Mean girls are everywhere

Teenagers are flocking to see a new US film about bullies. No wonder, says 14-year-old Ellie Veryard - the vicious cliques it portrays are all too familiar

Any teenager who goes to see Mean Girls, the latest "high school" comedy from the US, will be surprised at how familiar they are with the characters they discover on the screen. Despite being massively simplified, you can easily pick out people in your own school according to the groups in the film. And the forms of bullying that take place throughout are really familiar. The movie may have been distributed as a comedy, but I know what it feels like to be made fun of for wearing the "wrong clothes", and when it happens to you, it's not funny at all.

Any teenager who goes to see Mean Girls, the latest "high school" comedy from the US, will be surprised at how familiar they are with the characters they discover on the screen. Despite being massively simplified, you can easily pick out people in your own school according to the groups in the film. And the forms of bullying that take place throughout are really familiar. The movie may have been distributed as a comedy, but I know what it feels like to be made fun of for wearing the "wrong clothes", and when it happens to you, it's not funny at all.

Mean Girls tells the story of Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan), who moves from Africa to America. She's been taught at home all her life, and, therefore, has no idea what to expect when she starts high school. The film hinges on the idea that school is an even greater anthropological challenge than even the wildest African plain, and Cady has to negotiate a distinct social hierarchy, made up of tiny little groups.

There's the geeks, the jocks, the Asian babes, the mathletes and, at the top of the tree, the Plastics. These are the It girls - they're hugely popular, but the rules of belonging to their group are incredibly strict. They have to wear the right outfits, certain clothes on certain days; for example, they're not allowed to wear tank-tops two days in a week, hoop earrings are banned, and they can't wear sweatpants unless it's a Friday. The Plastics control the school, and the other students go along with the hierarchy because they want to be in the popular group and be accepted. The film shows how cliques can wreck everyone's life.

You can almost see people you know in Mean Girls. And you recognise the groups at school as well. At my school, a mixed school with about 1,000 students, we've got the people just like the Plastics and the outsiders, and we've got people who go along with it. Just as in the film, a very small group of people manipulate the rest of the school. There are a group of girls who are in control and what they say, goes. For example, they wear a new pair of school shoes, and suddenly everybody has to have the new shoes.

A lot of bullying is defined by what we wear. I'm one of the grungy type people. When I used to come into school, people would shout "grebo", "goth", "grunger", and yell at me for not wearing normal fashionable clothes. I had always been a normal person, and then I turned up wearing grungy clothes and everyone wanted to know what had happened. It all went against me. At first it felt really bad. It annoyed me, because I hadn't done anything to them, and it hurt - a lot. Now, when it happens, it just bounces back off because I don't trust them. Why would I trust them when they say bad things about me?

Our social groups are defined by what we wear. The people who are highest in the social hierarchy have got exactly what's in fashion. Lower down the social scale people wear whatever they like. And even though our school is a bit more tolerant and open-minded than the one in the film, some people are still completely unprepared to talk to you if they think you belong to a group that isn't cool.

If you're not accepted, you're an outsider. These are the people who either want to be popular, but are too low down to actually even try it, or who really don't care about the social system. In the film, Cady makes friends with the outsiders, but is soon befriended by the plastics, who ask her to hang around with them. Encouraged by the outsiders, she infiltrates their gang to see what they do. The plan is successful at first, but Cady gradually starts becoming a plastic herself, and the whole thing ends up a bitchy nightmare.

The meanness in the film takes on different forms, but it's almost all psychological. Sometimes the cruelty is dealt out so subtly that the characters don't realise that they're being laughed at, and they don't know what's going on. It's the same for us. At my school boys fight and make up straight away. With girls you've got a whole grudge match that goes on afterwards. The bitchiness can last for ages.

In particular, the film shows the girls "three-way bitching", which I've seen at school. A girl will go into a room to start a conversation about somebody who's secretly waiting outside the door. It's a way to set up someone you don't like, and see what is being said about you behind your back. It's mostly the more popular girls that do it, they mess with each other's heads. Lower down, we kind of stick together, to escape what's going on.

It's the same with sex. A person's sexual experience becomes something that can be used against them at any time. It's particularly bad at the top of the school hierarchy, where it's all about how much sex you've had and whether you've done this, or that. People get teased because: "I can't believe you haven't done that yet". Similar pressures exist among the people who aren't as popular, too. People try to impress the It people with their sexual experience. But then, if they do, they get classed as sluts. If the It people do it, they're cool.

Does everyone deep down want to be an It girl? I think everyone just wants to be accepted; that way they feel they can be liked. If you really look closely, the It people are sometimes the people who are the most hated, because people don't like them for what they do. But no one says anything about it. They just keep quiet because they think everyone else adores them.

Of course, in the film, everyone ends up confronting each other and settling their differences. I wish it could be the same for us. If you've got a problem at our school you go the chaplain. Quite a lot of people do; you go with friends and you discuss solutions to problems and build on the things you've discussed with each other, which is confrontation on a smaller scale. And we've got a friendship club, where you go and talk about what a friend should do. It's got an A to Z of being a friend, which says things like, a real friend will accept you for who you are, stay with you when times are hard and call you just to say "hi". But mostly, you keep your head down, because there are some people who would just make your life hell if you were to confront them. Getting involved in someone else's problems depends on who the person is, and how much social power they have.

In the film, everyone talks to each other about their problems. It's a nice idea, but it's not going to happen here and that's really sad. I wish it could, but you know it won't because people will never openly admit that they've said mean things about each other. If everyone did, it would probably be easier; at least you'd know what everyone really felt.

'Mean Girls' is on general release