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Words Will EVER Hurt Me
Girls as Bullies
By Kelly Burgess
They're getting it now, though, thanks in part to a recent spate of books and articles on the subject. Rachel Simmons, who recovered sufficiently from the tortures of her youth to graduate from Vassar and become a Rhodes scholar, turned her lingering pain into the book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (Harvest Books, reprint 2003).
This sudden focus on the problem of female bullies has brought a wave of media attention to the subject. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times have run extensive articles about relational aggression that, among other things, show how often parents, usually mothers, encourage this type of bullying because it gives their daughters a leg up on the "competition."
Although many of these books and articles give the "leader of the pack" girls catchy names such as Alpha Girls, RMGs (Really Mean Girls) and Queen Bees, Susan Wellman dislikes those terms. She likes calling a spade a spade or an aggressively mean girl just what she is – a bully.
