I just watched Mean Girls! Damn, that movie is so Problematic I love it.
Mean Girls confuses me greatly.
It seemed to me like standard pro-homeschool propaganda, though with a bittersweet ending tacked on over the usual bad ending. It’s the cautionary tales homeschoolers tell each other, converted to movie format.
A movie like that is inherently niche: it can’t have mainstream appeal because the mainstream itself is the villain.
I watched it at a party with a group of public schoolers once, and I was boggled that they liked it. A movie that hated them, that called them animals (and not in the technical sense), and yet they were enjoying it.
Is this that “you aren’t stuck in traffic, you are traffic” thing? Nobody’s bothered by anti-public-schooler sentiment because everyone thinks of themselves as not counting, that the sentiment is directed at all those other people?
(Or maybe I was supposed to pattern-match it to Relatable Stories Reminding Me of My Own Life, and enjoy it on that level? But since I never went to public school, the thing in my life it best pattern-matched to was propaganda rather than personal experience, completely changing my perception of the film?)
What strikes you as homeschool propaganda, the thing where Cady is Corrupted By Popularity and ends up changing her whole personality? Or the thing where the movie talks about how High School Is Like A Jungle/otherwise terrible? Because both of those are very common teen movie tropes, and I’m curious if you’d react in a similar way to similar movies.
#I can think of way more examples for the first one #I think the second one is more common in like books #(and adaptations of books) #probably to appeal to Sensitive People Who Read #but it’s still definitely a common cultural trope
Both of them are also common tropes in cautionary tales about why you shouldn’t go to public school. Corrupted By Popularity is more disturbing when you’re a kid hearing these stories, but as I’ve gotten older I find High School Is Like A Jungle getting worse because of that…that knowing superiority embedded in it. “Yes,” it says, “we’ve all had times where we looked at a group of public school kids and saw a pack of lesser animals for a moment before they resolved into people. Most, perhaps all, of us have had times where they never resolved into people at all. It’s okay; not only okay, but worth encouraging.” And that’s…not…okay? It’s sure as hell not worth encouraging. Like, yeah I’ve done it, and I don’t feel inclined to beat myself up over it, but these days I try to actually see people as people? Not seeing people as people has a pretty bad track record in general.
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“Yeah, I think public schoolers see it and think ‘Oh, yeah, I remember that shit at my school’.
ie: It’s not anti-public-school propaganda any more than people think the
average sit-com is anti-family propaganda. It’s a dramatised and
exaggerated version of their /actual lives/.”
…huh. I really liked sitcoms as a kid, but I liked them to the extent that they did not remind me of my own life. They were–rather like Mean Girls, actually–glimpses into other ways of being.
I did once hear that Roseanne was so popular because it reminded people of themselves, and that surprised me. I liked Roseanne best because, as an upper-middle-class homeschooled kid, the lives of the Connors were completely alien to me, and I thought that was fascinating. I mean, it’s certainly possible to have a more alien-to-me life than they did–hell, I’m pretty sure you have one yourself, Alison–but people more foreign than them are generally portrayed as foreign, as people who are interestingly strange rather than interestingly identifiable-with. Roseanne portrayed itself as normal, as a story made by and for an alternate universe where people actually lived like that, and that was why it appealed to me.
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It may be worth noting that IME, homeschooled minors generally do not date. Teen relationship drama pings as foreign to me, because…look, one time I heard through the grapevine that some sixteen-year-old in the community was dating someone, and the reason that got passed through the grapevine was because it was unusual for a sixteen-year-old to be dating at all. Another time, we got this one age ~14-15 kid who’d started out in public school and only recently switched to homeschooling. Apparently he flirted with the other kids around his age, most of whom didn’t notice and the remainder were weirded out. I honestly don’t know whether he flirted with me or not; I was in the oblivious majority, and I only know this was happening because I heard the parents talking about it.
Bear in mind, this was all among secular homeschoolers.
Mind you, even with the cautionary tales it’s very common for kids to switch to public school later on, especially at the middle-school/high-school transition, and the kids who do this tend to be more otherwise-normal than the kids who don’t. The weirdness level of homeschooled kids thus becomes more concentrated the older they get; in particular, groups of homeschooled teens are frequently upwards of 50% autistic. There are confounding factors and probably complicated feedback loops when it comes to which differences in homeschooling culture are actually cultural.
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#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #homeschool
Brinens and Things 