-teen genre: girl (brunette, naturally) is awesome but not popular; popular girl (blonde, naturally) is actually really insecure and has a crappier life than the unpopular girl; there’s some lying and some scheming, both parties get humiliated, they fight over a boy; unpopular girl becomes popular for being who she really is and gets boy, who, it turns out, never cared if she was popular or not because he’s actually really deep; popular girl gets back down to earth and everyone becomes friends.

During scenes in which there was a lot of cattiness and scheming on the popular girl’s part, and those where adolescent girls were going to such great lengths to break free from their social status and join a different one, my teacher was saying that it all seemed so unrealistic.  I told her that movies like this were always overdramatic, but that social hierarchies in U.S. grade schools can be very rigid and can cause kids a lot of problems.  It was something she had a hard time wrapping her mind around because it was a foreign concept to her.

In movies and TV shows that deal with cliques and popularity and the horrors of grades 6 through 12, there is often a level of cruelty that for all my high school’s cliques, popularity fights, and cutthroat girls striving to be on top, I was fortunate never to witness.  I’m referring to things like popular or athletic guys beating up geeky boys just because they’re geeky; popular kids asking an unpopular kids to a dance as a joke; physically threatening and taunting mentally challenged students.  That isn’t to say, though, that other schools in the U.S. don’t experience that sort of cruelty, nor that other types of cruelty didn’t exist in mine.  Social struggles in high school and middle school are exhausting, stressful, and sometimes harmful.  It’s rare that a kid doesn’t agonize at least a little over some sort of social issue, but there are a few here and there and I was always jealous of them.

Cruelty like the above aside, adolescent cliques and social hierarchies are normal, at least in our culture.  And not all of them are damaging.  The qualifications for social status change as you get older, but learning to deal in grade school is often training for dealing afterward.  It can, however, come as a shock, as it did to me, when you discover that those qualifications are different and you don’t know where to look for your new ones.  I struggled with that one when I first started college.  I worked through it, but some people don’t.  One time a good friend of mine from high school, let’s call her Monica, who was always popular without effort and regardless of whom she befriended outside of her main clique, mentioned to another girl, we’ll call her Regina, from our circle that she was going to hang out with a bunch of our friends, all of which were friends from high school or earlier.  Regina made some sort of exclamation about how Monica was still hanging out with them.  Monica asked Regina why she didn’t, and Regina answered, “Because I’m not in high school anymore!” and asked Monica why she was still hanging out with them.  Monica said, “Because they’re my friends.”  She told me this story a couple of years ago but it’s always stuck in my head.  Regina has known Monica for many years, and would know that she’s not the type that tries to cling to a clique or social status.  So why did she feel the need to point out that she was the one who wasn’t in high school anymore?

I came to my own conclusions, as did Monica.  But it makes me think about the consequences of not being able to move on from the social ecosystem of high school.  In college I took a psych/soc class on human sexuality.  My TA was okay-looking, pear-shaped and bottom-heavy, wore dark clothes, hard short hair that she often dyed different colors, and had a cynical and sarcastic sense of humor.  There was a blonde girl in our class who was very nice, decently dressed (and was trendy but always had something interesting on because she knew how to sew and was able to make her own clothes), petite, had a nice bag, and had pretty features but some moderate-to-severe acne problems.  One day, our TA said that this girl reminded her of the really popular girl in high school that was so pretty and perfect that you just wanted to hate her, but you couldn’t because she was so damn nice and sincere.  She said, “You were popular, right?”  The girl shifted in her seat, laughed nervously, and said she didn’t know (on which I call bull because we all know what crowds we did or didn’t belong to).  I thought maybe I detected some bitterness in the TA’s voice.  She did reveal at least two things, though: one, that she was not considered, or at least didn’t consider herself, popular in high school, and two, that she at least sometimes felt that resentment toward the kids who were considered popular in high school.

I thought what she said was interesting because it showed the different places from which the TA and I and the other people in the class were coming.  I hadn’t put the girl in that category because, as fair or unfair as this is, at my school those who were considered popular were better dressed and prettier.  But my TA either remembered a popular crowd that was aesthetically different from the one I experienced, or she was focusing on the general characteristics (blonde, clothes, demeanor, a general look that makes all those people the same) as an outsider who might ignore or overlook the details that caused me to make a different assumption.  Then my TA continued the conversation and made the rest of us all very uncomfortable.  (The blonde girl, as she was so nice, seemed to remain uncomfortable by the backhanded compliment and I don’t think we ever found out if the TA’s assessment was correct.)

The TA started picking other people in the class and stating whether or not they were popular in high school.  She didn’t do everyone — she never got to me, which made me kind of relieved but kind of disappointed because I was curious to see how she would assess me.  I noticed that she mostly picked people that were overweight, awkward, unattractive, not fashionable.  I remember one girl in particular: quiet, heavy, seemed nice, and had terrible, crooked teeth.  The TA pointed at her and said, “You weren’t popular.”  She asked if she was right, and the girl, whose feelings I can only imagine were hurt, said something about how they didn’t really have cliques and popularity at her high school.  (I don’t know where she was from, so anything’s possible, but usually that’s dodging the question.)  The TA did the same to a few other students, and aside from the fact that what she was doing seemed borderline inappropriate to me given the weight that our culture gives things like popularity, what struck me most was the bitter and hostile tone in her voice as she went through a fourth of the class.  Since then, there have been times that I’ve wondered if, as she was a graduate student in the department, she was doing some sort of social experiment for research purposes, but given her tone I kind of doubt it.  And if she was, then I think her research might be a little tainted by her clearly hostile views on the whole popularity thing.  Will she get over it?  Will the girl from my high school?  What are some of the things that make it difficult for someone to move on from the social hierarchies of adolescence?  What were the social systems like in your middle schools and high schools?

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