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My best friend and I used to joke about how much tension there is between gay men. We could be kiki-ing and walking down 8th Avenue, but as soon as another pair of gay dudes walked past, we got silent, almost like we were ready to rip out they lace front, or maybe we were comparing ourselves to them in some way. It wasn’t that we hated them necessarily, but there was a palpable sense of judgement, like the four of us were thinking our own sassy thoughts about the other person being all, “Child, boo. Did you see that train wreck?”

We spend so much time talking about homophobic violence aimed at gay people from straight people, and the situation is so bleak for some gays that they think the only way out is for them to take their own lives. There are NO H8 campaigns and It Gets Better projects and marriage equality is winning. But when are we going to have a serious conversation about hatred towards gay men within the gay community? When are we going to talk about gay homophobia? Why are we so afraid of GAY?

In case you didn’t know, gay homophobia is rampant. There are gay men who avoid the gay “scene” altogether. There are gay men who say they don’t like black guys/guys of color and claim to not be racist. There are gay men who don’t like fat guys. There are gay men who can’t stand fabulous gays AT ALL, the same gays who spend all their time at the gym getting totally MASC, so U B 2. Whatever — I can’t be bothered with the gym because I, like Victoria Beckham, do not wear flats.

Bruce Pruitt, a New York-based filmmaker, made a fascinating documentary about New York gays and the assumed hatred towards other gay men in the gay community. Not only is it a fascinating question — why do gay men often hate each other — but many of their responses were captivating if problematic. Some spoke about being embarrassed by certain aspects of the gay world, like unconventional sex that would be totally faux pas in the straight world. Others talked about only being attracted to masculine men and “not liking” stereotypical gay men or the stereotypical definitions of “gay,” which is probably why those people spend hours and hours in the gym working to be as masculine as possible so nobody will ever know they just sucked 25 dicks.

One thing that stood out to me about the video is that everybody kept talking about THE gay community, when in reality there is no such thing. There are gay communities, not a gay community. I know I tend to hang out more with artists and creative types, many of whom might be gay, but the gay is not what links us together. Ideas are what link people together. As with any social group there are always subcultures within subcultures, because that’s how we learn to make a place for ourselves in the world. We go where we are wanted, where there are people just like us.

Part of living in the social world is knowing what works for you and making your own place for yourself. You go where you’re wanted, not where you’re going to be teased or feel rejected. You hang out with people who like you, not people who are constantly ready to bitch slap you — unless you’re being a hot ass mess, in which case you probs deserve what you got coming. That’s why I largely avoid big, mainstream gay clubs like the freaking plague. I never have a good time, and it’s hard to explain that to people without sounding like some kind of jerk. It’s not just because I don’t want to hear any Top 40 music. It’s more that I don’t feel at home or welcome there. It’s a gay space, sure, but maybe not MY kind of gay space. Perhaps Not every gay space is a safe space.

I don’t know why some gay men hate other gay men, but it’s definitely a question we should spend more time talking about.

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“The Most Popular Girls In School” is a Youtube web series about the gross, dark, weird side of high school.

This show is so strange and great. My favorite part about it is how specific everything is: the way they use people’s first and last names, the character’s voices, the spot-on pop culture references, the shape of the world and how insane it is. The show is also f-cking funny as hell.

Using Dollar Store “Barbies” and stop motion animation, the show centers around a new girl at Overland Park High School, Deandra, and how she finds herself in the middle of a feud between the Van Buren sisters and head cheerleader MacKenzie Zales. It’s like a crude, sick version of ‘Daria’ or ‘Mean Girls’ or ‘Gossip Girl.’ I don’t know if they’re improvising or if the scripts are written but it’s so pitch perfect and hilarious I wouldn’t be surprised by either. I was gonna include some quotes here, but seriously, just watch the whole thing.

“The Most Popular Girls In School” started on Youtube in 2011, but has since gained a following on Tumblr this year (or at least, I watched it after seeing .gifs from the show everywhere). Start watching it below! Season two is coming soon!

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Silver Linings Playbook

The winter movie season (especially January) tends to be a dumping ground for movies that couldn’t hack it anywhere else — whether they’re risky business for a studio that feels they might be a tough sell to audiences (the re-cut, hyper-violent Gangster Squad) or a studio red-headed stepchild that has flop written all over it (the long-delayed Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters).The A.V. Club recently referred to January as the “least-wonderful time of the year.” But this winter, we’re seeing an emerging trend on top of our yearly pile of holiday coal: a stinking heap of slut-shaming and sex negativity.

To be fair, this isn’t the first time that slut-shaming has reared its sexist head in TV or film. The WB’s golden age programming had a marked tendency to punish its female characters for losing their virginity. Both Gilmore Girls and Felicity have their young leads engage in infidelity to break dat hymen, which leads to retribution and (in the case of Rory Gilmore) being shipped off to Europe for the summer like Daisy Miller. In my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy Summers’ undead boyfriend loses his soul and tries to kill all of her friends after they have sex. The premium is put on maintaining one’s virginity, and if any form of sexuality is shown, it’s harmful and dangerous.

Cinema sometimes subverts these norms — like The Devil Wears Prada — but the more common example is a film like What’s Your Number?, which tells women that having sex with too many people is bad. If you’re a slut, no one will ever love you and you’ll be doomed to be alone. It’s like that scene in Mean Girls where a sex-ed counselor tells girls that if they have sex, they will get pregnant and die. This is not how Judy Blume said it would be.

