can i get a side order of beef

Now for the real update.
Mean Girls is an imperfect work, but god how I felt the distant ulcer of teen girlhood revisiting uncomfortably like a birth mom. So nasty, we ladies can be to one another, typecasting ourselves, forming identities via who reads the part with most conviction. I realize I just wrote “an imperfect work” about a teen dramady penned by an SNL writer (a talented one) and starring Linday Lohan. But oh how it landed, swept girl battles from freshman year up from the bile of my memory, when my best friend Ashley threw me into a mirror over a boy and I punched Amber in the jaw in the hallway, and so-so-tough Katy Valdez whupped me with a shiner the size of a softball for reasons I still do not know, other than we were in Wyoming, and high school in small towns means boredom and big punchin’. I stopped fighting after she kicked my ass, in front of, like, the whole school, or at least all the B-listers whose parents kept loose locks on the liquor cabinet. Boones Farm is a good joke now, but then it was sacrament.
I am pretty sure Ash apologized to either Diamonds & Pearls or Doctor Feelgood. She had a baby when we were juniors and transferred schools, but by that time I was Sisters of Mercified and had given up fighting for fanzines. Just think, if I weren’t blogging right now I might be brass-knuckling some sad lady in a Hardee’s parking lot.
There have been debates on whether Mean Girls is a feminist film and listen, it
MAJOR SPOILER ALERT
ends in utopia; as though Tina Fey wanted to right all her wrongs, with all the Mean Girls (the A-list, got-it-all beauty clique known as the Plastics) in a gymnasium, reconciling with their friends in one giant affirmation of sisterhood, reading apologies to their comrades and then doing the “trust” backwards stage dive, Ani DiFranco concert-style—presumably and accurately representing academic feminism because, for some of the bitchiest apologies, the crowd parts and alpha girls are left to crush each other or slam hard, alone, onto the gym floor. Lindsay Lohan’s character, who has flirted with coolness but learns the big lesson—the cutest dude will like you more if you’re smart—please let it be true—ends up winning after growing up and reclaiming her one love: calculus. It’s funny and the nice girl finishes nice, and first, winning the Mathlete championship, the Cutest Dude, and the spring fling crown. She ends up HAVING IT ALL. I loved it and laughed my ass off—but would definitely rather watch real-life-in-action, like Real Women Have Curves or even the painful truth of the girl characters in Raising Victor Vargas.
Even still, somehow it’s realer than the Hilary Duff klutz crap, because with Hilary Duff’s character we are asked to ignore the fact that Lizzie McGuire Can’t Lose.That, for every time she takes a spill or rams her face into a locker in front of Prince Charming or handsome Italian suitors, there is nothing genuinely underdoggish about either Hilary Duff or Lizzie McGuire—they are gorgeous and talented and smart and charismatic and their waspy upper-middle-class married parents are supportive and kind. But look, even now I am putting Hilary and Lindsay on separate sides—two girls whose publicized beef is based on Aaron Carter, the debatably talented younger brother of a debatably talented Backstreet Boy, and who doesn’t even seem like a fun date.