Social Control In Mean Girls

2. Mean Girls ties into sociology though the areas of socialization, social interaction, social structure and groups. The first concept I grasped from this film was social control. Social control is a concept that refers to the ways in which people’s thoughts, feelings, appearance, and behavior are regulated in social systems. The type of social control I choose was formal social control. Formal social control is carried out by authorized agents, which in this case is The Plastics. Like Karen stated, “The rules are that you can’t wear pink two days in a row, and you can only wear pink on Wednesdays.” The Plastics attempt to control the society, the school, by telling people what is cool and not cool, fashionable and unappealing. They set norms …show more content…
One of the concepts I choose that help’s society understand deviant behavior and social control from the film Mean girls, was feminist perspective. Feminist perspective uses the conflict approach to examine the reinforcement of gender roles, highlighting the role of patriarchy in maintaining the oppression of women. When the main character Cady is introduced to the girly world with The Plastics, she immediately learns how a girl should act. As Gretchen quoted, “That’s just like the rules of feminism.” The Plastics have this idea where they must have the perfect body, the perfect outfit, the perfect hair, and the perfect boyfriend and must overcome the rest of the girls. Mean Girls encourages girls to rise above attacking each other or downplaying their own abilities for men. This movie really portrays all of the negative stereotypes that are placed on women, especially that they are pretty much just all about looking pretty, keeping slim, wearing all of the cool clothes and dating only the most popular boys in school. I feel that this film does not give a positive or empowering representation on females at all, because of the way that the girls act and all of the irrelevant things they do that make themselves “popular”. In the movie Cady gets into a “fight” with Regina. Although the word “fight” means a violent physical confrontation, this “fight” consists of playing with emotions and gossip in attempts to destroy one another. Since Cady came originally from Africa, Cady …show more content…
The second perspective I choose is a functionalist perspective. Functionalist perspective concludes that all people in society serve a purpose that helps society function. Basically, all individuals have certain social roles that when are put together, they form society. In Mean Girls, functionalist perspective would be found when viewing all the different groups in order to have a normal functioning high school. Janice introduces the different groups to Cady, “Asian nerds, cool Asians, varsity jocks, unfriendly black hotties, girls who eat their feelings, girls who don’t eat anything, sexual active bad geeks, and the plastics.” Socialization is seen when the cafeteria is split into different social groups because they each have common characteristics. Socialization is a continuing process whereby an individual acquires a personal identity and learns the norms, values, behavior, and social skills appropriate to his or her social position. This lunchroom scene shows us these separate groups that form the school. The most popular group would be the plastics, with the main leader Regina George. Majority of the students and even staff seem to follow along what the plastics do. For example, when Janice thinks she is humiliating Regina by cutting holes in her shirt but, in reality people see it as a trend and walk around school with two holes cut in their shirt as well. Gretchen and Karen also