London teacher fined $717 for posting Hitler picture on Facebook: http://dlvr.it/8dgC4j
It gets worse:
Mahmudul Choudhury, 35, was reported to the police by a Jewish student who he had previously friended on the social networking site….
The Hitler photo shared by Choudhury was accompanied by the caption, “Yes man, you were right… I could have killed all the Jews, but I left some of them to let you know why I was killing them. Share this picture to tell the truth a whole world’.
sunspottedgirl replied to your post: sigh
why do people think this is funny> why why reminds me of a guy who used to torment me in high school ugh
the asks probably remind you of a guy in high school because they’re so juvenile
i don’t think anon was trying to be funny tbh i think they were trying to make me feel bad because they have a problem with things i post (and also because they are antisemitic)
even though they might say if asked that they were “trolling,” the fact they think it’s remotely okay to say the k slur or joke about the holocaust shows they are antisemitic
it’s funny because i just made a post about how i got a death threat from someone who called me a kike a long time ago – but i feel like the post that probably “inspired” those asks was the even more recent one i made calling out non-jews for speaking with authority about jews
either that or it’s some random hate follower who decided finding out i was jewish was a wonderful opportunity to send me hate mail
the fact some of the worst instances of hate ive recieved came when ppl have found out im jewish just goes to show you antisemitism is still a very real problem – i think a lot of people just won’t show it to your face
sigh
another time i got a threat from someone saying i was a kike who should be slaughtered that seemed to come from my school and i emailed tumblr staff about it
this time, i don’t think there was much they could do because it was an anonymous submission not even an ask, so the person would have been logged out or maybe had no tumblr at all
but i just wanted to know if they had anyway of tracking the person’s IP address given that they had been on my blog
and again, they sent me a cookie cutter response about blocking the user (WHICH DIDN’T EVEN APPLY IN THIS CASE, THERE WAS NO WAY TO BLOCK AN ANONYMOUS SUBMISSION)
so then i sent them an irate reply, calling them out for not even reading my post, asking for the information I wanted and asking what would happen if i got police involved since i was literally afraid for my safety at school
and they FINALLY responded that if and only if police got involved would they try to help me lol
Oh, one of these. Great. I got chased off of a forum I moderated by an Animals’ Rights activist who called us all “atavistic barbarians” (and, without exaggeration, that was the kindest thing he said). Oy.
“I’m going to save you from yourself, and once I’ve brainwashed you into thinking like me, you’ll thank me!” Yeah, no thanks. And this is coming from someone that is a committed Jewish atheist.
Every once in a while I like to point out I ate my first bagel when I was around 16, because bagels aren’t a Jewish thing everywhere.
Yep. I think the Moonbat Anon drew on her “cultural christianity” for the litany of false and offensive stereotypes in her messages,and chief of those is that all Jews are Ashkenazi.
Oh, I’m Ashkenazi, but we don’t do bagels in Israel.
HAHAHAHA “u can still be a jew, u can still eat bagels and **gettlefish**”
cause THATS what being jewish is about at its core, about eating bagels and gefiltefish
omfg
thats what my entire identity is constructed around, fucking eating fucking bagels and fucking gefiltefish
holy fuck
I just can’t get over the Jews having sex through a hole in a blanket part… Like that’s got to be one of the most antisemitic things I’ve ever read. And just for anon’s and everyone else’s education:
In Jewish law, sex is not considered shameful, sinful or obscene. Sex is not thought of as a necessary evil for the sole purpose of procreation. Although sexual desire comes from the yetzer ra (the evil impulse), it is no more evil than hunger or thirst, which also come from the yetzer ra. Like hunger, thirst or other basic instincts, sexual desire must be controlled and channeled, satisfied at the proper time, place and manner. But when sexual desire is satisfied between a husband and wife at the proper time, out of mutual love and desire, sex is a mitzvah.
A man may never force his wife to have sex. A couple may not have sexual relations while drunk or quarreling. Sex may never be used as a weapon against a spouse, either by depriving the spouse of sex or by compelling it. It is a serious offense to use sex (or lack thereof) to punish or manipulate a spouse.…there are passages in the Talmud that encourage foreplay to arouse the woman. (Nedarim 20a). Any stories you may have heard about Jewish sex occurring through a hole in a sheet are purely an urban legend.
