Mean Girls (part 1)

I’m not sure how Joyce ended up with the DVD of Mean Girls, but she suggested we watch it one night last week. I think someone told her it would give her insight into what it was like when I was in high school, although the movie came out in 2004 and I graduated in 2011.

Of course I know the movie. It’s not gay to say I know Mean Girls: everybody my age knows it.

Turns out the story is an old one. Joyce really liked the movie, and she said that’s how girls were when she was in high school too. She told me about a huge fight she had with her best friend when they both liked the same guy, and the guy liked Joyce better than her friend. The friend started spreading rumors that Joyce was a bigass slut who was having sex with a lot of other guys besides the one they’d had the fight over. So all the girls in school started thinking she was a whore. So did the boyfriend, although Joyce was finally able to get the guy to believe that the rumors were just rumors started by a very mean girl who was once her friend. They didn’t go out for too much longer, however; Joyce thought he was cute, but not cute enough for all the drama he caused. And Joyce still hasn’t talked to her ex-friend after all these years…even though they were friends from elementary school until they had the fight over the dude in the 11^th grade.

Let me make it real clear that the movie and Joyce’s story are about mean girls. It’s not the same for guys. First off, a guy will usually tell you what he thinks of you to your face. Second off, if a guy says something to my face I don’t like, I can punch him in his face. And that usually clears the air. It’s like when you get into a fight in the hallway in middle school and a couple teachers pull you apart. They then tell you to shake hands; that’s usually not too hard.

Yeah, there are guys who bear grudges (think about that jerkoff at the turkey bowl in San Marino), but, for the most part, we keep it pretty simple and straightforward.

Besides, it’s also a total waste of time trying to spread a rumor that a boy is a slut. It’s only gonna come off as a compliment lol.

Maryville High had mean girls of its own, and the biggest meanass in the class of 2011 was named Ashleigh Renfroe. She was blonde and curvy for a high school chick…and pretty much every boy in school thought she was hot. There’s no denying that. I mean, she was hot. Y’all may be guessing that she was a cheerleader, but she wasn’t. Cheering takes time and dedication, and Ashleigh was way more concerned with clothes, makeup, boys – and being super mean to the other girls in school.

The other girls looked up to her, however. I never got why, and I think it’s fucked up, but that’s how it was. I know this for a fact because I had a sister in the grade behind me, and Melanie Kate was one of the girls who looked up to Ashleigh. If Ashleigh did something new with her makeup, Melanie Kate and her friends copied it. Same with Ashleigh’s clothes, although Melanie Kate didn’t have the kind of money to spend on clothes that Ashleigh’s parents let her have.

What made Ashleigh the most important girl in our grade wasn’t just that she was mean and hot. It was that the other girls cared what she thought of them. I still don’t get why they’d care what a meanass girl like Ashleigh thought…but they did. And that’s how Ashleigh was able to control most of the girls in school.

There’s one more piece to the puzzle…one which they don’t discuss in the movie, since it’s about us guys. Ashleigh always had a super cute boyfriend, so she could make sure that the other girls were jealous of her. One of the reasons why the other girls cared what she thought was because she was able to get the best-looking, most desirable boyfriends in school. More than that, she knew exactly when to dump one boyfriend and move onto the next one – to show how super desirable she was. But she also knew not to do it too often, because, if she did, she’d be a slut…and a slut is the last thing a high school girl (well…most of ‘em lol) wants to be called.

Ashleigh’s boyfriends were pretty much always what the movie calls “man-candy” and what I’ll just go ahead and call cute jocks. Now, what the movie totally doesn’t go into is what was going on with the boys while the girls were being mean to each other. (I get it that the movie is about girls, but, watching it this time, I wondered why Aaron didn’t have a buddy to talk to…or why the gay guy didn’t have anyone to dance with at the end. Joyce told me I should be quiet and look at the title of the movie lol.)

Basically, when girls are being mean to each other, boys are thinking and talking about sex. And telling a whole mess of lies in the locker room. It’s cool, though: we know we’re all bullshitting, so nobody calls anyone on his lies. Well, most of the time. We can be a little mean sometimes too. So there were basically 2 Ashleighs: the one all the girls looked up and wanted to copy and were scared of…and the one the boys were talking about in the locker room.

There were plenty of nice girls at Maryville High who didn’t get talked about in the locker room. Like my sister Melanie Kate…although I made it real clear that anyone who talked about her in the locker room was gonna get the crap beaten out of him. Us guys didn’t get together and make a list of the nice girls, but we all pretty much knew who they were. So a nice girl didn’t usually need an older brother or boyfriend to protect her.

Ok, Ashleigh Renfroe was not a nice girl as far as us guys were concerned. Not even close. There was plenty of talk about her, some of which was probably wishful thinking, but a lot of it started with her boyfriends and ex-boyfriends. The one thing that every guy in my school knew was that Ashleigh gave great blow jobs. Not that most of us had even had one blow job to compare it to. (Yeah, fine, that included me. Y’all might not believe me knowing about shit like my 30 Chicks/30 Days bet but I was pretty retarded about girls until junior year when I turned 17. I was just too interested in sports to think about girls until then.)

So, while no girl would dare call Ashleigh as slut or a whore, that’s exactly what us guys said about her when we were among ourselves.

But it’s even crazier than that. Being known as a slut in the locker room means that guys are going to think of you as being easy. And easy is a plus for a lot of guys: it means you’re way likelier to get laid than if you’re dating a virgin or a nice girl. That (and how she looked) made guys interested in Ashleigh. I mean, seriously, what red-blooded southern boy isn’t gonna be interested in a hot chick who gives blow jobs?

So a lot of guys were interested in her. How did she choose her boyfriends, then? Simple: she chose boyfriends who a lot of the girls wanted too. Like I said: cute jocks.

And, yeah, I mean myself as one of the cute jocks. I had Melanie Kate to tell me what the other girls thought about her big brother. I’m not gonna say I was considered the cutest boy at Maryville High, but it’s hard not to know it when you’re one of the cutest.

That made me an obvious candidate for being one of Ashleigh’s boyfriends. Which is where my trouble with her started.