ABSTRACT

Introduction It is Monday morning and you decide to wear jeans to school instead of a skirt. The consequence of this seemingly innocuous action? You are kicked out of the clique and forced to eat lunch alone. Welcome to girl world, where the rules of popularity are rigidly enforced by a pack of mean girls, also called queen bees. The petty, mean, and manipulative side of girls’ peer groups became a popular subject in the United States after the publication of a spate of best-selling books on the subject of mean girls with such titles as The Secret Lives of Girls, Odd Girl Out, and Queen Bees and Wannabes. Following suit, American television and print media in the early 2000s diffused the message that, contrary to traditional stereotypes, girls were far from being sugar and spice and everything nice.