(Source)
Also:
Okay, this is actually genuinely offensive. Where on Earth did you learn about Judaism, Stormfront? For G-d’s sake, choose another career at the very least- nobody will want to be rescued by you.
Shmuel Boteach, author of the acclaimed Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy labels the sheet rumor as utterly false. “Judaism,” he says, “is the one religion that not only allows sex for pleasure but sees sex as the holiest of all acts because it brings life into the world – and even when it doesn’t, it sews two people together as one flesh, one soul.”
(Source) But you know Jews are so barbaric and backwards about sex…
you know how people say Einstein failed math?
some people say that the differences in German and Swiss grading systems are the reason behind this urban myth, but I’m more cynical – especially since I’ve seen people use this very myth to back up the antisemitic claim that Einstein stole all his work from his non-Jewish wife (a claim I’ve seen cycled through tumblr but also among Neo-Nazis – once again showing us how leftists can be just as antisemitic as the far right)
btw i just started reading this book Einstein’s Jewish Science and it’s awesome i esp recommend it for jewish ppl
Eastern European Jews are made the scapegoats for certain defects in present-day German economic life, things that in reality are painful after-effects of the war. The confrontational attitude toward these unfortunate refugees, who have escaped the hell that Eastern Europe is today, has become an efficient and politically successful weapon used by demagogues. When the government contemplated measures against Eastern European Jews, I stood up for them in the Berliner Tageblatt, where I pointed out the inhumanity and irrationality of these measures.
the Albert Einstein they never told you about, speaking publicly against German antisemitism in 1922 (Source)
Thank you for your contribution:
Would anyone else of Jewish origin like to contribute?
– STM
This is true but I won’t comment
Yea some Jews in America can certainly benefit from white privilege because of how white supremacy operates in the USA. Those benefits don’t give white-passing Jews equal (or, as some people absurdly claim) more privilege than white people—Jews as a whole are still excluded from whiteness & actively harmed by white supremacy based on ethnic/racial anti-Semitism.
Conditional white privilege is afforded to white-passing Jews in a temporal way—as in, if you aren’t too overt about your Jewishness in some social settings, you will be afforded white privilege; however, it can change literally according to the whims of non-Jewish white people, and there’s this consistent point of view that even if the non-Jewish white people let the Jews ‘be’ one of them them temporarily, it’s shaky and you’re expected to deal with the violence, anti-Semitism, and overall any sort of oppressive behavior. If you don’t, white-passing or not, you will be non-white. It’s according to behavior, setting, ‘acting Jewish,’ assimilation of all kinds, etc.
This is me speaking from a point of view of a Jewish family that ranges from white-passing Jews to black Jews. I have seen how conditional white privilege works with Jews, and while it’s much better than how my black Jewish relatives are treated, it doesn’t mean that white-passing Jews get to be automatically aligned with white supremacy and shielded from harm—I still have white-passing cousins who get called Khazarian impostors who are invading the white race (for the record, my white-passing cousins aren’t European, they are West Asian), are called kikes on the regular, and are the targets of violence.
Conditional white privilege for Jews in America is also highly, highly location based. In New York City, someone with stereotypically “Jewish,” often Ashkenazi features will read as white. In backwoods Virginia? Not so much. I read as white if I do my makeup the right way and straighten my hair, and I don’t say anything that makes my Jewishness explicit. As soon as I do so, my reception here in the South changes — I go from educated, articulate woman to A Jew. And that is open season. It means I get asked if my hair hides my horns. It means I get asked if I have a trust fund, or if I got in college/grad school because my parents are donors. (My parents are actually working class, thanks. Not all Sephardim got here early and prospered. Some of us are still dealing with language barriers and being alienated from the dominant Ashkenazi culture that surrounds American Judaism.) I had students in the Midwest come up to me after class and tell me I was the first Jew they’d ever seen and I “didn’t look like” what they thought Jews looked like, because I didn’t have “you know, the big nose.” I’ve had people throw pennies at me. I got the crap beat out of me repeatedly in school because Jews were running the world. I’ve had people track down my information on the internet to send me death threats because Hitler should’ve finished the job. That is not white privilege.
