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A recent survey by Girlfriend magazine took a poll of female teen readers on the subject of school popularity and the results might surprise you. Or not, depending on which side of the spectrum you lie on.
1500 readers were surveyed, most stated that they were thankful not to be included in the “popular” groups in school. Just about 94% also stated that they prized being well-liked over being popular … which, I guess could be the same thing, but regardless — Girlfriend editor Sarah Cornish states that it’s apparent that young women are placing more importance on cultivating lasting, meaningful relationships over fitting into the popular group and dealing with bitchy, backbiting friends.
The final results stated that just over half of the readers surveyed stated that they, who were not in the “popular” group, thought themselves to be happier than those who were and just under fifty percent who stated that they were the lucky ones to be a part of the elite clique stated that they were not as happy as those who were not.
Young, impressionable girls are wondering, now, why could this be. I think it has a lot to do with society’s standards of high school popularity and the subsequent stresses that occur due to fitting into those high standards. I also think that young girls nowadays are becoming more forward-thinking in their quests for happiness and they can see through the facades of juvenile stereotypes to a greater sense of well-being and accomplishment thereafter.
Whether or not all of these young girls are being honest will remain to be seen — only by a long-term self-reveal, obviously — but it’s a good thing that young girls nowadays are looking for positive individuality in situations rather than trying to jam themselves into a mold in which they’d never normally fit.
Were you one of the elite throughout school? How did, or didn’t, the effects of popularity change your school career?
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Meh. I’m a dork and proud of it.
Same here!
In high school I was one of the two girls that showed up to the Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. It was great.
If there was a popular clique in my school I certainly never noticed. It’s probably a cultural difference. At my school sports were not a big deal; I know we had swimming, football (european, not american), and a couple of other teams but I have no idea when they played or who was involved. There were clubs but they weren’t cliquey at all. Of course there were various groups of friends but people socialized between them and there was no hierarchy.
I can think of one girl who clearly wanted to be a popular girl but even then the majority of people in my year knew that she was compensating for her early years in high school when everyone thought she was a complete dork; overweight, asthmatic, and thick glasses.
And by European football you mean normal football :D :D
**first thing I saw this morning…heheehee** normal football….
Calling it normal football is a little ethnocentric. Perhaps we should just call it the kind of football where you actually move and don’t wear several pounds of armor or maybe the kind where you actually use your feet more than a couple of dozen times per game.
;-)
A lad I know refers to American football as a “lesser form of football”. I LIKE :D
Did you ever see the Simpsons episode about soccer,a riot broke out because it was so boring,so very very boring!
You people need to
1 – meet an American professional football player -
2 – play the game a few times to get an idea of what is involved.
Let me tell you – they are freaking HUGE! I’m a touch over 5 ft tall and I feel like an ant next to one of them – even the “smaller” ones. Not only are they huge – they are enormous in weight as well.
Add in the fact that they are fast onh the field, you can now imagine 2 or more 300 pound + men running at one another full tilt – do they need pads?
Damn straight they do.
And there is a long history of injuries involving death brain injuries and paralysis to back it up.
American or European football?
Just 2 different games. Completely.
DISCLAIMER- FROM USA-
You can’t say one is better than the other, that’s ridiculous to compare soccer and football. Compare rugby and football if you want, but even they are different games.
American Football and As(soc)iation Football (Soccer came from the SOC in association apparently. Basically the naming issue is that both games require a kick with the foot to score a goal… why does anyone get their panties in a bunch over which version is better or “true” football?! LAME! Haha!
No but SERIOUSLY it was a bloody joke. I am sure American football has loads of epic elements, but you people can be sure too European football is just as exciting, just on an entirely different level. Bloody hell it was just a joke.
@Mireee, I took it as a joke..that’s what made me laugh!
My hubby is a huge sports nut. If he’s not watching sports on TV it’s the Sci-Fi channel. I got a true understanding of what I call soccer (heehee) when I saw a game in person. Those guys are in excellent shape. I also know some NFL players and those guys are for the most part huge and in excellent shape. Anyway, you did give me a good laugh this morning.
I think everyone got that you were fooling around, Miree.
The reason that I commented was because a lot of my non-American friends don’t understand our game – it truly does help to see a game live. It’s seriously like the clash (crash) of the titans, and that men of this size can be so agile and fast is quite impressive.
Lol hope so I was like “what the hell, it was just a light-hearted joke”. I was taken aback by the comments defending American football.
Yes Rhonda. The kind that is actually you know, FUN, to watch and doesn’t make one… yawn. The kind doesn’t require you to sit through 2+ hours for a whole 1 point.
