Forums → Popular Media → So Last Night, I was Watching Mean Girls...

...which is really how all my good stories start.

But anyway, this thread is the spiritual successor to the last thread I made. Actually, someone else made it and I jacked it, but tomato tomato. I would link to it here, but it seems to have been eaten by a forum glitch. At least I assume that's what it was, because it was CLEARLY not violating any forum rules. But I digress. Back to the story.

Like I said, I was watching Mean Girls, but in honor of Lidsay Lohan's recent adventures, I decided to wear my lesbian subtext goggles. This awesome mental filter allows you to read between the lines and see those lilac prose that tell us all Toadette has a thing for Princess Peach. My goggles are probably more well trained than is healthy. Anyway: Janis is presented as bisexual, having a crush on Regina and kissing Kevin G from Mathletes, but that's not really important. The theory I had was that there was another lesbian: None other than Regina George.

"But Xzeno, Regina is shown hooking up with dudes! How's your little theory lookin' now?" you say. This is a good point. However, one must note that Regina directs all of her emotional energy towards girls. She uses males as a method of affecting the girls in her life. She goes out with Aaron for Cady. She has no emotional investment in Aaron himself -- she cheats on him and is not fazed when he breaks up with her. She only uses him to maintain her status among her female peers or to specifically affect certain girls. Boys are devices with which to reach out to girls to her. She doesn't date them for them, or as a means to their own end. She does it for the girls in her life.

But why? First, let's examine the most central relationship: Cady and Regina. Right off the bat, their relationship is given a sexual component. Regina first speaks to Cady because Jason is harassing her with sexually themed questions. Regina calls him out on this, and engages Cady in conversation as he leaves. She immediately displays an interest in Cady, even inviting her to join her table. But why? Why Cady? "Why don't I know you?" she asks, a little to happily. At first, this seems to be her reason for speaking to her: TO maintain control, she has to know everyone of import. But she continues to hang out with and befriend Cady. Regina treats her in a way she describes as "sweet", until she begins picking on her. At first her cruelty seems to be motivated by little other than moving the plot along and petty sadism. However, one must take notice of how Regina first mistreats Cady: She gets back together with Aaron. Cady likes Aaron. When Regina discovers this, she moves to prevent any potential relationship between the two. Regina isn't trying to hurt Cady, she just can't stand to see her with a boyfriend. If Cady had a boyfriend, she would focus her time, energy and most important affections on him instead of Regina. Regina couldn't deal with that. Notice how genuinely hurt she is by Cady's personal attacks against her. In essence, Regina takes immediate interest in and subsequently torments Cady not out of hatred, but out of infatuation.

"But wait, Regina openly disses lesbians. What now, Xzeno?" Regina answered this question herself: You can't have a lesbian at an all-girl pool party. You see, Regina is a repressed lesbian. She knows that being a lesbian would cause her to be ostracized by the very females of whom she so desperately craves the attentions. Rather than being in "boys are icky" stage of life, Regina is stuck in the "lesbians are icky" stage of life. She picks on girls (including Cady, but more generally here) because she doesn't know how else to get their attention. She's like the little girl on the playground pulling Sigmund's hair. She doesn't know how else to deal with her feelings because she's been taught that they're wrong. But she still needs to try to forge more meaningful emotional connections to females. She just doesn't know how to -- or even that she can -- do it healthily.

Even Regina's "burn book" hints at this. The book, which is pink and covered in lipstick kisses, contains pictures of girls with associated insults. In her own private book, Regina's abuse can't be motivated by a need to reach out to the girls, because they can't read it. She says negative things because she's too repressed to express her feelings in a positive way, even to herself. Note, however, that the book fixates on the sexual nature of the girls she's insulting, calling them all sorts of things I'm not going to repeat here, like skank and *****.

Regina at first seems to be a mean girl, motivated by... well, that's never adequately explained. However, this examination throws her in a more sympathetic light: A victim of circumstance and society's cruel rules as much as she is a leader and creator of these selfsame rules. Regina doesn't need to be knocked down a peg, dethroned or pushed in front of a bus. She just needs someone to love her and understand her.

Oh God, someone stop me. I'm starting to actually believe some of this stuff.