Antisemitism is really complex, but the thing that is critical to remember is that it grew out of the emergent “science” of racism in the 18th and 19th centuries. As white, European men set out to sort the world into tidy taxonomies, people were also sorted. And Jews, as Europe’s long-standing, much maligned social Other, were understood to be something else. Not white. Not Aryan. Not like Western European Christians. And in the moment when race developed, the sense that Jews could never shake their Jewishness, that it was something in their blood, and conversion to Christianity couldn’t fix it, that was when earlier, religious anti-Judaism turned into modern antisemitism. Antisemitism is wholly race and ethnicity based. And while it is mediated by culture in the same way that many forms of racism are, given distinct forms in distinct places and times, it is based on the idea that Jews are biologically “something other,” in the same way that Asians are “something other.”
Jews in the US have only taken on the status of “model minorities” tending into conditional white privilege since the Holocaust. So whenever you want to talk about Jews being white, remember this: it took the attempted genocide of the Jewish population of Europe to give American Jews the ability to not be subjected to quotas in housing, university slots, and to be accepted into American social institutions — if only grudgingly. America was still dealing with accusations of “blood libel” — in which Jews are accused of murdering Christian children to use their blood in festival food, primarily Passover matzah — in the 1920s. This is not the distant past. This is within living memory. But with the Holocaust showing the full end game of antisemitism, Americans recoiled and tried to act as if they weren’t anything like Nazis and American Jews were always flourishing here.
White America pointed to the way assimilated American Jews had prospered and decided that Jews were doing just fine — and then turned our apparent prosperity into a stick to beat other minority groups with. (This is not dissimilar to how the Irish became white, but made complex by the fact that Jews are still, to use a legal sense, a distinct, insular minority.) In order to obtain that conditional whiteness and thereby prosperity and access offered by white America, Jews must assimilate. They must stop observing Judaism in traditional ways and act more like their Christian neighbours. (This is not unlike how German Jews learned to prosper in the 19th century. But given Germany’s history, it is safe to say that trading assimilation for begrudging acceptance is the devil’s bargain.)
What I really want to point out is this: Jewish identity in America is intersectional. In some cases, we benefit from white privilege, or we may be white-passing. However, we are oppressed by Christian privilege, often violently. (FBI hate crime statistics back this up.) It does not matter how observant or not Jews are; we are lumped in a group of “not Christian,” and as a consequence, we are forced to adhere to Christian social scripts, Christian calendars, Christian values if we are to interact with American society at large. (And when we don’t, we’re accused of being clannish or exhibiting cult-like behaviour.) We are expected to smile and give approval to Christians appropriating our culture, rituals, language, and holidays. We are lumped in as an afterthought as the imaginary American “Judeo-Christian” heritage. We are Other, tolerated, objectified, or spoken over on a religious axis. When Jews do not have white/white-passing privilege, we then suffer from more oppression when racial and religious oppression fall down on us. Which makes this complex, and often leads to this tension where those who are not part of the Jewish community see the image of primarily New York Jews, accepted as part of the city’s fabric, and project that Judaism is only oppressed on a religious axis, if it is oppressed at all. But when you are part of the community and have a legacy of oppression, suffering, forced conversion, death marches, assaults, and microaggressions, both for your religious beliefs and for how Jewish or not you look, how white or not you are perceived to be, it is immediately and viscerally apparent how intersectional, conditional, and fraught Jewish identity is in the United States.
We are a contested people, constantly defined by those outside of our communities and expected to accept their definitions in order to access the privilege they offer in return for our docile agreement. We are often model minorities, held up as what other oppressed groups should be like, obscuring our struggles right now for the Holocaust, the one white Americans feel comfortable talking about, talking over, appropriating and fetishizing. So to say that Jews are a religious group, not a category of race or ethnicity, that serves to obscure the intersectionality of our existence in America, and it only contributes to the idea that Jews must be one thing and one thing only in order to be appropriately Jewish in the US — pale skinned, Eastern European, not too religious, and urban. But for the rest of us, out in the parts of the States where none of those things save us from violence, that definition from other oppressed folks does far, far more harm than good.