Haha woah hold your ponies it was just a joke.
haha so I posted that comment 5 minutes before heading to class and ironically the guy sitting next to me in class starts watching a soccer game on his laptop. Me and everyone else gave him tons of crap for it. You European people are weirdos :) (he’s like Pakistani or something)
I don’t much care for either version. I understand American football better but I find the whole run for 15 seconds then spend 5 minutes setting up for the next 15 second run frustrating. I don’t know a thing about european football but it’s more exciting to watch because at least they’re moving most of the time. I’ve watched the World Cup once and the Super Bowl maybe 5 times so I guess that means I like American better. Mind you, the year I watched the World Cup France won and I was watching with a group of French men so that was pretty exciting.
Rhonda, my grandmother used to say. ” I don’t get it, a bunch of men in tight pants that run and jump on each other.” LOL
To all of you-
Are you serious?! Have you guys SEEN a football game??? It’s as good as it gets! No they don’t run for 5 seconds and then set up for 15. It’s action packed the whole time, you never know who’s going to win even if there’s a clear favorite. It takes strength, agility, planning, strategic thinking, brute force, and this… brotherhood. It’s this group of guys getting er done and having a blast. *sigh* I need to go hang out with some earthlings because clearly you guys are little aliens from mars…or women close enough :)
Sorry….but I think I’ll stick with hockey. ^_^
Me too. Unless it’s the Olympics. Then I’ll watch just about anything. I have no idea why that is.
I will also watch anything during the Olympics! Absolutely anything. It’s addictive.
Right? I was like, “Why the hell am I watching curling?”
Two words: Greco-Roman wrestling.
Womens hockey team(US),going for the gold in 30mins. I’ve got my popcorn ready.
P E R V
Who told you?
NFL Combine. Espn. This weekend.
275lb guys with the agility, speed, stamina and hand-eye coordination of athletes half their size. True strength and athleticism, in my opinion.
I’d really like to see the exact questions asked on this study. I think it would be very difficult to ask in a neutral manner.
I was a band geek in high school, but moved between a few crowds, as did most people. There was a group that might have been identified as the ‘popular’ people, but not at all in the Hollywood sense. The majority of the school was fine within their own friends, and I don’t think these people were accorded any more status, or had many more hangers-on than usual.
Then again, I went to a school where ’school spirit’ was a joke, our football team never won a game, and the cheerleaders may or may not have existed.
Did you go to my high school? Hahaha school spirit.
You Canadian? :)
I went to college with a Canadian cheerleader. They were purely competitive, none of the jumping around at games and such. Nobody had heard of competitive cheer leading (this was before Bring It On came out) so she answered a lot of questions. I don’t think most of us really believed it since most of our knowledge about cheer leading came from Sweet Valley High and the like. ;-)
That would be solely her school. At mine, I *think* we had a cheerleading squad of a couple girls, but maybe not for all of the years. They weren’t competitive. They weren’t popular. They just sort of existed in the periphery. Maybe they cheered at games, but I never went to a sports game to see. They really just barely existed.
Heck, I’m not aware of anyone in my city going to a high school with reigning cheerleaders as seen in fiction.
What I found is that is it not really you that determines whether you are popular or not (by sports or other activities that you may do) but how others deem you. People put the labek on others that they are “popular” and then feel the need to try to be mean to them or knock them off the pedestal – when those people are the ones that put the person on the pedestal in the first place.
So it is not surprising to know that most teen girls do not want to be put in that category because it can be a no win situation.
At my secondary school (the equivalent of ‘high school’) pretty much my entire year was split into two groups. There was the more conventional group (athletic boys, girls with perfect hair), and then there was the other group consisting of the more ‘rebellious’ kids (stoners, punks, and general oddballs). There wasn’t really an in-between until we got older and started moving away from safety in numbers. I was generally in the second group as I was too much of a geek to fit in with the first.
I think I was lucky because I got the benefits of popularity without the backstabbing – due to my best friend being immensely popular with all the boys from both sides. I got to go to the good parties, but as not many people knew who I was I was free from being the subject of rumours.
Of course, looking back I think I was lucky – at the time however I would have happily sold a large portion of my soul to be as popular as my best friend was.
We now go to different universities (but very close to each other) and she still is immensely popular, but also immensely messed up. My other friends who were on the fringes like me tend to be more well adjusted now.
I was an utter outsider. I had friends but didn’t like them, I just hung out with them because otherwise I’d be alone. I was into stuff nobody else was into (emo, indie music; indie films) and I wasn’t exactly what we can call pretty so I didn’t even have a boyfriend. I was more often unhappy than happy, quite an angsty teenager if you ask me, although I never was the kind to yell at my parents. I just stayed in my room, surfed the internet, dreamt of Uni and listened to indie British rock. Woohoo.
