Or is this just female friendship… The White Lotus has me wondering.
Recently, someone accused me of being a mean girl. Me! Who goes to church and meditates twice a day. Me, who loves to sneak cigarettes and crush on cute boys! I’m the furthest thing from a mean girl. Except, I guess, when a man with whom I’d been entangled in an intense and confusing situationship turned up on Instagram looking cozy in another woman’s reels. Blindsided and stung, I showed her profile to my friends, who knew exactly what to say.
“How old is she? 60? Gotta be,” sniped one.
“To be on social media that much—and to be so curated, at her age—is a huge red flag,” added another. “Yikes.”
“She calls her daughter her ‘bestie,’” I pointed out. “Super unhealthy.”
The next time the man in question called and asked me to hang out (because of course he did), I told him I’d seen his “Insta-grandma.” I informed him that not only did she look a thousand years old, her social media presence was deeply cringey, and she could use some therapy. That’s when he leveled the “mean girl” accusation at me.
I suppose I deserved it. I wasn’t proud of my cutting words, but I told myself that they’d been born out of the hurt he’d caused me. It’s not like I ever would have said any of those things to this woman’s face. (Which is, in fact, lovely. I admit it! She’s beautiful.) I stopped stalking her profile, gave myself some grace, blocked the middle-aged fuckboy, and tried to move on. Watching the latest season of The White Lotus, however, with its trio of childhood friends on vacation in Thailand together, got me thinking about mean girls—and whether I might actually be one.
If you watched the show, then you know that Jaclyn (Michelle Monaghan), Laurie (Carrie Coon), and Kate (Leslie Bibb) took turns being horrible to each other. Jaclyn, a famous actress married to a younger man, urged divorcée Laurie to have a fling with one of the resort staffers, then seduced him herself—a fact that the church-going, Trump-supporter Kate gleefully reported to Laurie the morning after. Laurie pretended to think this was funny, when she was obviously furious, then accused Jaclyn of trying to seduce Kate’s husband years ago. Despite spilling the tea earlier, Kate, tried to stay above the fray. “One person’s fake is another person’s good manners,” she said, in one of my favorite lines of the season.
While these mean girls are characters on a TV show, their toxic dynamic feels quite true-to-life. Why are women so mean to each other? When I was in junior high and had a stomach ache most days before school because I didn’t want to face the popular girls mockingly calling me “Nerd Barbie,” my parents assured me that my peers would grow out of their unkind behavior. At age 49, however, I can’t say that we all have.
“I think ‘mean girls’ are ultimately unhappy girls,” says psychotherapist Elisabeth Crain. “If somebody’s mean, it’s because there’s something inside of them that’s either unprocessed, unfulfilled, or they’re projecting onto other people. People who are content with themselves typically don’t project into the world or act nasty unsolicited.”
The first time I remember being mean to another girl, I was in first grade. The morning bell had just rung, and we were hanging up our coats and backpacks in the back of the classroom. I was excited because I’d brought a new library book to read at my desk when I was done with my schoolwork. (I was always done early: Nerd Barbie.) But when Angie Reedy, who had the coat hook next to mine, saw me taking my book out of my backpack, she regarded me with scorn. “Mrs. North told us not to bring in books for read-aloud time anymore,” she said, loud enough for all our classmates to hear. “You’re gonna get in trouble for not listening.”
My face got hot. Angie Reedy had invited all the girls in our class to her birthday party, except for me. She had parents who were still married to each other, and I’d heard that she slept in a ruffled pink canopy bed in a two-story house—things I could only dream of. She was also in the lowest reading group, and couldn’t read chapter books to herself. I could, though. I was the best reader in class. “This isn’t for read-aloud,” I told her. “Mrs. North said I could bring it.”
Angie Reedy shook her head at me. “I don’t believe you. You’re lying.”
At these words, something snapped inside my little Scorpio heart. I leaned in close to her and parted the smooth, shiny curtain of honey-blond hair covering her perfect pink ear. “Fuck off,” I whispered. I didn’t know what this meant, but I’d heard my parents fighting often enough to have an idea that it was a terrible thing to say. Angie Reedy’s face turned tomato red, and she marched straight to our teacher’s desk.
“Mrs. North! Elizabeth said a bad word to me!” I remember being mildly surprised that Angie Reedy was smart enough to understand what I’d said. She was crying, and Mrs. North—usually as chilly as her name—was hugging her. I wondered if I’d be kicked out of school forever.
When Mrs. North summoned me to her desk to ask if what Angie Reedy said was true, I could only nod. My voice was stuck in my throat. Mrs. North shook her head sadly. “You’re getting an award at the school-wide assembly today,” she said. “I nominated you, and I can’t take it back now. But I’m going to have to talk to your parents about this.” She sent me back to my seat, bearing the weight of the world on my six-year-old shoulders.
