Picture this; Charlotte is cool, popular, pretty. She’s funny, kind and amazing with people. She loves sport and shopping and she’s your classic popular girl. Sophie is a little bit strange, she spends a lot of time completely silent on the outside but animated and noisy within. She loves books and writing fanfiction, she sucks at sport and her fashion sense is a little quirky. In any teen novel, Charlotte is the nasty mean girl who will eventually get her comeuppance and Sophie is the protagonist who will probably fall in love with the popular sporty guy (who is obviously secretly a great guy.) and she’ll become cool and popular and liked by all, leaving behind all her realism.
Pop culture gives us one of two views; the first, that Charlotte is cool and the one we should aspire to be, Sophie is boring and will never amount to anything anyway, and the second that popular girl =bitchy and that Charlotte is shallow and false while Sophie is dorky and relatable. We only get one view never the possibility that both girls are good people and that we can learn from both. Nerdy guys are either our protagonist (such as in “Life in Outer Space” by Melissa Keil) or, (and this is more common), a side character, sometimes shown to be kind and/or smart but never with a love interest or portrayed as attractive.
So why do we do this? Why do we categorize people and disregard evidence that doesn’t fit with the way they’re meant to behave? We have formed stereotypes for thousands of years, it provides an evolutionary advantage in that if we know that a certain type of animal (or person) behaves in a certain way we can be on guard around them. Friendship groups in a school setting are usually quite solid by the age of 11 and while heavy emphasis on “popularity” is most common in middle school and lower high school, most situations in which there are cliques will have some sort of social and popularity hierarchy.
Knowing why we stereotype doesn’t tell us why we associate things like “nerdiness” with being a loser and “popularity” with unkindness, when in reality, some studies have shown it’s not the kids at the top of the pecking order that do most of the bullying, and that many people have identified popular people as being popular because they’re kind and good with people. We also seem to have this idea in our heads that you can belong to one group and one group only! Apparently popular people can’t love Doctor Who and write fanfiction, and if you have glasses and love books you are destined to remain at the bottom. I personally know this to be untrue, as of of the most popular girls at my old school secretly loved to geek out over fanfiction with me.
So how can we leave these stereotypes behind? Well, it’s going to be hard to do that entirely. Teenagers are always going to label each other no matter how much we preach. In fact, some people are proud of their labels, proud of having something to connect them to others. But we need to remember that labels are a perception, not a perfect description. No label can Entirely sum up an individual and nor should we expect them to. Labels can be useful, they can be a badge of honor. But a badge shouldn't define a person and neither should any label.
"Why Nerds Are Unpopular." Why Nerds Are Unpopular. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. <http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html> Kennedy-Moore, Eileen. "Popular Kids." Psychology Today. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. <https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/growing-friendships/201312/popular-kids>.
This is really interesting but I feel like that isn't the case always, there is a movie called GBF where they show that the popular girl is actually really nice. But I agree stereotypes shouldn't be based on pop culture views and ideologies.
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