Girl Crisis and Power in Mean Girls and Clueless

In today’s society teens are over dramatize everything in order to feel like they can gain girl power. For example, teens will over dramatize a girl crisis then gain girl power from it. Mean girls & Clueless reinforce an outdated view of ‘girl power’ only coming after a girl crisis to help portray how in high school when a girl has a girl crisis, they become a better person and gain girl power, to help and make the main character realise how clueless they are.

Mean Girls is a movie where teenage Cady Heron was educated in Africa by her scientist parents. Cady finally gets to experience public school when she moves to the united states and learns how high school is very different compared to being home schooled in Africa, but then Cady starts to get comfortable with high school due to meeting her first friend who are Janis Ian and Damian. She then unwittingly finds herself in the good graces of an elite group of cool students dubbed 'the Plastics,' who are Regina George, Karen smith, and Gretchen Wieners but then Cady soon realizes how her shallow group of new friends earned this nickname of plastics.

Clueless is a movie where shallow, rich and socially successful Cher is at the top of her Beverly Hills high school's pecking scale. Seeing herself as a matchmaker, Cher first coaxes two teachers into dating each other. Emboldened by her success, she decides to give new student Tai a makeover. When Tai becomes more popular than she is, Cher realizes that her disapproving ex-stepbrother was right about how clueless she really was and falls in love with him.

Mean girls use the outdated view of ‘girl power’ only coming after a ‘girl crisis’ to help portray how in high school when a girl has a girl crisis, they become a better person and gain girl power to themselves. Cady’s outsider status set her up for crisis as she didn’t know what was right and wrong and this made Cady biggest crisis which was when the secrets book got leaked around the school as she was the main reason it happened because Regina George had found out what Cady had done to her. Cady took her friend’s, Cady forces Regina and her boyfriend to breakup and then kisses Regina’s ex-boyfriend. This made Regina leak her secret book which has information about every girl in school and then she accused the book to be Cady, Gretchen or Karen. After all of this had finished, she then realised that she was acting like someone she isn’t and was not the right way to gain power and she should go back to her old ways. She then apologised to everyone she hurt and gained girl power and started to become a better person.

Clueless purposely makes Cher a really likeable person as she doesn’t think she is doing wrong to the community and that she is privileged, false, confidence and clueless. Then once Cher realised how clueless she actually is and what she is doing isn’t that good, she then started to change the way she thinks. Cher started to then get a lot of crisis for example, Cher failed her driving test, realising Elton was just making her happy because she liked her, thinking everything she said was correct, but it turned out to be wrong. All of these are crisis that happen to Cher helped to make her realise how clueless she really is and then gained girl power by her wanting help the community in a positive way, and she started by volunteering to help miss Geist with finding cans of food for the community.

The view of girl power only coming after a girl crisis is not the only way to gain girl power as you can gain it through already doing good to the community and being nice and respectful to people and don’t need to talk behind people back as that is what happened in mean girls then a massive fight broke out then girl power was gained after everything was sorted but if you didn’t talk behind peoples back there wouldn’t of been a massive fight between the girls in the first place and every girl could have girl power if every girl was given respect and treated each other nicely.

In today’s society girls overdramatize crisis that happen to themselves to gain girl power.

They do this as they have been influenced by movies like Mean Girls and Clueless where it reinforces an outdated view of ‘girl power’ only coming after a girl crisis. So, in real life there are teen girls overdramatizing their life in order to gain girl power.