For me, the whole question of the racialization of Jews is incredibly complicated. You have some Jews growing up seeing themselves as white their entire lives. That was me until I learned more about Jewish history, culture and politics on tumblr. To be fair, I didn’t have a Jewish upbringing whatsoever. My Jewish father died when I was a kid and my non-Jewish mother raised me. But I still do know there are Jews out there who never have really thought about the question of the racialization of Jews or white privilege.
When I first ran into this discourse I strongly disagreed with it, but I didn’t know anything about the racialization of Jews in Europe or how we were racialized in the US earlier in history, and how the question of when we became white in the United States’ imagination, if ever, is hotly debated. Then I encountered the rhetoric of white supremacists and how none of them saw us as white. And was told to my face by a white supremacist that I “had it out for white people.” After experiencing antisemitic online bullying from white supremacists and becoming too afraid to engage with them when I saw them being racist because I knew I’d become a target, too, I started to think of things differently.
I too have had someone track me down to attack me online from school. At first it was due to me being trans. Then, once they learned I was Jewish, THAT’S when they decided to send me death threats and call me a kike. This happened in the wake of the shooting on the Jewish community center and retirement home in Kansas city. They found out I was Jewish based on my posts on the shooting, and told me I should be slaughtered. I was literally afraid for my safety and dropped my classes, because evidence pointed to the person being from my school and in one of my classes. I live in San Francisco. Not the deep south.
But when I lived in a rural part of California where a nearby neighbor actually hung a confederate flag on his house, antisemitism was quite overt. Calling random people “Jew” was a insult my peers frequently used for laughs. My brother got it much worse than I did because he openly identified as Jewish and I thought we couldn’t be real Jews because our mother wasn’t Jewish.
I think it’s really complicated though, in the sense there are many people who strongly believe Jews are white—including, many whites in power who do not racialize as nonwhite—who still see us as white upon our Jewishness being revealed, and I think our racialization has changed over the years, which is why I personally take issue with “white passing” terminology and prefer “conditional whiteness.” But I’ve found there’s a lot of disagreement on this topic among Jewish activists too. Some Jewish activists consider us PoC, some non-white but not PoC, some consider us conditionally white, some only white-passing, some white while experiencing antisemitism, a form of oppression wholly separate from racism. I have seen people with really well-reasoned rationalization behind all of these different views.
I think, like I said before, there are so many people in denial about this issue, including some Jewish people. I think there are a good number of Jews who disagree with this post. When that shooting happened at the Jewish community center and Jewish retirement home by that former KKK member there were rabbis interviewed by prominent newspapers talking about how this was all about freedom of religion. I think some Jewish people seem to believe that if we divorce ourselves from a racial or ethnic identity that we can assimilate fully into whiteness… But there is reason to doubt this strategy works? Then again, when you consider all the prominent Jews assimilated into whiteness (sometimes even against their will!!) and how much privilege they’ve derived from this, just being seen as white, perhaps this strategy has benefited many. But then it also seems to have come with a price (i.e. erasure of Jews and antisemitism and violence against Jews).
You even have people acting like the Holocaust was a genocide “against white people” even though Nazis explicitly stated it was about the purity of the white race. People don’t like to contend with the complexity of Jewish identity because it doesn’t really fit their limited understanding of religion and race. Then you have the fact there are many self-identified Jews who are not religious, who also experience antisemitism.
Antisemitism isn’t just about religion by any stretch of the imagination. But I also know that not all of this is so easy to categorize with terminology… There are various groups I can think of who experience complex racialization (one person who comes to mind is Kim Kardashian who is Armenian, and depending on who you ask that makes her white or nonwhite or PoC). I’ve noticed many activists will treat her as white when it suits their commentary or not when it suits their commentary. I’ve noticed this happen even with people who are half white and also with white-passing mestiz@ latin@s. People will say the latter are white because “latin@” is just an ethnicity, ignoring the fact mestiz@ people have continually been treated as nonwhite throughout the Americas (and the differences between white-passing mestiz@ people and white latin@s who have no Indigenous blood). But then you also have some white-passing mestiz@ people who have assimilated into white society and even identify as white (and sometimes are racialized that way). I’m not saying the issue is the same as Jewish racialization—there are lots of differences, but it just reminds me of the complexity of identity and how it always seems to resist being wholly pinned down with simplistic rhetoric.