From all her comments, I have gathered Rhonda grew up in Scotland, and here it’s the same – culturally there’s no “popular” group in high schools here, everyone has their own friends, although some are more noticed than others. There was this girl in my class who was absolutely gorgeous and everyone knew who she was, and you know, the cool kids from my year, but they weren’t popular in the traditional sense, just cool. I kindly hated them :)
I moved between 2 or 3 groups as well. I didn’t particularly care what anyone thought, though.
If I’m honest, I think I delighted in shaking things up (starting faux “trends” just to see what idiots would follow) because I could.
It amuses me to no end when I run into former classmates now and a surprising number of them tell me that they were afraid of me! I was “too honest”.
Well guys…back then..I was in the “popular group”, but didn’t feel like I fit in. The popular group in high school consisted of advanced classes, great grades, homecoming court, scarlett torch,(which I made and didn’t even know what it was). We also partied but never got caught, skipped school cause it was boring, so forth and so on.
As I said, I never felt I fit it, but never learned to speak up fro myself until 25 years old or so. Did massive growth in my early 30’s, finally got my shit together. I hated my youth, never attended a class reunion, and tried to make extra sure that my kids had a better one.
I was a punker. So…not in the popular crowd. But I was happy, because I didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought of me.
I was in a group of friends in 8th grade that was pretty much a “breakfast club” assortment. We were mostly segregated into our natural species’ by the time we hit high school in 9th grade.
The girl that went on to join the popular crowd was not as happy as the rest of us. She always felt that she was on the verge of losing her popular status, she dated boys she didn’t really like because they were the ones that were in her social circle, etc.
The rest of us floated around different social groups throughout high school. I always traveled between the punks and the hippie burnouts. Got along fine with both of them.
There were 16 kids in my graduating class- none of that popular/outcast stuff mattered. The larger school I went to for half of 9th grade (300 kids per grade) was definitely more socially structured. Being popular there meant that your family had money. If you could afford to play whatever sport, wear fashionable clothing, your own car (HUGE) and have high ambitions of going to whatever college you wanted- you were popular.
Make of it what you will, I don’t think any of it matters at all. Your lot in life could change at any given stage.
In high school, I was one of the three or four “gamer chicks”, and what’s more I didn’t party and liked to read both actual classic literature and manga. So obviously I wasn’t in the popular group. I never minded in the least.
I was homeschooled ( I assume I was popular with my parents), then popular in my Christian primary school, wildly unpopular in my exclusive ladies college and then sent to Catholic Boardingschool where I gave up on the whole thing and then discovered at the end I was wildly popular.
It was stupid because I never changed my personality to gain or lose popularity – it was like the stockmarket, the tiniest thing could trigger popularity or not!
I fucked the hottest girl at the Catholic school though, and she still invites me over from time to tim (I say no!)
Goo, You crack me up!
One thing that really, really gets to me (which I guess is a bit sad) is that at school me and my friends were known as “the freaks” because we dressed differently and didn’t listen to the same music as everyone else.
And now, thanks to the wonders of Facebook, I’ve noticed that so many of the girls that were in the popular group at school now listen to the same sort of music and are more ‘alternative’.
These girls have pretty much become what they made fun of me and my friends for being.
It’s kind of sad that at school they felt like they couldn’t be like that because they were so set on fitting in.
To be fair, a lot of what was once considered ‘alternative’ IS what’s now popular.
Haha yeah you’re right.
Still annoys me though. Actually I think it annoys me more that it’s now cool to be ‘indie’ at least I’m pretty sure it will never be cool to be into Black Metal and so I’ll always be a freak :P
I’ve never understood how ‘indie’ can be considered a valid label. It would be anything not part of the main labels – which could include all kinds of disparate music genres. To call a type of music ‘indie’ is to change the word into one with no meaning, leave those without a label of all other sorts without the logical descriptor, and make a mockery of the word when the bands become popular and do sign with major record labels.
There really needs to be a better term for that music.
I propose ‘whiney’. :)
It’s funny The Breakfast Club was mentioned because the study reminds me of the scene where Claire is confessing how hard her life is due to being one of the popular kids. She complains that she is held to a higher standard and that she can’t do what she wants or spend time with who she wants. It’s just so much pressure on her. Maybe it isn’t such a new trend at all.
I was an orchestra geek and wannabe punk in HS so I have no experience with this phenomenon myself.
i am one of the most popular girls in my grade, of course one of my best friends is the queen bee or the “alpha”. people think the popular girls are just.. there. no, we’re all really tight friends who love each other alot. we dont care if we become the dorks as long as we have each other :)