Michael Tiddes’ A Haunted House (aka that movie starring a bunch of Wayanses) gives us a great example of Hollywood’s norm of sex negativity, as characters who overtly express their sexualities are lampooned for it. The Wayans’ brothers previous Scary Movie franchise engages in the same behavior, presenting female sexuality in broad caricatures and dichotomies. Women are either fake-breasted sluts or virgins. In A Haunted House, the character most defined by his sexuality is Nick Swardson’s gay psychic, and Swardson can’t get through fifteen seconds of screen time without the movie shaming him for his sexuality. They even pull out a nice lisp and some leather gear to do so. The Wayans oeuvre is not one for subtlety.

As a (terrible) send-up of horror films, A Haunted House both comments on and upholds the horror genre’s tortured relationship to sex—where the virgin lives and the slut dies first. (Joss Whedon’s recent The Cabin in the Woods parodies this trope brilliantly.) If you wanted an example of slut-shaming in horror films for your cinema class, the recent Texas Chainsaw 3D is practically a gift from God, a movie whose characterization of female sexuality is so over the top that you feel like it has to be a joke. Two of the film’s three screenwriters are female, so I sincerely hope this is the case, but Tina Fey assures me it might not be. Seriously, did Mean Girls teach us nothing?

Texas Chainsaw 3D introduces us to two female leads, whose sexual behaviors are diametrically opposed. Alexandra Daddario’s Heather is a classic horror movie good girl in the vein of Jamie Lee Curtis, who looks like Neve Campbell crossed with Tiffani Amber Thiessen. She’s shown to be somewhat sexually active, but far more conservative than her friend Nikki, whose dress and nomenclature suggest she’s auditioning for Showgirls II: Revenge of the Kibble. Almost every line of Nikki’s dialogue that graces our ears is about having sex, hooking up or boys—but Raymonde plays Nikki with enough winking irony that you know she understands what she’s dealing with here. During a panel discussion about the film, the Lost actress was a good sport about her character’s limitations: “That was another pleasure of mine, to fulfill the iconic stereotype role of the bimbo in the horror movie.”

Despite the brains behind the boobs, the movie treats Nikki with a strange amount of disdain and spends a great deal of screen time setting her up for a slut takedown. Throughout the film, Nikki goes after Heather’s boyfriend (played by rapper Trey Songz, obviously) like a drunken, heat-seeking missile, and finally lands him in a barn by getting him liquored up. She all but has to force him to get him to have sex with her, which the movie is then able to punish her for by brutally slaughtering her. Whereas Mr. Songz’s death gets to take place off camera, the film revels in watching her pay.

The same behaviors take place in Jack Reacher, a movie that’s been steamrolled at the box office by Django Unchained and Les Miz ever since it was released. Buried in the pre-Christmas onslaught, the film portrays Tom Cruise as a loner vigilante working with and against the police to track down a serial killer, played with reliable surreal gusto by the mad German auteur Werner Herzog. While hunting down the bad guys, the film serves as a love letter to Tom Cruise’s apparently irresistible sex appeal, as almost every woman he encounters throws themselves in front of him to have sex with him. In an uncomfortable scene, even an old lady cashier gives him the sex-me-now eye. He declines, because he’s too good for sex. Jack Reacher is above that sort of thing.

One of the women dying to be with him is the scantily clad Sandy, who approaches the much older Cruise in a bar and offers to go to bed with him. For reasons that the plot will attempt to explain later, Cruise turns down her offer, at first mistaking her for a hooker, and then repeatedly calls her a “slut”—until the men she’s with try to beat him up. (Because it’s a Tom Cruise movie, he’s able to fight all of them off.) However, the movie is not done with Sandy, and Cruise will track her down again later to give her a bizarre speech about her life choices and why she needs to change her filthy, whorish ways. Sandy doesn’t turn her life around, so someone punches her in the head and she dies. No more Sandy.

What’s interesting here is that the movie finds the idea of Tom Cruise being an insatiable lothario so permissible that it’s able to ram it down our throats — but if a woman expresses herself sexually, she gets killed for it. What is this, the Taliban?

Even the movies that do a better job on issues of female sexuality have an odd relationship with the secular flesh. Take the Oscar-nominated Zero Dark Thirty, which is a landmark in rewriting the rules of women in film. Jessica Chastain’s Maya lives for her job, so much so that she views the idea of having sex with her co-workers “unbecoming.” When another female employee, played by Meryl Streep look-alike Jennifer Ehle, suggests that she relax and let her hair down, Maya insists, “I’m not the girl who f**ks.” In order for Maya to be respected at what she does, she’s not allowed to be sexually active at all, and Maya looks down on those without her brand of sexual ethics. All this does is replace one set of sexual standards for another, rather than just allowing women to make their own choices.

Although the film is meant to be a statement about the hyper-sexualization of women in cinema and a cry against patriarchy, this only upholds the overarching sex negativity in Hollywood, where sex is a four letter word. Last year’s public slut-shaming of Kristen Stewart and the industry’s complicity in dumping her career only showed how much progress needs to be made on the issue. We need to change a culture where women are thrown under the bus for cheating, and men get to keep their jobs and careers. The slut shaming we see in such films as Texas Chainsaw 3D is a reflection of that puritanical mindset, one that we reinforce by throwing money at it.

