They manipulate, gossip, ostracize and alienate. They pick on other girls, ones who are different in some way — overweight, nerdy or awkward — as well as those who are overly confident, who are high achievers and who think they are “all that.”

“In crowds” and cliques rule the playground and cafeteria with Byzantine codes of conduct that regulate everything from the right shoes to wear, to the appropriate boy to have a crush on. Girls who transgress are sent to a social Siberia, forbidden from joining in at games at recess, shut out from the lunch table, unable to find a partner for group projects.

Such is the cruel, Machiavellian world of girls, immortalized in works such as the Margaret Atwood novel Cat’s Eye and the Winona Ryder movie Heathers. “This has been going on for centuries,” says Sibylle Artz, associate professor and director of the University of Victoria’s School of Child and Youth Care. “Every woman who’s been through school would know it.” But, she adds, there is surprise at any behaviour that defies a stereotype.

Surprise is an understatement. Since the publication of Margaret Talbot’s New York Times Magazine February cover story, “Girls Just Want To Be Mean,” there has been a tsunami of attention focused on the aggressiveness of girls.

In the spring, Rachel Simmons released her New York Times bestseller Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture Of Aggression In Girls. Simmons is a national trainer for the New York-based Ophelia Project, an organization that helps bolster girls’ achievement and self-esteem.

Published almost simultaneously was Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities Of Adolescence. The author is Rosalind Wiseman, co-founder of the not-for-profit Empower Program in Washington, D.C., which works with young people on issues of violence.

Meanwhile, Seattle journalist Emily White weighed in with Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth Of the Slut, a book examining how young women are punished and ostracized for their real or rumoured sexual exploits.

According to these authors, while bullying among boys tends to take the form of physical aggression, among girls, the tactics are much more psychological and emotional. Researchers have called this “relational aggression” — using the ties or promise of friendship to manipulate behaviour.

“Relationships are very important to girls and women, and yet we have still very few options to deal with conflict,” says Denise Andrea Campbell, past president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.

“And that dynamic can manifest itself in very ugly ways. Because many girls don’t know how to deal with their feelings of anger and jealousy directly, and are taught that those feelings aren’t good feelings to have, they come out in indirect, punishing ways. Suddenly a girl is getting the silent treatment, or is the recipient of dirty looks, or is the subject of rumours and gossip.”

Shannon Bligdon, 15, has seen this first-hand.

“We had a Queen Bee in our elementary school — even my mother called her that,” the Oshawa girl recalls. “She did control things a lot. Like, you weren’t allowed to wear the same clothes as her. One day a girl wore the same sandals and she wasn’t allowed to play with us for a week.” In high school, the cattiness got worse. “Teenage girls are the meanest,” Shannon says.

By exposing the dark side of female relationships, the authors of the mean-girl books hope to liberate young women from the tyranny of the clique. And with varying degrees of perception, skill and scholarship — White’s book is perhaps the most insightful and least prescriptive of the lot — they suggest reasons for and solutions to girls’ bad behaviour.

The most sobering conclusion is that despite their increased achievement and freedom, girls are still admonished not to be too powerful, especially in the realm of sex, while being bombarded with media that are hyper-sexualized and violent.

“This aggressive, mean behaviour tends to come out in girls when they are in Grades 6, 7 and 8,” says Lyndsay Moffatt, a Toronto elementary school teacher who is studying for a master’s degree. “That’s just as they are moving from being girls into teenagers and developing sexually. There’s a lot of anxiety and fear at that time, particularly around sex. They hear about AIDS, pregnancy, sexual harassment and rape.

“Where do they express that anxiety? Where do they try to exert their power? They can’t do it with their parents or their teachers, they can’t do it with boys, so they take their feelings out on other girls. It’s safer and easier to lash out at each other.”

Artz agrees. “Contrary to popular belief, it’s not that girls are becoming more empowered, it’s that images of women have become more and more sexualized, and these images are disempowering women.”

Girls are left to conclude that true power comes through their desirability to men. The aggression girls display towards one another has to do with consolidating that power, Artz says. “Overwhelmingly, their fights centred on their sexual currency and their pretty-power quotient. It’s about competition for males.”

Reports on The Oprah Winfrey Show and other TV programs, and in magazines and newspapers, all note this supposedly “new” phenomenon of female aggression. Dateline called bullying “an epidemic among America’s ten- to thirteen-year-old girls.” But if this behaviour is centuries old, why is it getting so much attention now? And is the problem as widespread as the media attention and public concern suggest?

“I think we need to be careful when we look at social trends and say, ‘Girls’ aggression is on the rise,’” says Campbell. “How much of this current attention is simply because we are now aware that there is a problem?”

So, are girls meaner now? If we haven’t studied their aggressive behaviour before, how can we make any conclusions about it?

One reason for the flurry of attention is due to editors, producers and publishers looking for a fresh angle on the endlessly fascinating topic of Mars and Venus gender differences. And in an era of Jerry Springer-esque talk shows and reality television, bad girls and cat fights are always titillating.

Yet, aside from the sheer sensationalism of the topic, the mean-girl books have struck a nerve. Parents, particularly middle- and upper-class ones, are increasingly micro-managing every aspect of their children’s lives and obsessing over their safety and well-being.

Since the shootings in Columbine and the beating death of Reena Virk in Victoria, the issue of bullying has become a priority for schools, with young people being fretted over as both potential victims and potential perpetrators of violence.

“Adults have always been afraid of teenagers, but now there’s even a greater angst and a greater sense of being threatened,” says Campbell, who is writing her master’s thesis at McGill University on youth and social change.

“In terms of numbers, the generation of young people growing up is the largest since the baby boomers. It’s different and it’s powerful. In North America, it’s the most ethnically diverse generation so far, it’s technologically savvier than any other generation, and on social issues it tends to be very progressive on issues like homosexuality.

“There’s a big fear on the part of adults and parents about this up-and-coming generation of young people, and I think these books about girls and aggression play into that anxiety.”

Moffatt adds that these mean-girl books unintentionally play into a growing backlash against girls and their improving status in school. “For thirty years, there has been this enormous effort to improve the situation of girls within the education system and to raise their academic achievement and self-esteem,” Moffatt says.

“That has been very successful and now we are seeing a backlash against this focus on girls, with books like Christina Hoff Summers’ The War Against Boys, which says that it’s boys who are now the victims in the school system and that they are the ones who are being left behind.

“I think all this attention on girls and aggression is part of that backlash. People are looking at girls and saying, ‘It’s girls, not boys, who are the real bullies. Girls have been bad all along.”

The reality is something much less sensational, Moffatt says. Both boys and girls are capable of good behaviour, as well as bad. Sometimes gender differences play a role in how that behaviour manifests itself, but gender itself isn’t the only determinant.

“Obviously, it’s important to look at gender differences in education, to see where there are failings, inequities and stereotypes that limit one gender or the other. But we also have to look at class, race, religion, family situation, the child’s individual personality, their history, their interests and so on. We always have to keep in mind the bigger picture.”