BY ANTHONY CHIARALUCE

The concept of girl fights, to most, is very intriguing. Why do girls do it? Is it because of their social class, the way they were raised, or maybe it’s because there is a substantial amount of pressure from the media? The answer is all of those and more.
Many speculators believe girls fight because they want to mimic their male peers, but they couldn’t be more wrong. The cover story, “Girls Just Want to be Mean,” appeared in a recent issue of the New York Times Magazine. In the words of Bahtya (www.stophazing.org, “Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?”), “It’s the popular thing to do. TV, media, newspapers, it’s like they teach girls you’re supposed to fight…” If the media really doesn’t want girls to fight then why do they idolize it by giving it a cover story, or by basing sitcoms, for example Degrassi, on girl fights?
Another reason for girl fights is social class. According to Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D, “As I read about the near obsession with indirect forms of aggression (Butler, 1991, p.21), I knew that the target audience was middle class white girls.” According to Newsweek in Chicago, junior girls from the privileged Glenbrook North High School paid for the right to be hazed by senior girls at the annual “Powder Puff” football game. Five girls were hospitalized, one with a broken ankle, another with a concussion that caused severe memory loss, and another with ten stitches to the scalp. These girls were white, and they weren’t as high income as others at the school. This is an instance of “symbolic annihilation”, or the tendency to ignore people lower than us, or to only accept them if they degrade themselves to our stereotypes of them. This is unacceptable.
What’s even more unacceptable is the reason that people show such an interest in girl fights. Girls tend to watch them so they can figure out ways to fight and so that they attract attention to themselves by associating themselves with the fighters. It doesn’t matter what type of attention, whether negative or positive, it just matters that they are getting attention because that’s what girls like. Guys watch them because they get a sense of eroticism from watching two females fight. Guys invented the idea of “jello- wrestling” so they can see two girls, that are all oily, grab each other. Same concept with regular girl fights. The thought is that if two girls are getting close enough to fight maybe they’re close enough to start kissing or other sexual activities.
It’s ridiculous that girl fights are becoming this common for middle school and high school students. Hopefully everyone will realize the atrocity of girl fights, with an end result of halting these events.