If there’s any hope for sluts at the cinema, you’ll find it in films like Will Gluck’s Easy A or David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, which aren’t perfect but are a huge step in the right direction. In Silver Linings, Jennifer Lawrence’s Tiffany plays a widow who went through a promiscuous period after her husband’s death, about which her romantic interest, Bradley Cooper’s Pat, gives her a hard time. Rather than apologizing for her past, Lawrence owns her sexual history. When Pat calls her a “big slut,” she retorts, “There’s always going to be a part of me that’s sloppy and dirty, but I like that, just like all the other parts of myself.”

Sure, Tiffany has to reinforce the idea that she’s not a slut anymore to assuage Pat’s fears, but a mainstream movie that even flirts with sex positivity is a revelation. Although outspoken young actresses like Jennifer Lawrence and Olivia Thirlby — who mentioned in a recent interview that she self-identifies as a “slut” — are ready and able to break the boundaries of how Hollywood portrays women, they need directors, producers and writers who are willing to go on that journey with them. Rather than continuing to perpetuate damaging norms and then cheekily playing along, we need to stop teaching young women that their bodies are bodies are disposable and they deserve to die for having sex. We have to stop enabling sexism and start actually doing something about it.

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Mean Girls

Quoting Mean Girls isn’t just a sport. It’s a national pastime. Mean Girls is how we make sense of the world, giving the chaos of the universe a recognizable template by which to understand it. More than any writer of her age (and I’m serious), Tina Fey has changed the ways that young people speak and interact with each other, introducing lovely new phrases into the vernacular like “fetch” and “that’s not a thing.” If I had to go an entire day without using a Fey-ism, I don’t know if I could do it. Tina Fey gives me life. She is my reason for being.

With that in mind, I compiled a list of my most-used Mean Girls quotes, in no particular order. This list is in no way an objective compilation, and you may find that your favorite quips vastly differ from mine. That’s one of the great things about it: it’s an endless source of humor to pull from, a veritable Bartlett’s for our age. Do you have favorites I didn’t include? (Hint: I purposefully left a couple favorites off, to give you something to feedback about.) Leave them in the comment section below.

1. “Get in loser. We’re going shopping.”

2. “Ex-boyfriends are off-limits to friends. That’s just, like, the rules of feminism.”

3. “Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized by Regina George.”

4. “We only carry sizes one, three and five. You could try Sears.”

5. “That’s why her hair is so big. It’s full of secrets.”

6. “It’s like I have ESPN or something. My breasts can always tell when it’s going to rain. Well… they can tell when it’s raining.”

7. Janis: “We gotta crack Gretchen Wieners. We crack Gretchen, and then we crack the lock on Regina’s whole dirty history.” 
Damian: “Say crack again.”
Janis: “Crack.”

8. “But you’re, like, really pretty… So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?”

9. “I’m a mouse, duh.”

10. “Can I get you guys anything? Some snacks? A condom? Let me know! Oh, God love ya.”

11. “I don’t hate you ‘cause your fat. You’re fat ‘cause I hate you!”

12. “I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school. I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy.”

13. “One time, she punched me in the face. It was awesome.”

14. “I want to lose three pounds.”

15. “I have a nephew named Anfernee, and I know how mad he gets when I call him Anthony. Almost as mad as I get when I think about the fact that my sister named him Anfernee.”

16. “’Cause she’s a life ruiner. She ruins people’s lives.”

17. “Regina George is not sweet! She’s a scum-sucking road whore, she ruined my life!”

18. “If only you knew how mean she really is, you’d know that I’m not allowed to wear hoop earrings, right? Yeah, two years ago she told me hoops earrings were her thing, and I wasn’t allowed to wear them anymore. And then for Hanukkah my parents got this pair of really expensive white gold hoops and I had to pretend like I didn’t even like them. It was so sad.”

19. “On Wednesdays we wear pink.”

20. “Made out with a hot dog? Oh my God that was one time!”

21. “Did you see nipple? It only counts if you saw a nipple!”

22. “Why should Caesar get to stomp around like a giant, while the rest of us try not to get smushed under his big feet? What’s so great about Caesar? Hmm? Brutus is just as cute as Caesar. Brutus is just as smart as Caesar. People totally like Brutus just as much as they like Caesar. And when did it become okay for one person to be the boss of everybody, huh? Because that’s not what Rome is about. We should totally just stab Caesar!”

23. “You smell like a baby prostitute.”

24. “I’m sorry I called you a gap-toothed bitch. It’s not your fault you’re so gap-toothed.”

25. “I guess it’s probably because I’ve got a big lesbian crush on you! Suck on that.”

26. “Somebody wrote in that book that I’m lying about being a virgin because I use super jumbo tampons, but I can’t help it if I’ve got a heavy flow and a wide set vagina!”

27. “Everyone in Africa can read Swedish.”

28. “Oh my God, Danny DeVito! I love your work!”

29. “I can’t go to Taco Bell. I’m on an all-carb diet. God, Karen, you are so stupid!”

30. “If you’re from Africa, why are you white?”

31. “There are two kinds of evil people in this world. Those who do evil stuff and those who see evil stuff being done and don’t try to stop it.”

32. “I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom.”

33. Damian: “My Nana takes her wig off when she is drunk.”
 Ms. Norbury: “Your Nana and I have that in common.”

34. “Gretchen, I’m sorry I laughed at you that time you got diarrhea at Barnes & Nobles. And I’m sorry for telling everyone about it. And I’m sorry for repeating it now.”

35. “She doesn’t even go here!”

36. “I hear she does car commercials…in Japan.”

37. “And on the third day, God created the Remington bolt-action rifle, so that Man could fight the dinosaurs. And the homosexuals.”

