Sugar and spice and not entirely nice

When Rosalind Wiseman was 22 and fresh out of college, she taught martial arts to teenage girls. As part of the training, she asked the teens to reflect on who they were and what forces had shaped them.

The answers she got were often troubling. Many girls, she realized, were suffering from emotional damage inflicted on them by other girls - and sometimes the tormentor even included one of their closest friends.

She heard stories of cliques, bullying, and rigid social structures built on physical appearance and adolescent notions of status. She was horrified by tales like the seventh-grader who was ostracized and afraid to return to school because she didn't wear her socks the way the popular girls did.

Originally, Ms. Wiseman had begun her work in the hopes of protecting young women from physical violence. But she ended up worrying about another kind of violence: Why, she asked, are adolescent girls sometimes so cruel to one another?

The result of her questioning is "Queenbees & Wannabes," a book in which she attempts to chart for parents and teens alike the murky waters many young girls navigate as they learn early and painful lessons about social power and status.

Often a cruel "Queenbee" is someone who dominates her peers, but other girls assume roles like "sidekick," "floater," "torn bystander," or the "pleaser/wannabe/messenger."

With her book recently released in paperback, Wiseman is again on a book tour, speaking to audiences, and continuing her quest to advise both girls and their parents on strategies for dealing with the teen years.

Why can teenage girls be so mean? Have they always been this way or is this something that's getting worse?

It's such a simple question and yet so complicated at the same time.

I think it's a combination of things. Generationally, girls have always done this. Eighty-five-year-old women sometimes tell me they remember the exact same thing and they even remember the names of the girls who were mean to them.

But today girls become more verbal at an earlier age. Our culture pushes girls to become more and more adult at younger ages. The clothes reinforce this. Girls need to feel in control of their situation today more than they did in the past.

But if this was just something that was happening to this generation I wouldn't have had this kind of response [to the book]. It exists everywhere. A community with more money requires not just a Tiffany bracelet, but the most Tiffany bracelets. In communities with less money it may be a pair of shoes or a pair of jeans.

But it's all working together to conspire against girls. What gets you high social status? The right style, the right look.

If you're a beautiful girl, you get privilege. People pay more attention to you.

Hasn't any progress been made in terms of offering girls different kinds of role models?

In some ways we've made progress, but in other ways we haven't. [Status] is extremely tied to how you fit in gender stereotypes.

You can have [the] Victoria's Secret [look] on one hand, and [soccer star] Mia Hamm on the other, but they're both body types and both very hard to achieve.

Today people have a very hard time holding their kids accountable and dealing with the fact that they're being mean. They have the feeling they can't talk to other parents about it. It's perceived as being superficial, a rite of passage, something everybody goes through. Sometimes people even say they'll be stronger for it. I'm trying to work with schools to hold kids accountable and empower parents.

Why are adults often reluctant to deal with this?

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