Nice Girls Finish Last: Why It’s Too Easy Being Mean

Every woman can remember when they experienced their first ever “mean girl.” I know I can. I was in 5th grade, I had just moved from a small town to a huge city. You could say I was a bit of a tomboy; I had short hair, wore boy clothes, and loved to play football at recess. I guess that is what started it all. The girls in my grade started calling me a dyke. I would be lying to you if I said I knew what that word meant at that age; I didn’t, but I soon found out.

Women can be mean, and some of us do it for sport. We do it “just because”.

I remember the first time I started becoming a mean girl. I was in middle school. I was part of a trio of “best friends” one of my friends started talking trash about the other. I didn’t know what to do, so I joined in. I sat there and talked poorly about my best friend. Why? I don’t know, everyone else was so I didn’t want to go against the grain. Well, I ended up losing that friend, and we haven’t spoken since. I don’t think that I’ll ever stop being ashamed about this. So other than “just because,” what are some legitimate reasons that us girls turn against each other and enter major b*tch mode? I’ve compiled a few possibilities:

1. We can be insecure.

We see women with the physical characteristics we want, and we get envious. If you meet a girl and she tells you she loves everything about herself, she is lying. We, as humans, all have something we wish we could change about ourselves, but some of us are just a little more vocal than others.

We check Facebook to see our boyfriends ex girlfriend; we want to know what she looks like. Is she in a new relationship? We sit here and look at her and compare ourselves to her “perfect” features. We think “she is skinnier than I am, does he think I am fat?” or “oh she is really pretty…” We often times forget that they are with us for a reason.

2. We are constantly competing.

With clothes, hair, makeup, everything. We always compete against other women for attention. We feel that we have to look our very best and that often stems from us wanting to look better than someone else. Sadly, a lot of the time that someone is one of our friends. We will spend hours trying to perfect our look even if the event itself only lasts 45 minutes. We want to be our best, we want to be the best.

3. Social media could destroy us.

Seriously, we all sometimes catch ourselves looking at a woman’s “flawless” Instagram wondering why our lives can’t be like that. We spend what feels like forever trying to take a perfect picture – one that we feel would be good to post online, because we want to make sure we’ll get as many likes as all the other girls on our feeds. We want someone else to stumble across us and think “wow she is pretty.” We want to be the cause of someone’s envy.

Woman are hard, we are not as kind as most people seem to think. We take being rude as a sport. We make tearing people down a competition, and if we fail, we try harder. We all act as if we all have nothing in common, but in fact we all do.

We all have fallen victim of a mean girl and we ourselves have all been a mean girl.

So before you sit there and think about how it is okay to be mean to someone, think about how it made you feel when someone did the same thing to you. Think of the chance to be different. Be kind to others, be kind to yourself because that person you’ve been judging and being really hard on could have the potential to become your best friend for the rest of your life. Think of how beautiful you could be, if you actually looked at how beautiful YOU are, instead of how others are?

Because pretty looks doesn’t forgive ugly personalities.

Featured image via Luis Leon on Pexels