38. “Whatever, I’m getting cheese fries.”

39. “I have this theory, that if you cut off all her hair she’d look like a British man.”

40. “This is Susan from Planned Parenthood, I have her test results. If you could have her call me as soon as she can. It’s urgent. Thank you.”

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Mean Girls (Widescreen Edition)

1.

Mean Girls (Widescreen Edition)

I’ve tried to alter this phrase by replacing Glen Coco with the name of the person being spoken too, but it simply isn’t the same. If a friend does something worthy of praise, this is automatically the way I congratulate them automatically. Everyone is Glen Coco when they’re winning at life. This should be a term we use to commend successes, small or significant.

2.

Mean Girls (Widescreen Edition)

If a friend is potentially going to hookup with someone, or the topic of sex is even being discussed, this is the immediate piece of advice to give them. If you’ve mastered the art of deadpan delivery, it’s even better. Say it sternly, just like Coach Carr, the underage student predator he was.

3.

This is a viable response or comeback to anything anyone says. It’s the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of quotes, there is literally no wrong way to use it. Just know that by deciding to ask me a questions, there is ALWAYS a risk that I’ll respond with these four words as my answer.

4.

It’s just really fun to use this line whenever something goes awry or resembles unpleasant living conditions. Electricity went out? Hell no, I did not leave the south side for this! Police cars in the neighborhood responding to a disturbance? Hell no, I did not leave the south side for this! Remote batteries died? Hell no, I did not leave the south side for this! Then I always laugh hysterically, as if I’ve just delivered the greatest punchline of all time.

5.

If butter or margarine is around, I’ll pop the age-old question and much like the Ashton Kutcher line, draw confused looks from people who don’t know the quote. Honestly this is partially why I look forward to eating out. When hitting up Denny’s or IHOP after a night of bars and clubs, they don’t just present you pancakes topped with a slice of butter. They’re presenting you an opportunity to put your Mean Girls quoting abilities to good use, and isn’t that all any of us really want out of life?

6.

I’m a fetch loyalist who fully intends on doing my part to make fetch happen. When you find a cause you believe in, you fight for it — and damnit, this is my KONY project. Soon I’ll have a promotional video along with wristbands and whatnot in a ‘Fetch Action Kit,’ spreading the word and doing whatever it takes to make fetch famous.

7.

I probably over use this more than any other Mean Girls line, mainly because the opportunity to say it presents itself so often. Essentially any occasion where someone is about to have a seat in a room where there are 2+ persons, I’m going to shout this at them with the pent up anger and frustration of Gretchen Weiners, only I follow mine up with a “just kidding.”

8.

What you can’t do is sit with us — you can, however, go shave your back now. Whenever someone gives attitude or speaks rudely, this is the response they get. Something about dismissing someone and telling ‘em they can go away is so epic, but the cherry on top is insinuating that their back hair is out of control and in need of maintenance. Think about it. “You can go away now.” Meh, that’s alright, but not nearly as effective as telling someone to kick rocks and take care of the jungle growing on their spine.

9.

This line is rather helpful when you need something to say in an awkward situation, and sometimes acknowledging the current scenario’s discomfort can ease the tension. Of course, sometimes it can make it even more uncomfortable, but hey, at least you can happily quote Mean Girls while staring social anxiety in the eyes.

10.

I don’t even know the context in which I use this, I just know that these words come out of my mouth pretty often. It’s basically something I just yell out every few hours, and once in a while it may actually fit the situation. Once you’ve seen Mean Girls over twenty times, you suffer from a syndrome that forces you to blurt out quotes instinctually. It’s a gift, and you shouldn’t take your abilities lightly. 

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This post articulates a theory I’ve long held: That if real life were Mean Girls, Taylor Swift would be Regina George. Sure, she always plays the “nice girl” (the Cady in the situation), but you’ve always suspected it’s true. Deep in your heart, you don’t picture Regina asking Cady if butter is a carb. It’s Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is a regulation Mean Girl. When she threw shade at Tina Fey (aka Ms. Norbury), Taylor was just fulfilling her destiny.

Own it, T-Swizzle. It’s okay. Being associated with Rachel McAdams is the best thing you could ever do. If you still needed convincing, this one’s for you.

How do I even begin to explain Taylor Swift?

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Taylor Swift is flawless.

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I hear her hair is insured for $50,000.

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I hear she does car commercials…

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…in Japan.

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Her favorite movie is Varsity Blues.

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One time she sat next to John Stamos Ashton Kutcher on a plane…

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…and he told her she was pretty.

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One time she punched me in the face.

Joe Seer / Shutterstock.com

It was awesome.

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30 Rock

The first time I saw Tina Fey perform, I had no idea who she was. Pretty much no one in the theater that night did. To us, she was just the other person in the sketch show, second fiddle to the one everyone had really come to see. Which, looking back on it now, is completely insane. The show was called Dratch & Fey, and in the summer of 2000, it was pretty much the hottest thing at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater in New York. But it wasn’t the Fey part that had everyone talking. The real star was Rachel Dratch, who had debuted on Saturday Night Live a year earlier, and become beloved by comedy nerds everywhere, myself very much included. Before Dratch & Fey even made it to NYC, we comedy dweebs were breathless with excitement. “Did you
hear Rachel Dratch’s show from Second City is coming here?! I need tickets. I NEED TICKETS. Oh, by the way, who’s Fey? Don’t know. Some dude, maybe? Who cares. It’s Rachel Dratch!” It’s preposterous to think about now, now that Tina Fey is the most consistently hilarious and well-rounded comedian in the country, but in 2000 she was simply Rachel Dratch’s lesser-known co-star. But 2000 was a long time ago. So long, in fact, that in The Wall Street Journal’s review of the show, they said it was so good it was “even worth missing Survivor for.” And thus their journalistic integrity torch was extinguished. But after seeing Dratch & Fey, I was sure I’d never forget Tina again.

