This American Life - 245: Allure of the Mean Friend

Broadcast on: 05 Sep 2003

In a way the story is always the same. There was this kid. She was mean. She was popular. It's such a fixture of childhood. You can just walk up to a kid on the sidewalk or at a public pool, and they'll tell you. The popularist is this girl. She's in my grade. She's really mean, and she has a lot of friends. I wanted to play with her, and then she had no friends, so she said, "Yeah, the other day I wanted to play with her again," and her friends were there, and she said, "Get lost." Sometimes she'd be a mean to my sister, and I don't like that. She always telling somebody what they can and can't do. She act like she's a boss of people. She's a real boss. She thinks she got the rhythm in a gear. I'm mostly the popular one in my class, but I have a lot of other popular friends. This boy in my class, he liked me, and every time he would come by me, I would tell him to get out of my way. Everybody says that he's the like the nerdiest boy in our class. He'll start bothering me and me and my friends. I'll tell him to leave us alone. My friends even tell him, "Don't even look at her."

I talked to a high school sophomore about all this. Lily Allison, 15, in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and she said, "In high school, anyway, it's kind of like the laws of nature. Someone always will end up on top." Because there's always going to be the girls who are the most popular, and then that the guys look at the most, and that get the friends because they're so pretty. There's always going to be those girls, and I think once people get the idea that they have that power, they're going to use it. And they know that they can be mean to people and still be loved by everyone. You have nothing to lose, so why don't you go ahead and be mean to everybody that's not as good as you? In Lily's class, the girls like that, the popular ones, have been her best friends. When I became friends with them, it was in seventh grade, and there was none of that. It was before the superlatives, and before there was the most attractive. Like, I'll admit, I was one of those girls until the first time they kicked me out of their little group. And then I saw how it really is. That's where we were. We were the four blondes. And what was it like to be one of those girls? Um, it was fun, you know? I mean, the attention is kind of fun. Look at them looking at us. It's fun, it makes you feel powerful. I mean, like, part of being one of the four blondes is that everybody does the same thing. Shaves their legs every day, has a perfect matching outfit, you know what I mean? Yeah. Makeup boys have to be perfect. Not too much, not too little. Suck up to the teachers. Like, I remember I went like two weeks without wearing a skirt, and one of them called me and was like, "You have to wear a skirt tomorrow. You've worn pants too many days in a row." And if you don't fit that, then you get kicked out for a little while. Who really got kicked out at the beginning of this summer? She made a mistake. She didn't do what the other girls wanted at some party. So they called her up to kick her out. One of them is like, she's the mean one. It's kind of like the Spice Girls. We all have our own little, our own little, like, identity, you know what I mean? Yeah. There was like the tough one, the cute one, the smart one, you know what I mean? And the mean one. Yeah. And so when we all got in this fight, they called me up and they put the mean one on the phone. They'd tell her what to say. She'd say it to me, then put me on hold. Figure out what else they wanted her to say, and then say it. Wait, they put you on hold, so you just sit there on hold, waiting for them to come up with the next mean thing? And that's right.

And they didn't even realize how mean it was. Of course, it doesn't always end in high school, and this isn't just about teenage girls. There are popular bullies in business and in politics, some very successful ones in politics.

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