In Response to the Comments on My Mean Girls Post…

(www.bizchicksrule.com) — The comments exploded on my mean girls post when I wasn’t looking! I tried to respond in the comments box, but it got so ridiculously long that it made more sense as its own post. So, here goes.

I’m going to steal from a comment I just left on Ry’s post "Why I Fear Women and Love Mythical Hobbits":

Whether Heather [Armstrong] is in actuality a mean girl is in my opinion immaterial to this discussion because she’s not the one talking smack on the blogs and making herself look like a vitriolic shrew — and THAT is what I was talking about. When people complain with substance … when they express a concern and make an argument, that’s saying, "enough is enough." I respect that. I’m down with it. When they do what I see happening now, that’s doing the mean girls playground wars thing, and that I have no respect for whatsoever.

If you think someone’s a butthead, you can tell that person or not. But you have to accept that no matter what they did that made you think they sucked in the first place, you will look a WHOLE lot worse if you go public with your unkind thoughts and rip them to shreds and call them names and say mean and nasty things about them and their friends and their family. And especially if it’s just because you don’t like their dog or their writing style or their hair or WHATEVER, or because they did something vague to someone else, or possibly someone else several people removed from you that you saw / heard about / think might have happened / bet would be something they would do, you look like a moron. You do. And you deserve it.

My point is that you get to choose how you respond to something. Calling names and taking low blows is a choice. Stating your case plainly is a choice. Saying nothing is a choice. These bloggers are choosing to be mean girls, and there are other ways to share an opinion. My opinion is that being a mean girl sucks, and this tendency of women to get all catty on each other is holding us back and it’s time to knock it off and be grown-ups already. Just because someone does something you think is stupid / mean / whatever does not mean that you have to respond in kind. That’s what children do. "He hit me!" "She hit me first!" You should know better.

***

In response to specific comments that I didn’t address already in the original post…

lildb said in part

this should have been nothing, but it became something when conflated unnecessarily by the speaker. shame on her.

I contend that it should have remained nothing. The only person who knows the speaker’s intentions in bringing it up at the keynote is the speaker, so let’s leave that alone. For all we know, it was meant to be a charming anecdote. What has turned it into a BIG TO-DO is the attacks after the fact, the mean-girl-ness. If no one said anything, who would give a hoot?

Allena said in part, in response to an earlier exchange

sometimes you HAVE to assoc w/hags! It’s not pleasant but it’s life. Being a soccer mom taught me to create a drama filter ;-}

To some extent I agree. Unless you live in a bubble, it happens. But you don’t have to seek out people you don’t care for. Wear headphones in the office. Bring a book to soccer practice. Skip the party hosted by the people you don’t like. Again, you get to choose. If it means sitting alone, so be it. Personally, I’d rather be content and alone than uncomfortable and surrounded by jerks.

Ruby said in part

I feel like Blogher should be called Doocher, because somehow it’s always about her and her friends. If you’re not in with her friends well then you’re just nobody.

Ruby, I think it sucks that you’ve had bad BlogHer experiences. I hope you will give your feedback to the organizers. I know they are open to it. But I have to point out here that I had never even heard of Dooce until about an hour before the keynote and even now if you put a gun to my head I couldn’t name a single one of her friends. And I don’t care. She is just a blogger, just like you and me. Do I think she’s a great writer? Yes I do. I read her blog for the first time at the airport on my way home from San Francisco and I loved it. But I managed to get through pretty much my entire life to date including all of BlogHer without that knowledge, and I still had a great time. And I found a lot of other awesome blogs there, too. That was part of the payoff.

If you don’t like the club (or if, like me, you don’t know it exists), start your own.

***

In closing (for now), YOU ARE NOT A VICTIM OF YOUR OWN LIFE. If you have a problem, do something about it. It all comes back to choices. You can choose to do something or you can choose to do nothing. But both are choices, and there are times when each of them is right. You can choose to let something go, or you can chose to tell the world about it. Just make your choice a conscious choice — because you will have to live with the consequences, positive or negative.

And as far as I’m concerned, there is never anything positive about being a mean girl.

Contents © Copyright 2008 Kristen King

Tags: women in business, women and business, women, woman, business, womens business blog, blogher08, blogher, keynote, mean girls, queen bees, gossip, catty, catfight, dooce, bloggess, hobbit, immature, clique, cool kids, biz chicks rule, kristen king