To be fair, there were probably more informed members of the audience who were aware of the Fey genius. She had written for SNL for a few seasons, and months later would take over as head writer and co-anchor of “Weekend Update” with Jimmy Fallon. But for the most part, she was unknown, and it’s crazy to think that in the 12 years she’s gone from that to utter comedic world domination. She was hilarious that night, of course. And weird, and unique, and preposterously hot. All hallmarks we’ve come to know as the Tina Fey Brand. And of course, she was just getting started. Since then, Tina Fey revitalized “Weekend Update” and SNL, made the hilarious Mean Girls, wrote the bestselling Bossypants, created, wrote and starred in 30 Rock — one of the best sitcoms of the 2000s, and effectively mocked Sarah Palin’s political career into submission. A pretty impressive resume. Even better than mine, and I’ve worked for Blockbuster Video twice. But all of that isn’t what sets her apart. What truly makes Tina Fey special is that everybody loves Tina Fey. And I mean everybody.

Have you ever heard anyone say they didn’t find Tina Fey funny? Like, even one person? Seriously, have you ever heard the words, “You know what, Tina Fey just doesn’t do it for me.” No. You have not, because it’s never been said. Language stops functioning if you try to complete that sentence. You start, “You know what, Tina Fey just does — ” and then your jaw breaks off your face and falls on the ground. Parents like her. Kids like her. Hipsters, weirdos, Democrats, Republicans, even my cat can’t stop talking about Date Night, and I thought it was pretty mediocre. Who else has such universal appeal? Puppies? Maybe, but you still have to pick up their poop, which limits things. I would say she’s the white Barack Obama, but she’s not. She’s better. She’s the white Michelle. The white Michelle With Bangs. Everybody loves Michelle with Bangs.

The moment I knew Tina Fey had reached the maximum capacity of adoration was when I got a phone call from my mom. My mother can’t send a text message, she doesn’t own a DVR, and still uses dial-up internet. But still, she called and asked, “What do you know about this Gina Gay? She’s very funny.” That’s big time stuff. I mean, she only got three letters wrong! For her, that’s huge. Like man walking on the moon huge. I can’t think of any other performer with such cred. Jon Stewart reached Mom Awareness a few years ago, but I think she forgot about him. She still mentions Bruce Springsteen occasionally, but I’m pretty sure she has him confused with Bon Jovi. No one else, pop culture or otherwise, has reached such lofty heights.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Fey is the quality of her work. Check out her IMDB page, there’s not a stinker in the bunch. (Except for, perhaps, her voice work in Deer Avenger 2: Deer in the City, which I have yet to track down.) There is no other comedian with such a success rate. Will Ferrell. Steve Martin. Woody Allen. Joan Rivers. Bill Cosby. Louis CK. Chris Rock. Jerry Seinfeld. They’ve all made a crapper here or there. Not Tina Fey. Tina Fey would take one look at the script for Bee Movie, say, “Yeah, kinda heavy on the puns,” and just write another hit TV show instead. I wouldn’t just watch her read the phone book, I’d watch her consider reading it, then lie down and take a nap instead. In the least creepy way possible. If there’s another comedian that good, and as universally beloved, I’d love to know who it is.

Seriously, tell me. I’m lost without 30 Rock. At this point, I’d even take a Gina Gay.

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I went home a few weeks ago for a belated birthday celebration with my family in Cincinnati. I’m too afraid of everything to get on a plane without several doses of Dramamine and a Vodka Tonic in me, so I took the early morning bus, waking up at the crack of dawn to have someone wantonly drool on my shoulder while I tried to finish my copy of The Lonely Polygamist. I was seated across from two girls who spent the entire trip kiking, gossiping and drinking what appeared to be a Southern Comfort mixer out of their water bottles. I only brought books. I was not adequately prepared for this.

Over the sound of X’s Los Angeles on my headphones, I listened to my two friendly Indiana aislemates shittalk what had to be almost every woman they’ve ever been acquainted with — especially Brooke, who had committed the cardinal sin of being both a “psycho bitch” and a “total slut.” I looked up from my book. Psycho bitch? I was puzzled. That was the way my father talked about my mother after their divorce, and it was strange to hear his words and his misogyny casually fall out of someone’s mouth. It’s like seeing someone else wear a shirt you own in public, as if they discovered a guarded secret of yours without even realizing it. It’s disconcerting.

Because I’m a technology addict (in recovery), I vented by status updating about it on my phone: “These two girls next to me have been doing nothing but trashing other women for a straight hour. It’s International Women’s Day. You’re not supposed to do that today! Womenfolk, be good to each other. Tina Fey is watching you.”

For anyone familiar with the context (which should include most people on Earth by now), the message was a reference to Tina Fey’s speech from Mean Girls about our lady hate epidemic and the internalized patriarchy and misogyny that women experience every day. Fey reminds us, “You’ve got to stop calling each other sluts and whores! It just makes it easier for men to.” The movie itself is a spot on critique of our culture of female competitiveness and the hostility it breeds amongst young women, who find themselves always competing against each other for resources and men. Being a young woman today is like being on Survivor.