One trouble that dogs me is the worry that in all the complexity we resist acknowledging privileges and power—because many of us non-Poc/white-passing/condtionally-white/white jews or whatever you want to call us have privilege over many PoC, so much so that many of us have hardly had to question our racialization at all and have comfortably aligned with whiteness. There is the issue of how some of us have not so easily been able to assimilate, though. There is a lot of variety among us in terms of geography, culture, ethnicity, upbringing and physical features—I’m sure we don’t all have the same experience.
Then again, I think one problem is so many, SO MANY non-Jewish activists are so vocal on these issues and then less-educated people, even sometimes Jews (like me! I did this!) eat it up and think we’re just white and that’s the end of it. Despite the fact this ignorance can get you harmed or even killed in some cases. My naiveté about antisemitism and race put me in danger when I engaged with white supremacists. It arguably helped lead to the deaths and attacks on Jewish activists in the Civil Rights movement. You could argue the erasure of antisemitism and the complicated racialization of Jews is just another way progressives are complicit in violence against Jews because we are continually denied our history in our schools and in leftist activist circles. So then we either a) confront antisemitism alone everywhere as leftists ignore it in their own circles and even on the far right or b) remain in ignorance ourselves resulting in our own internalized harm. I used to be the latter. And now, it seems, I am the former.
I think at the very least, non-jews need to stop making authoritative, sweeping statements about Jews. I’ve seen this happen so many times and it’s really harmful.
Mean Girls has become a pop cultural phenomenon of memetic proportions. Even people who have never seen the movie can quote from it at length. Considering that the movie is female-centric and tackles issues like girl hate and body image, many people hail Mean Girls as feminist, and it’s clear that the screenplay writer, Tina Fey, intended it be so as the protagonist “Cady” is named after suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But in my opinion, Mean Girls is not actually very feminist. Don’t get me wrong: the movie is obviously incredibly well-done. I think it’s super clever satire, and there’s positive aspects for girls in the movie, but I enjoyed it as a well-written, entertaining film—not as a feminist one, for various reasons.
This post is first in my series of feminist reviews of media. See here for details on my ratings system and criteria.
Everyone who hasn’t seen this movie probably knows what happens through gifs alone, but obligatory spoiler warning.
Mean Girls centers on protagonist Cady, who has been homeschooled all her life and is completely new to the social dynamics of high school. Two outsiders, Damian and Janis, take her under their wing, but when the Plastics, the prettiest and most popular girls in the school, vie for her attention, she is sent in as a mole by Janis to infiltrate the Plastics and undermine Queen Bee Regina George’s cruel reign. Throughout the movie, Cady winds up becoming something of a Mean Girl herself, blowing off her friends and becoming enamored with the Plastic lifestyle. The girls, especially Regina, manipulate, insult and bully each other. The film’s resolution comes after the contents of the Burn Book, where the Plastics write all the school gossip, are revealed to the whole school, and when all the girls in the school are forced to resolve their conflicts.
Women: 6/10
Mean Girls‘ strengths lie in its girl-centricism and how it encourages girls to rise above attacking each other or downplaying their own abilities for men. The movie delivers these messages in a comedic way through the development of its protagonist and other central characters. But while the girls eventually learn to support each other and stop bullying each other, the actual problems in society that cause girls to act this way are never explored. The film makes it look like teenage girls act this way just because and only need a kumbaya session to get over it. And while the girls are more developed than the boys and take center stage, most of them are stereotypes. The Plastics are a trio of caricatures: the dumb blonde (Karen), the Jewish American Princess (Gretchen), and the backstabbing popular girl (Regina), but even the other main female characters, who are portrayed more positively, don’t escape this fate: such as Cady’s friend Janis, the snarky, eccentric lesbian and Tina Fey’s character, Ms. Norbury, the pitiful spinster, and most of the side characters are little more than whatever clique they belong to (band geek or Asian mathlete).
