On Feb. 15, the Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) club hosted a movie night for Galentine’s Day. Galentine’s Day is a day to celebrate female friendship and is often celebrated a day before Valentine’s Day. A poll was sent to the people who RSVP’d for the event with the option to choose between some classic movies that showcase female friendship. Mean Girls (2004)eventually won the poll and was the movie that ended up being played. The event took place at Thad Cochran Center.
Mean Girls is a comedy movie that shows the dynamic in some female friendships in high school. In the movie, the lead character, Cady Heron, is a new student who has just moved to suburban Illinois from Africa. She has been homeschooled her entire life and is suddenly thrown into the turmoil of being a girl in high school. In the movie, she navigates a life that is so similar, yet, so different from the life she once had. She soon learns the unwritten laws of some female friendships and relationships in high school.
The movie explores subtle power play that takes place in some female friendships, especially in high school where popularity is prioritized. The competitiveness enforced between women by a series of unwritten rules is explored in the movie. The movie ends with most girls realizing that they do not need to compete with other girls and that backstabbing and betrayal hurts everyone in the end. In the end, the movie also shows a new group of girls taking Cady and her friends’ place in high school drama while the initial group is finally at peace.
The movie is very applicable to the club. Girls are often socialized in a way that causes them to view other girls as a threat and a competition. While most girls grow out of it, some go through their lives viewing other women as their opposition. Most fields of STEM are very male-dominated and women often have to work much harder than their male counterparts to get the same recognition. Some women try to deal with this problem by othering themselves and proving that they are not like “other girls” in STEM, whom they try to portray as being not as smart.
It is very important for women to have one another’s back, especially when they are in a male-dominated setting. Mean Girls was a perfect example of why clubs like WiSE are needed for women. The choice of the movie for Galentine’s Day was, in the words of Gretchen Wieners, so fetch
When asked about the movie, the club president, Zoe Lequeux had just one sentence to say. “This is an iconic movie,” Zoe Lequeux says, which is a very good one-line description of the movie.
Science and arts are often wrongfully portrayed as opposites of each other. A science club enjoying and appreciating art together also showed how art is important to science just like science is important to art.