Yet for women and everyone who supports them, there’s a danger here. A friend of mine pointed out to me that our constant critique of women critiquing each other often serves to perpetuate that very cycle of behavior. Even if we’re criticizing women for criticizing women, aren’t we still criticizing? She reminded me that the best thing sometimes is to let women simply be and allow other women to lead by example — and that doubly applies to men, who might mean well but often simply affirm that internalized shame by calling out lady hate. Misogyny is the slipperiest of slopes.

To clarify before the internet gets angry at me: I realize lady hate is a problem. It’s a huge fucking problem for everyone — women, men, gender neutral sky beings like Tilda Swinton, dogs, babies, flowers, kittens, sunshine and rainbows. It’s a problem we all need to face up to by doing our best to affirm women — because a society that better supports women better supports everyone.

But that does not get better by my male friends saying to each other, “Wow, isn’t it sad that women hate each other! Those crazy women.” It would be like your friend walking up to you with a broken arm and thinking you can fix it by saying, “Wow, isn’t it terrible that your arm is broken? That looks like it hurts.”

Misogyny hurts everyone, including men, but it hurts women who are constantly expected to be perfect at all times.

In addressing this issue, we must remember to let women be flawed without looking at their behavior as a proxy for all women. In a video that went viral this week, the late film critic Roger Ebert (my forever hero) chastises an attendee of the Sundance Film Festival for expecting the film Better Luck Tomorrow to be a universal representation of all Asian Americans. Ebert reminded him that we would never expect that of a movie about white people, and we need to let the movie be the story it wants to be.

Sometimes I wish we had the same respect for women, who are constantly expected to be ambassadors for their gender, rather than simply letting them be. The most obvious instance of this is Girls; I’m not commenting on it’s racial critiques (which are valid) but the idea that Lena Dunham has to provide us with a proper, “good” example of all young women everywhere. The show is too this or that; there’s too much sex, too much bad sex, too much swearing, too much nudity; Lena Dunham doesn’t know how to write women, she doesn’t know how to write men. She’s probably a Satanist.

Why do we expect the representation of imperfect people to be perfect? We allow men to be flawed. Why not women?

I find Girls refreshing because unlike most shows about women, we don’t always have to like them or root for them. I can’t stand Hannah and don’t relate to her, at all, but that’s okay; I can still enjoy watching her without endorsing her behavior all the time. When I watch a Judd Apatow movie about men, I’m rarely asked to endorse their behavior, and the movie Bridesmaids was such a breath of fresh air because it didn’t call women out for hating each other. Instead, it showed empathy for Kristen Wiig’s Annie and her struggles to become a better person.

Young Adult was revolutionary simply because it allowed Mavis not to get better and didn’t shame her for that. If Mavis wanted to a “bitch,” it’s her right to choose. Donald Trump is a professional asshole, but no one expects him to be a good representation of men. We need to level the playing field.

My friend Emily Heist Moss (who you should be reading, if you aren’t already) discussed our expectations of women this week in a column for Role/Reboot. Rihanna has often been criticized for not being a “good role model for young girls” because of her decision to go back to Chris Brown — which, whether you agree with it or not, is her choice as a woman. Moss argues that the reason we don’t allow her to have the agency of her own decisions is that so few women are in positions of cultural power and authority, so successful women have an added burden on them.

However, as Moss argues, that’s not fair. We allow men to be bad boys or rebels without demonizing them for their transgressions, and Charlie Sheen’s public breakdown only helped him become more rich and successful. The man got an 80-episode deal with FX for Anger Management, a critically reviled show that regularly makes light of his history of abuse. Where’s the concern for young men who might watch that show and think it’s okay to lock a prostitute in a closet and assault your ex-wife? I hear crickets.

If it sounds like we’re in between a rock and a hard place, it’s because we are. Our culture’s relationship with women is complicated, and the solution should be, too. Of course, we shouldn’t let people of any gender off the hook if their behavior actually harms themselves or other people, but continuing to aggressively and wantonly police female behavior only perpetuates the feelings that women are always being watched and judged, as if society were a giant beauty pageant where no one wins. Our gender panopticon doesn’t help anyone.

I wish I could tell you what the solution is and wrap this article up in a nice bow, but I can’t. I don’t think it works like that.

However, I know where we can start. We can start by simply having empathy for women and struggles they face, whether they are cis, trans, of color, differently abled or a woman of size. (Or more than one.) We can start by checking our own privilege and recognizing the roles we all play in perpetuating a system of patriarchy and oppression and take ownership over our ability to change our own behaviors. We can start holding those of us around us to a greater standard of empathy and broaden the conversation we have about women.

All of us need to allow for greater, more diverse representation — in every way possible — and uphold the right of women to make their own choices, even ones we don’t like or agree with. This hate starts with our need to approve of and validate women. It starts with us. If we want to dismantle our culture of lady hate, we must not solve hate with more hate, using the master’s tools. To inspire positive change, we need to be our own masters and create our own. 

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On the red carpet of the SAG Awards in January, a few days before Jack, Liz and the rest of the 30 Rock gang sang their final farewell on the series finale (“The Rural Juror” song, anyone?), Tina Fey, the show’s creator, writer and star, told reporters that she was already hard at work on other projects, including a musical adaptation of the 2004 high school comedy hit Mean Girls.


”I would love to,” Fey told E! News about making a Mean Girls musical. “I’m trying to develop it with my husband, who does all the music for 30 Rock, and I think Paramount’s on board.”


