Ashlee Guillory Informative Essay Sugar and Spice… No Longer Everything Nice I. INTRODUCTION 1. ATTENTION GETTER: Can girls be mean? Has everyone experienced betrayal by the hands of a female? Do we even need to answer these rhetorical questions? a. Girls are mean. I really hate saying that, but everyone knows it is true and the more we pretend that girls are not mean, the more trouble we bring on ourselves. 2. Again, girls are mean that is all there is to it. They are not sweet little quiet things that never cause a problem in school, like those troubling boys who start brawls in the hallways 3.
The typical mantra is that boys are more aggressive than girls are, but in the last decade or so, we have learned that girls can be just as aggressive, just in a different way. a. They are mean in a way that slips through the cracks, under people’s noses. They are mean in a way that teachers do not notice or turn a blind eye to. This is not something new; it has been happening for decades. 4. PREVIEW: Today I will inform you of how girls are not all “sugar and spice,” and never have been, but are also not inherently mean or evil. TRANSITION: Now let us start with how and what age meanness starts.
II. BODY 1. MAIN POINT: Meanness can start in girls as young as three or four years old. These toddlers will use manipulation and peer pressure on their parents to get what they want. In preschool, children do it daily. They will exclude others and threaten to withdraw their friendship, when they do not get their way. It may be leaving someone out, to telling friends not to play with someone, to saying, “I’m not going to invite you to my birthday party! ” if you talk to her. 2. According to Nelson, “Preschoolers appear to be more sophisticated in their nowledge of social behaviors than credit is typically given to them. ” 3. I really wish I knew the answer as to why girls can be so difficult to one another. It really shows their own insecurity about the many changes going on in their own lives if they cannot be good to others. No one feels confident enough about themselves during their teen years, and some people think that making others feel bad is a way to make themselves-feel better. TRANSITION: Now that we know when meanness starts, we can move on to relational aggression. 1.
MAIN POINT: According to psychologists, there is a new form of “non-physical” cruelty spreading through schools today, so extreme it has been given its own name: relational aggression. a. Relational aggression is described as any behavior that is intended to harm someone by damaging or manipulating relationships with others (Crick and Grotpeter, 1995). 2. Researchers have long know that adolescents, especially girls, engage in this sort of behavior, to maintain their social status in school. Relational aggression can have devastating and long-term effects on its victims. . A “girls” friendship can be either the key to popularity or the key to their destruction. The “mean girls” are usually highly liked by some and strongly disliked by others. a. These “mean girls” seem to be very socially skilled and popular, but are very manipulative and mean when they think it is necessary. TRANSITION: Now that we have learned about relational aggression, we can move on to the different hierarchies found in our society. 1. MAIN POINT: Girls have always had cliques and hierarchies; they have always gossiped, bitched, and ostracized.
In school, starting from pre-school all the way up to high school, you have the popular kids, you have the average kids, and you have the kids whom others do not like. Then there are those kids who just fly below the radar, the ones that no one seems to notice. a. Then there is the whole substrata of wannabees, messengers, and of course, the “targets,” as explained by Nelson. The targets are pushed outside of the group and then pounced on by the rest of the group. The kids that are picked on are called names, harassed, and even bullied. 2. Girls use extraordinarily sophisticated methods.
They use psychological forms that are harder to detect and they can easily do it with a smile. 3. Everyone knows the girls that walk down the hall and laugh and snicker at others. They are at every school. It use to be that people would only get picked on at school, but now the “mean girls” can get on facebook and post hateful comments about people or post embarrassing photos of them. a. Emotional pain is worse than physical pain, but people can not see the ones on the inside. TRANSITION: Now that we have learned about the different hierarchies in the found in our society, lets look at what we learned today.
III. CONCLUSION 1. In conclusion, girls are mean, do not kid yourself and say that they are not. Do not turn your head and look the other way. Girls manipulate, degrade, bully, and emotionally abuse each other everyday. 2. Summary: Hopefully through this presentation you have learned how girls can be mean and manipulating. WORKS CITED Nelson, David. “Mean Girls Start As Tots. ” http://cbsnews. com/stories/2005/07/tech/main693714. shtml. Bringham Young University. “Relational Aggression: More than Just Mean Girls. ” Suffolk Public Schools. Ed. Youthlight inc. .