Cady, the protagonist, is the most developed character with a multifaceted personality. Unlike everyone else, she does’t fit easily into stereotype, but she is a white homeschooled girl from “Africa” with a complete, unrealistic ignorance around American culture and teenaged socialization. She seems to come from another dimension where there’s no such thing as “society.” Thus, the person who cures Girl Hate in the movie is a mythical figure who doesn’t exist in real life: someone introduced to the beauty industry and internalized misogyny at the age of 16. It’s no accident Cady isn’t a popular girl who learns the error of her ways. Or, heaven forbid, a popular girl into fashion who isn’t mean. Nor is she a nerdy girl grappling with her social standing. She is a magical Outsider immune to all this stereotyping in the first place, moving between nerd and popular girl, while everyone else fixedly adheres to stereotype, allowing the film to side-step truly challenging stereotypes or addressing the sources of internalized misogyny altogether.
Why do the girls put down their own appearance and that of other girls? Why are they so mean to each other? The movie never tries to parse this out. The male characters in the movie are peripheral, which is both good and bad: good in that girls are the center of the movie, bad because the main source of misogyny in the film is girls themselves. In fact, men and boys are rarely shown being sexist whatsoever, and when they are, it’s a joke or minor plot device. Unlike Legally Blonde, which depicts women working together to confront misogyny from men and society, Mean Girls presents misogyny as a girl problem. It’s not that boys like Aaron, Cady’s love interest, are intimidated or turned off by girls like Cady being good at math, it’s that girls like Cady just dumb themselves down to have an excuse to talk to these boys. It’s not that our society has a vicious beauty industry that literally pressures girls into starving themselves, it’s that a few popular girls decided that being thin is important and so they take dangerous drugs to get skinny, which is funny somehow. Men can sit through Mean Girls, content in the knowledge that girls are just catty and mean, so misogyny is their problem to fix. But the film doesn’t even offer girls any real tools to address internalized misogyny!
The movie is definitely far from wholly negative, though. It’s important that the movie ends happily, with Queen Bee Regina not remaining demonized, but finding a suitable outlet for her anger (sports), and girl hate being overcome (even if the “solution” in the movie isn’t applicable to real life). It’s also wonderful to see the gender roles reversed with heartthrob Aaron being nothing but a tool to Regina and a vapid male bimbo with no real traits other than being incredibly attractive and kind but bumbling, and the other white boys, like Regina’s jock boyfriend and Gretchen’s love interest, being similarly vapid. It’s also true that the movie is lacking the outright misogyny intrinsic to so many Hollywood films and replaces it with girl power—but all of it is incredibly superficial and in place of what could be a much more feminist narrative.
PoC: 4/10
Throughout the movie, many PoC are visible in the background and make brief appearances in small roles. They have one-liners like “I’m from Michigan” from a token Black girl who is assumed by the teacher to be from Africa, when Cady actually is (which in and of itself is racist—what country or city in Africa is Cady from? And why is Africa treated like a savage wilderness when there are cities there?). PoC serve mostly as background decoration behind a white central cast, and, unfortunately, are at times reduced to stereotype. There’s even a scene where Cady’s friend Janis points to different cafeteria tables pointing out “the nerdy Asians,” “the cool Asians” and the “unfriendly Black hotties.” Most troubling is the portrayal of the Asian girls in the movie, who are shown only speaking Korean and being completely isolated from the social world of the rest of the school and continue to be “queen bee types” even after the rest of the girls have improved. Worse, the school coach making out with two of these Asian girls is made into a joke, playing into the racist notion that Asian girls are more “grown up” and sexual.
One of the very few prominent PoC characters is Kevin, the overbearing South Asian mathlete who appropriates AAVE and hits on women. I would say Kevin’s portrayal is mixed: he’s funny and not exactly a complete stereotype but also offensive in his sexism and Black appropriation. Most of the white boys in the film are benign and passive, but Kevin is pushy and sexist throughout the movie, though it’s played for laughs. The school principal Mr. Duvall, a Black man, is probably the best PoC representation in the film. He defies stereotype as occasionally stern but never unkind and is neither hypersexualized or desexualized, shown displaying a romantic interest in Tina Fey’s character in a charmingly awkward way. There is one point when he shouts: “Aw, hell no. I didn’t leave the south side for this!” when the school girls all begin fighting in total pandemonium. This moment is interesting: an educated and well-dressed Black man is briefly revealed to be from a lower class background, but neither his accomplishments nor social standing are undermined, subverting the racist dichotomy between “bad” Black person (or “thug”) and “respectable” Black person in this moment of code switching. He doesn’t get much screen time or development, though.