How fetch is that?

As someone who prides himself on caring more about Mean Girls than actual girls, Fey’s announcement feels more awesome than, well, a punch in the face from Regina George.

Except for one little thing. 

The potential for botching the cast list.

 Converting the characters immortalized by Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Lacey Chabert into babes who can belt is a tall task, even for television’s favorite funnygal. Which is why, with Trang Pak as my witness and the advice of Cady Heron’s voice-over (“All you can do in life is try to solve the problem in front of you.”) as my guide, I’ve gone ahead and done the casting for her.

Jambo!

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THE CAST OF MEAN GIRLS: THE MUSICAL

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MELISSA BENOIST in the role of CADY HERON

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Before Lindsay Lohan’s life fell to bits, she wowed movie-goers with her comic wherewithal as Cady Heron, the cluelessly likable nerd from South Africa who, after years of homeschooling, winds up in the dog-eat-dog world of high school. Like Lohan’s character, her musical counterpart needs to be partly sweet and a little bit wholesome but served with a side of bitch to boot. Enter Melissa Benoist. Best known for playing Marley Rose, the naive new girl on Fox’s musical dramedy Glee, Benoist has Cady’s down-home demeanor, a healthy pair of lungs and, per her two-episode stint on Showtime’s Homeland in which she bared all (she plays a hooker or something), enough sex appeal to hold Aaron Samuels’ interest.


MEGAN HILTY in the role of REGINA GEORGE

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Regina “I Hear She Does Car Commercials in Japan” George is blonde, beautiful and an enormous bia, even when she’s being nice (“Get in, loser. We’re going shopping.”). So who better to play her than vindictive vixen Megan Hilty from NBC’s Smash. Hilty has the hair, the looks, the pipes and, judging by the actions of her character on Smash last season, maximum bitch-ability.


IDINA MENZEL in the role of MS. NORBURY

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Having originated the roles of Maureen Johnson in Rent and Elphaba in Wicked, Idina Menzel’s musical theater resume speaks for itself. The reason she’d be perfect for the role of Ms. Norbury, the sad (“The only guy that ever calls my house is Randy from Chase Visa.”) but hilarious (“…and I would love to have a girl on the team, just, you know, so the team could meet a girl.”) math teacher with a heart of gold is because, well, she’s Idina Menzel and she’d be perfect in anything.

TAYLOR LOUDERMAN in the role of GRETCHEN WIENERS

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Gretchen Wieners, heiress apparent to the Toaster Strudel fortune, is, beneath it all, a decent girl in spite of herself (“I’m sorry that people are so jealous of me, but I can’t help it that I’m popular.”). Taylor Louderman, the main cheerleader from Broadway’s Bring It On: The Musical, would be the perfect Vice Plastic. Taylor’s played perky (head cheerleader, hello!), she can sing and, like Gretchen Wieners, her previous role (if you’re at all familiar with the movie plot of Bring It On) has taught her a lot about what it means to be popular.

AMANDA SEYFRIED in the role of KAREN SMITH

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Following her portrayal of simpleminded sidekick Karen Smith (“If you’re from Africa, why are you white?”), Amanda Seyfried went on to star in movie musicals Mamma Mia! and Les Misérables, which means she’s got what it takes to take Karen to the song side. Plus, she’s already really used to wearing pink on Wednesdays.

JENNIFER DAMIANO in the role of JANIS IAN

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The owner of some of the film’s best one-liners (“I love seeing teachers outside of school. It’s like seeing a dog walk on its hind legs.”), Janis Ian will probably play a vital comic role in the Mean Girls musical. As a matter of fact, I can already imagine her “Where You Sit in the Cafeteria is Crucial” monologue turning into one of the show’s big numbers. Spring Awakening, Next to Normal and Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark alumnus Jennifer Damiano has Janis’ bite, plus she’s got the wounded soul role down cold.


JOSH GAD in the role of DAMIAN

Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

Although I never saw the original Broadway cast of The Book of Mormon, I have memorized the soundtrack and I can’t imagine anyone delivering the “Oh my god, Danny Divito! I love your work!” line better than moronic missionary Elder Cunningham’s originator Josh Gad. Oh, and if “Too Gay to Function” isn’t turned into a full-fledged musical number featuring Gad, I’ll do what Cady wouldn’t and shove somebody in front of a bus.

AARON TVEIT in the role of AARON SAMUELS

Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

If anyone was born to play gentle jock Aaron Samuels, Cady’s learning deficient love interest, it’s Aaron Tveit from the original casts of Next to Normal and Catch Me If You Can: The Musical. He seems kind, he’s dreamy and his voice is good enough to make anyone feel grool.


TAYE DIGGS in the role of MR. DUVALL

Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

Although the part is minor, Mr. Duvall provides the plot with a solid male role model and some of its most memorable lines (“Coach Carr, step away from the underage girls!”). Because of his chemistry (though clumsy) with Ms. Norbury, the role given to Idina Menzel just a few page scroll swipes ago, it would only make sense to cast Taye Diggs, her real-life husband, as Mr. Duvall. Also, Diggs is ripped (cue Mr. Duvall in a white cutoff holding a baseball bat), talented and he and his wife have shared the stage before.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA in the role of KEVIN GNAPOOR

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Of all the roles in Mean Girls: The Musical, there was none more fun to cast than that of motor-mouthed mathlete Kevin Knapoor. Since he raps in the film (“Yo, yo, yo! All you sucka MCs ain’t got nothin’ on me.”), there’s no better person to play him than the man who wrote and starred in Broadway’s In the Heights, Lin-Manuel Miranda. He can rap like the wind (I know, not a thing) and his comedic timing is impeccable, which means he’d be more than capable of slaying Kevin’s greatest lines, including my favorite, “What are marijuana tablets?”


