Lipstick Jungle: Mean Girls Who Fight!

'The days of the demur young lady are long gone, suggests writer Stephanie Tello --(and the view from where I sit says she's spot-on)...

'While I'm all for women breaking free of a gender stereotype,' adds Tello. 'I'm concerned that we are moving into a permanent spot in the other end of the spectrum: vicious raging bitches'

In her Wall Street article, entitled Lipstick Jungle, Ashley Samelson talked about college females this way:

'What shocked me more than anything...was the way women treated other women,' says Samelson.

'I regularly heard young women refer to each other using the most obscene and degrading insults. I observed females encouraging others to binge drink and then berating those who couldn't hold their liquor. At breakfast on the weekends, I often overheard young women discussing their shame after feeling pressured by their girlfriends to participate in a degrading activity, such as a lingerie-themed or "secretaries and bosses" party.'

Adding -- 'nearly every instance of female misery I encountered at Tufts seemed to be instigated initially by another woman.'

For clues to this trend Samelson points to that Koren Zailckas book -- "Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood" (2005) -- who -- 'sets a scene of young women at that upstate school not only encouraging one another to drink to the point of illness or blackout as a way to forge friendships but also competing with one another to be the most sexually adventurous.'

And Ariel Levy book -- "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" (2005) -- 'She details the emergence of what she terms the "nouvelle raunch feminist," a woman who gleefully participates in group sex and attends hook-up parties. Such degradation, Ms. Levy argues, is something that young women are learning in school and are forcing on one another.'

She writes: "If Male Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves."

Talking about how the modern women dispise female leaders, writer Jessie Matus,
puts it this way:

'If the women of the modern world could temporarily tear themselves away from the constant feminine duties that are the having of emotional breakdowns and the buying of unwearable footwear, they might be brought together to form the ultimate female motto.That motto would be, "Never trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die."'

Not convinced our next-gen-girls have gone slightly wild?

How about this story of a 41-year-old woman who drove four teen girls 'to and from' to surprise attack another 15-year-old...

Or how about -- this 15-year-old High School girl who -- after arguing 'over text-messaging' -- 'bashed another with a hole puncher, sending the student to the hospital with a concussion...'

'The teen repeatedly hit the other student in the head with a metal three-hole paper puncher until a school resource officer broke up the fight, police said.'

Stephanie Tello sums it up this way: 'As a group, women have been raised to be competitors instead of partners. In a world where we have to fight twice as hard as a man for respect, we should be working together for constant improvements in all aspects of our lives. Instead some of us continually show the world that we may indeed be too emotional and unstable to hold any kind of power in our society. If we actually banded together we would be a force to be reckoned with, as has been seen in the small moments in history when women fought on the same side for equality. Those women would look at us and the younger generation with such disappointment because we have become our own worst "frenemies."'