Janis’ character is technically a WoC (Lebanese) but is played by a white Jewish woman, and we go nearly the entire movie with the assumption she is white until she mentions being Lebanese. Earlier in the film, Kevin, who she winds up in a relationship with, mentions only dating women of color (which is played as a joke somehow?) so it seems they shoe-horned in her being Lebanese last minute for the sake of a punchline. Overall, Mean Girls isn’t racially progressive, as stereotypes are upheld and white faces take the foreground.
Trans people: —
There are no trans people in this film, but there are also no trans jokes as far as I could tell.
Sexual Minorities: 4/10
Although Damian and Janis, Cady’s close friends, are prominent characters, they represent a lot of what is wrong with gay representation in the media. Damian, the large and lovable gay sidekick, has always been a controversial character. His trademark line “too gay to function” is oft-quoted and oft-criticized. Damian is de-sexed and safe. He exists to be fabulous, funny and make cute jabs about fashion. He wants to be one of the girls: he even goes in the girls’ bathroom and is actively part of Girl World, as Cady calls it. The conflation of gender and sexuality is of course problematic. But Damian is overall presented as a likable, good person and friend, and gets a lot of screen time—further, it can’t be denied that feminine gay men like Damian exist. He does, however, only serve a heterosexual plot line and has no sexual or romantic interests of his own. This is a common trope that keeps gay men palatable to straights.
Despite ending up with a boy in the end, Janis is heavily lesbian-coded throughout the movie and continually referred to as a lesbian, which she never denies. Janis claims that saying Damian is “too gay to function” is only ok when she says it, and the reveal of Janis once having a crush on Regina during their friendship in junior high, as well as her insistence on keeping it secret is telling. In my view, she is subjected to the common homophobic trope of Lesbian Living Happily Ever After With a Dude. Further, if you think about it, Janis is arguably the meanest and most manipulative of the girls—she completely uses Cady to get sadistic revenge on Regina, going further than any of the other girls do, and relishes it at the end. Then again, all of this is presented as justified in the film, and she is a prominent character and is funny, witty, insightful and resourceful. But her ending up with a guy is a cop out: some people will interpret her as having been straight all along. All in all, both characters uphold many tired homophobic tropes even while they grant us desperately desired and prominent representation.
Disability: 3.5/10
The two visibly disabled characters in the film—a girl in a wheelchair and a little person—are little more than window-dressing in this movie. They aren’t, thankfully, reduced to jokes or stereotypes and at least present some positive representation. Regina’s use of the R-slur, which is not criticized, although it arguably reflects negatively on her character, also brings down the representation rating. The film also trivializes eating disorders when it jokingly refers to “girls who eat their feelings” and “girls who don’t eat anything” as cliques. The movie does better than most by simply including physically disabled people as just everyday people just living their lives without negative stereotypes, but considering they have bit parts, they are little more than tokens.
Abuse/Assault/Relationships: 6.5/10
Overall, the way relationships are depicted in this film is positive in terms of conflict resolution, apologizing and forgiveness. The girls had very dysfunctional and harmful relationships with each other, but they improve. In fact, most of the adults in the movie, who act as moderators in these conflicts, have healthy relationships with the students. Tina Fey’s character, math teacher Ms. Norbury, serves as a good role model for the girls in the movie, especially Cady. The way she helps the girls make up but also retains her status as an authority figure is healthy: she pushes Cady, expresses disappointment and also encouragement at the right times. Cady’s parents too seem to exemplify this balance well, as peripheral as they are in the movie. They are new to the task of handling a teenage girl in a public school environment, but they take seriously enforcing her being grounded, but also are supportive and care. The bad adult role models are presented negatively—such as Regina George’s mother who tries to be a “cool mom” and a friend to her daughter, wanting to be young again. She allows Regina to do whatever she wants, which is implied to negatively contribute to Regina’s character.
