The mean girls who haunt us

Full disclosure: one of my best friends has a story in this issue. I have known Celia Walden for about 15 years. From our first meeting of tucking into dinner (wine and cheese straws) and comparing laugh-or-you’ll-cry battle stories about being a woman working in the media, I knew I’d found a kindred spirit. A real girl’s girl.

So it’s always been fascinating to me that Celia and I have argued a lot over the years about one subject in particular: whether or not woman are nice people. Her experiences of high school and office rivalry have, until recently, had her largely convinced that all women smile sweetly as they knife you in the back. Apart from a very small circle, she’s had a lifelong struggle to trust anyone with an X chromosome.

I enjoy having this argument with her. That, along with mercilessly taking the mick out of each other, is part of our dynamic. It’s a defence mechanism I suspect we both started to hone in the girls’ own jungle that is high school.

The truth is, it’s rare to meet a woman who doesn’t shudder thinking back to those years. For me, the only constant during my teens was the shifting sands of female alliances. One day you’re enveloped in the glow of a girl gang, the next day you turn up to school to find you’ve been ostracised: the central character in your very own Kafka novel, because you never know what crime you committed to be sent suddenly to social Siberia. All you can do at such times is find somewhere to be invisible during lunch break. Oh, and be patient, because soon enough some other poor creature will wear the wrong type of jeans to school and the mean girls will forget about you and focus their ridicule on her.

Celia believes her fear of women stems from surviving the venomous arena of her single-sex school. But believe me, it’s no different when you go to a co-ed. In fact, sometimes the presence of boys only adds to the misery (for instance, when the lead mean girl starts polling them to find out who they consider is the ugliest of all of you). And, as I’ve often said, anyone who’s worked in an office knows that it’s not only the women who can be ruthless, duplicitous and bitchy. The difference, usually, is that if Joe does something spiteful, everyone hates Joe. When Josephine does it, people roll their eyes, tut and agree that working with/for ‘all’ women is just unbearable.

I found Celia’s story a really moving personal journey of learning to stop fearing 51 per cent of the population. It’s this vulnerable honesty that’s another quality in her I so admire. Sadly, we will now have to find something else to have wine-fuelled arguments about. But, like my husband, she really hates most of my outfits (‘Elvin, are you off to plough a field in those dungarees?’). We can start there.