If you haven't re-watched Mean Girls lately, you need to. It's a great way to reminisce on the days of football games, laughing at other cliques with your friends and prepping for the SAT, but it's also a great reminder of how prominent relational aggression is in the way girls and women deal with each other.
Remember when Cady Heron said that in girl world "... all of the fighting had to be done in secret,"? Having a woman talk bad about you behind your back or even smiling while making thinly-veiled insults directly to your face are both instances of this "secret fighting" also known as relational aggression. Unfortunately, whether you're still in high school or graduated with the class of -mind your own business- mean girl behavior can be found at every stage of your life.
It's so easy to get caught up in the tit-for-tat mindset when another girl has majorly wronged or even snubbed you in some way. But it's not so easy to recognize that the way you handle it says less about the nature of the girl-on-girl crime that was committed, and more about yourself. It's important to stand up for yourself, and it's okay to handle it in an assertive or a more quiet and tactful way. But there are some "secret fighting" behaviors that are never okay even in the guerrilla warfare of girl world.
For example: flaunting a guy in front of another girl.
She gets it. He chose you, if you're trying to maintain a friendship even after liking the same guy, then this isn't how you do it, sis. It's not a clever way to remind her to stay in her place, it's an incredibly transparent display of immaturity and sign that she needs to dump you as a friend.
Stirring up drama
You might know a lot of things about a lot of people, and what you choose to do with that information says a lot as well. Keep other women's' names out of your mouth. Creating contention where there wasn't any for the sake of entertainment just isn't cool.
Telling another girl's secrets.
There's almost never a justification for telling something private someone else told you in confidence. It's not okay and especially not if you're doing it to gain something at the expense of another girl.
Name calling
Seriously what are you getting out of putting another woman down? It's just like Cady said, "Calling somebody else fat won't make you any skinnier, calling someone stupid doesn't make you any smarter, and ... [it] definitely didn't make me any happier,". If seeing the look of dejection on someone's face that comes from you tearing them down brings you satisfaction, then you're not actually happy and you need to figure out why.
You might have committed some Regina George-esque crimes against other girls at some point, but in reality you're probably a nice girl with some misdirected frustrations. The key to navigating conflicts in girl world in a healthy way is no different than you would in the real world: confront it directly. Don't get so caught up in winning an imaginary war that you forget that women are all on the same team and we need to empower one another instead of tearing each other down. We all know Cady got a lot wrong on the way to figuring this out, but she did get it right in the end when she said "... all you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you."