As mentioned before, a deeply troubling aspect of the movie is how the coach making out with two Asian high school girls in the film is made into a joke and glossed over. A school teacher preying on a minor under his care is turned into a punch line—it’s essentially a rape joke. In terms of abuse, Janis is very manipulative, but never portrayed negatively for this. She uses Cady to exact revenge against Regina and when she confesses her actions, she is praised for it. Also, when Cady calls Janis out for her manipulation, Janis only puts the blame back on Cady. There never really is conflict resolution for this, either. There’s also the fact Gretchen retains the same character flaws and remains a mean girl but only in the Korean girl clique, which is presented as a positive resolution somehow. All the romantic relationships took a backseat to female friendships, so I found them to be bland and unremarkable, neither negative nor positive.
Body Image/Body Diversity: 3.5/10
Mean Girls continually depicts teenage girls disparaging their own appearance and insulting and critiquing the appearance of other girls. This is, however, presented in a critical way and by the end of the film, Cady realizes that doing this won’t get her ahead in life. That’s a positive message, but by the same token, the film doesn’t ever unpack why girls do this or the underlying problems of body image. Further, we continually see the main characters of the movie, who have idealized, perfect bodies, putting their own appearance down—this is presented as a silly ritual the girls undergo, but it also is never shown to be as damaging as it is on female self-esteem. Worse, is Regina George’s “weight gain.” At one point in the film, Cady tricks Regina into eating Kalteen bars that will make her gain weight as part of the plan to dethrone her as Queen Bee. I question the need to focus on Regina’s weight in her “take down” whatsoever, as it just reinforces fatphobia, especially since her “weight gain” is quite subtle and the issue of weight is never truly explored.
Damian and some side characters provide some body diversity, but fat characters as a whole, especially the girls, pretty much just provide jokes or punchlines in the movie: the “attractive” characters are all thin. The movie satirizes female obsession with weight and image, encourages girls not to put others down for their appearance and also shows Cady as improving when she compliments other girls on their appearance, but it never actually gets to a real criticism of body image, nor does it ever present fat people as being as attractive as thin people.
Jews: 3.5/10
Blink and you’ll miss it, but Gretchen Wieners is canonically Jewish: as the above gif confirms, she celebrates Hanukkah. Many viewers probably watched Mean Girls and remained unaware of this fact considering this one line is the only indicator of her Jewishness. With the acknowledgment Gretchen is Jewish, however, comes the question of her representation of Jewish women. While Gretchen is much less cruel than Regina (as is Karen, the “dumb blonde” of the trio), she also is perpetually a boot-licker to whoever’s queen bee (something she secretly resents). And she of all the Mean Girls arguably changes the least—remaining unapologetic about her meanness and retaining the same status of mean girl, just within the microcosm of the Korean students.
Some have questioned if Gretchen upholds the Jewish American Princess stereotype—i.e. the idea that Jewish American girls and women are spoiled, monied, neurotic and high-maintenance. As others have pointed out, her wealth is her most notable feature as the daughter of the inventor of toaster strudel. The gif above itself highlights how spoiled she is, same with when she threatens the principal with her father’s status to get out of trouble. Her neurosis is revealed as Cady gets under her false exterior… That said, it’s positive to see a Jewish main character included in a film like this who is also presented as beautiful, but considering that her Jewishness is nearly invisible, that she is played by a non-Jew, possesses stereotypical traits, and exhibits little character development/growth, I can’t say she provides good representation.
Conclusion
In the end, Mean Girls is representative of today’s defanged pop feminism that says women need only “lean in” and change their behavior to get ahead in society. Tina Fey’s quote that if girls call each other sluts, it makes it okay for guys to, basically sums up the main premise of the film: that misogyny is a problem with girls and women, not with men and patriarchy. Don’t get me wrong: internalized misogyny and girl hate are major issues, but what’s odd about this movie is the implication that girl hate magically appears from nowhere. Sure, the movie may serve as a good launching point for having a discussion with young girls about bullying and body image—but on its own, it doesn’t engage in any real feminist critique or break much ground, and it especially fails women marginalized on other axes. Girl-centric, witty, and hyper-quotable, Mean Girls is a fun time and an incredibly well-made movie with a female-written and female-centric script that encourages girls not to tear each other down, but when you analyze it a little deeper or compare it to more feminist comedies like Legally Blonde, its feminism falls short.
My Blog 