Years later, while going through a box of old things from my mother’s attic, I found the badge I’d been given, that long-ago afternoon. It’s got a drawing of Tigger—my favorite—bouncing high above the words “Smile-Giver of the Month.” I could still feel the hot shame that had crept over me when I walked onstage to accept it.
“Happy people don’t act mean,” says Dr. Crain. And indeed—I was a miserable child. I like to think that now, as an adult who goes to therapy, meditates, and operates from a baseline of happiness, I’m not mean anymore. But that Instagram-stalking, name-calling incident showed me that I’m not above being a mean girl—and neither are my friends, when they’re rallying in support of me. Are we the worst?
“We’re all entitled to a bad day,” Dr. Crain tells me. But scrolling other people’s Instagram reels is only going to make it worse, she reminds me. “Comparison is the end of happiness. There’s always going to be somebody prettier than you. There’s always going to be somebody smarter. There’s always going to be somebody more wealthy.” At some point, she says, letting others shape our beliefs about ourselves impacts our own happiness.
Is there more to it than just being happy, though? I asked Dr. Crain whether she thinks women are set up to feel competitive with each other, and how that plays into a mean-girl dynamic that continues into middle age. “When we look at who gets the best grades starting in school, or who gets the most attention, this permeates beyond that and into adulthood. It’s almost like a popularity contest that never ends,” she says. She believes that a “scarcity mindset” is to blame: thinking that there is only so much success, or money, or love, or attention, to go around, and if someone else is getting it, there won’t be any left for you.
I wonder if that scarcity mindset was at play when I was on the receiving end of some mean-girl behavior from a fellow writer in my local coffee shop a few years ago. She wasn’t exactly a friend, but she’d dated my best friend for a while; I guess that made us sort of ex-friends-in-law. When I ran into her in line for lattés on a rainy afternoon, she’d just been laid off from her staff job and was doing freelance essay consulting. I told her I was working on a story and I’d love to hire her to help me with it, if she was available.
At this, she gave me a bright, forced smile. “You know, I like to tell beginning writers to just try publishing something online to get their feet wet—maybe a blog or something.” I’d been working as a professional writer for over a decade at that point, and had published hundreds of pieces online. I was pretty sure she was well aware of this; I was too mystified to even be hurt. I shrugged it off and finished my story without her help.
Fast-forward to a couple of months ago, when I was sitting in another coffee shop, tapping away on my laptop, and she walked through the door. I looked up, we made eye contact, and she turned on her heel and walked out before I could even plaster on a fake smile. “Do you think it’s because I got a Modern Love published in The New York Times, after she was so weirdly mean to me about my writing?” I asked a friend.
“Who cares?” she said, laughing. This friend, for the record, is so unfailingly supportive of me that I truly believe she’s happier for me than I am for myself whenever I have any career or personal success. Why? I think it’s because she knows who she is. Again, it’s that scarcity mindset Dr. Crain mentioned: “People who are secure with themselves don’t operate from a place of scarcity, but rather from a place of abundance. They’re not going to be as competitive, and they’re not going to look at other women as threats,” she told me.
That said, Dr. Crain believes there’s a time and place when it’s OK to unleash our inner mean girls. “I actually don’t like to call it an inner mean girl; I like to call it the ‘inner bitch.’ We all have that inside of us,” she says. “You should always have the right to stand up for yourself and let that ‘bitch’ part come out and speak your piece.”
The problem with my inner bitch is, she usually comes up with the perfect thing to say after the moment to say it has passed. For example, when my two-timing situationship told me I was “too funny and clever” for him (my Insta-grandma comment riled him up good), I could have told him it was lucky he’d found this other woman, who was clearly very serious and not so bright. I don’t know if that would have helped the situation, though.
The White Lotus trio, in a twist I didn’t see coming, ended up laughing, crying, and cuddling it out. Jaclyn apologized to Laurie (“I want to be your friend,” she said, bringing tears to my eyes as I watched with my cats) and Laurie delivered a heartfelt monologue over their final dinner, coming clean about how the choices she’s made, along with her lack of a belief system, have left her feeling unhappy, unworthy, and just grateful to be sitting at the table with friends she perceives as more successful than she is.
“In healthy friendships, you’re able to look beyond the ways that you’re different and actually embrace your friends because they’re not the same as you,” says Dr. Crain. Watching the fictional Jaclyn, Kate, and Laurie drop their mean-girl masks and connect in a real way by the end of their vacation, I couldn’t help but fantasize that maybe one day the Insta-grandma, my coffee-shop nemesis, and I could all become friends, and I can put my mean-girl ways behind me. Oh, and Angie Reedy, too! I wonder if she ever learned how to read…
Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness.
Elizabeth Laura Nelson has been airing her dirty laundry online since she wrote an “It Happened To Me” story for the late, great xoJane. Since then she’s worked at websites including YourTango, Elite Daily, Woman’s World, and Best Life. When she was 12, she kissed the George Michael poster above her bed every night before she went to sleep.
