Jezebel
Mean Girls
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Just Desserts
Parents of students on the dance team at Andress High School in El Paso, TX allege that students from a rival team gave their girls baked goods laced with rat poison and bleach. (Exchanging gifts and pranks before football games is a tradition among Texas dance/cheerleading teams.) [UPI]
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Bully For You
Yup, Bullies Really Are Sadistic Jerks
Bullies on TV can be ultimately sympathetic characters. They inflict pain on others because they are in deep pain themselves: Mommy never loved them, Daddy is abusive, etc. Turns out that in real life, bullies inflict pain on others because it makes them feel good! According to a new study, scientists showed violent videos to 8 "unusually aggressive" 16-18 year old boys and eight "normal" boys of the same age while studying their brain activity. According to ABC News, "While both groups showed activity in the brain's pain centers, the brains of aggressive males, those with conduct disorder, also showed activity in the brain's pleasure centers, suggesting that they may have been enjoying what they were seeing." More » -
smart money
Will You Buy What Tina Fey Is Selling?
It's rare that you read a celebrity salary report and think "good for you Audrina, you totally deserve to be making millions and living in a three bedroom Tuscan-style villa in the Hollywood Hills." But that's exactly how we felt while reading Portfolio's analysis of the mounds of cash Tina Fey is raking in these days. And not just for herself. Since her show 30 Rock won seven high-profile Emmys this past weekend, Fey's value to NBC "has jumped significantly," according to Steve Rossman, who leads the branded entertainment practice at advertising agency R.P.A. "She is becoming a brand unto herself." More » -
faces of death
The Look: The Sharpest Weapon In A Mean Girl's Arsenal
That new show on the CW, Privileged? Okay, not great, but there's one thing it conveys really accurately: The Look. In the two episodes that have aired so far there have been instances where the kinda dorky, neurotic protagonist, Megan, says something lame or nerdy and her two snotty teenage tutoring charges give her a look of such whithering scorn and contempt, of "I have no idea what you're talking about and I am certainly not going to waste the energy thinking about it because you're weird and insignificant" that, whenever I see it, I get a vicarious chill and am immediately transported back to 7th Grade. I'd forgotten about The Look, the most powerful weapon in a mean girl's arsenal, until yesterday. When I got it. From an American Apparel employee. More » -
smells like mean spirit
Researcher Finds Watching Jerks On Film Makes You Act Like A Jerk
Researchers have always said that watching violent movies can make you more aggressive, but according to USA Today, a new study out of the UK has found that watching movies with "relational aggression" — where characters are verbally abusive — can make audiences more mean. A professor tested this theory by asking 53 college-aged women to watch, among other things, a scene from Mean Girls. The professor, Sarah Coyne, says: "Everyone's concerned about violence in the media… But we're missing out on lots of violence out there. We need to look at these other types of aggression." More » -
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Mean Girls
Girl-On-Girl Crime Rampant At The Workplace
Female bullies in the workplace, like particularly insidious farts, are silent but deadly, according to the Financial Post. They often use passive aggressive tactics like "little insulting jokes and putdowns, the cold shoulder, those subtle but degrading comments and deliberate humiliation, all designed to eat away at the person's self-esteem." And the Post notes that while male bullies are equal opportunity offenders when it comes to gender, female office bullies target other women 70% of the time. In addition, when men are the offenders, it's more easily seen as harassment, but when a woman is bullying another woman, the Financial Post says, it's "perceived by many as a 'personality' issue." More » -
mean girls
Plastics Get Comeuppance On New Show Queen Bees
Go back to the high school locker room with Queen Bees, the "mean-girl makeover" reality show premiering on teen-centric N Network July 11th. Seven mean girls, nominated by "friends," family and boyfriends, are tricked into believing they are there to compete in some kind of "biggest diva" showdown. But then America's Next Top Model winner Yoanna House shows up and tells them that no, they have been chosen for Redemption — and, oh yeah, that the most-improved-Mean-Girl will win $25,000. Growing, changing, catfighting presumably ensue. The N Network is calling this series "reality with morality"; inspiring programming that can instill positive self-image in teens. Says a network rep, "We encourage viewers to examine how we speak to each other and how hurtful words and actions can be." More » -
living la vida lohan
Dina Lohan Asks Ali What Liquid Is In Lindsay's Water Bottles
Despite Dina Lohan's insistence that she "can't stop" Ali from trying to "chase her dream" of being a hip hop artist (it's OK, you can laugh at that part), or can't protect her from "evil" reporters, she invited Access Hollywood into her home to interview her 14-year-old child, even though the kid had nothing in particular to promote. Dina sat down with Ali to prep her for the interview and asked a series of questions about older sister Lindsay that, frankly, seemed kind of inappropriate. If Dina wants Ali to be "normal," it would seem to us that she could just make the kid go to school and not bother searching this shit out, and inviting it into her home. More » -
Wet Hot American Summers
Summer Camp: The Best (Or Worst!) Eight Weeks Of Your Life
My summer camp nemesis was a wiry, thin-lipped, sneering eleven-year-old I'll call Hannah. Hannah attended an elite Manhattan prep school and decided early on during our stay in upstate New York that I was a hick. She taunted me endlessly for my lack of sophistication; for example, I didn't know what "peckerhead" meant, which apparently illustrated my state of overall loserdom and gave her a reason to use the word against me for the rest of the summer. [What DOES peckerhead mean? -Ed.] Even worse, I had to bunk with Hannah and her best friend, giving both the opportunity to be cruel to me in various overt and passive ways, like ignoring our morning cleaning ritual and leaving me to clean the entire cabin without them. (That lasted for at least a week until our counselor found me crying on the floor in a heap of their Benetton sweatshirts.) But I'm not the only one who experienced a Lord of the Flies-ish summer camp experience! In today's NY Observer, recently-wed writer Spencer Morgan writes about his experiences at camps as far-flung as Canada, and he doesn't skimp on sordid details, like his run-in with "raw" anus. More »