Welp, since the casting is pretty much complete, all I have to do now is wait for Tina to pick up the slack and write, develop, produce and promote this baby.

And if, for whatever reason, she doesn’t make it happen, my only response would be to echo the immortal words of one Regina George — “Boo, you whore.”

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image – Mean Girls

Mean Girls

The other day a guy hit on me by telling me that I was “like a hot person…but shrunken.” I responded, “So, a hot person? You could have just said that.” In some universe, I believe he meant that to be very sweet, but in this one, it was a backhanded compliment at best.

The men of this world clearly need help to step up their game. This is not cutting it. Enter Tina Fey. Next time you want to compliment someone, use this handy guide to picking people up with Mean Girls quotes instead, and you’ll immediately prove you are marriage material. Manties dropped.

As they say, Mean Girls is the sincerest form of flattery. Take it from a former Gretchen Weiners: Regina George will get you everywhere.

1. “You’re, like, really pretty…So you agree? You think you’re really pretty?”

2. “I’ve got a big lesbian crush on you.”

3. “Oh, hi. Do you wanna buy some drugs?”

4. To the object of your affection: “Your hair looks sexy pushed back.” To your wingman: “Will you please tell him that his hair looks sexy pushed back?”

5. “Your face smells like peppermint.”

6. “You’re a regulation hottie….Own it.”

7. “Oh my God, I love your bracelet. Where did you get it?”

8. “Four for you, Glen Coco! You go, Glen Coco!”

9. “You have really good eyebrows.”

10. “You wanna do something fun? You wanna go to Taco Bell?”

11. “I can put my whole fist in my mouth. Wanna see?”

12. “I will keep you here until four.”

13. “I hear [you] do car commercials…in Japan.”

14. “Damn! I’d rather see you out there shakin’ that thang.”

15. “Jambo!”

16. “Everyone in Africa can read Swedish.”

17. If you see a newbie at the bar: “Watch out! Fresh meat coming through.”

18. “Danny DeVito, I love your work!”

19. “Oh my God, you’re so skinny!”

20. “Get in, loser. We’re going shopping.”

Note: I don’t think #18 would work, ever, but I’d love to see someone try it.

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Although many of the movies we loved as kids we realize were kind of terrible when we get older (see: Batman and Robin), some only get better with age. For that, I give you Clueless, one of the most endlessly quotable movies of the past two decades and the Mean Girls of the 90’s.

We’re all familiar with bon mots like “As if!” and “Whatever!” but the movie offers an embarrassment of riches for those who endlessly re-watch it. Of the movie’s many great lines, here are some of the best.

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35. Cher: Okay, so you’re probably going, “Is this like a Noxzema commercial or what?” But seriously, I actually have a way normal life for a teenage girl.

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34. Mr. Hall: So does anyone have any final thoughts on Cher’s oration? Elton?

Elton: Yeah. I can’t find my Cranberries CD. I gotta go to the quad before anyone snags it.

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33. Cher: Dionne and I were both named after famous singers of the past, who now do infomercials.

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32. Murray: Your man Christian is a cake boy!

Cher and Dionne: (together) A what?

Murray: He’s a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde-reading, Streisand ticket-holding friend of Dorothy, know what I’m saying?

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31. Amber: Was I the only one listening? I thought it reeked.

Cher: No, I believe that’s your designer imposter perfume.

30. Christian: Do you like Billie Holiday?

Cher: I love him.

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29. Cher: I feel like such a heifer. I had two bowls of Special K, 3 pieces of turkey bacon, a handful of popcorn, 5 peanut butter M&M’s and like 3 pieces of licorice.

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28. Cher: If it’s a concussion, you have to keep her conscious, okay? Ask her questions.

Elton: What’s seven times seven?

Cher: Stuff she knows!

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27. Cher: Where’s my white collarless shirt from Fred Segal. It’s my most capable looking outfit!

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26. Mel: Where are you?

Cher: I’m just having a snack at my girlfriend’s.

Mel: Where, in Kuwait?

Cher: Is that in the valley?

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25. Cher: Isn’t my house classic? The columns date all the way back to 1972.

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24. Cher: I want to do something for humanity.

Josh: How about sterilization?

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23. Cher: So okay, I don’t want to be a traitor to my generation and all but I don’t get how guys dress today. I mean, come on, it looks like they just fell out of bed and put on some baggy pants and take their greasy hair (eww!) and cover it up with a backwards cap and like, we’re expected to swoon? I don’t think so.

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22. Dionne: Dude, what’s wrong. You suffering from buyers remorse or something?

Cher: God, no! Nothing like that.

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21. Cher: Do you prefer fashion victim or ensembly challenged?

20. Travis: I would like to say this. Tardiness is not something you can do on your own. Many, many people contributed to my tardiness. I would like to thank my parents for never giving me a ride to school, the LA city bus driver who took a chance on an unknown kid and last but not least, the wonderful crew from McDonalds who spend hours making those egg McMuffins without which I might never be tardy.

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19. Cher: He does dress better than I do, what would I bring to the relationship?

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18. Josh: (watching news about the Bosnian conflict) You look confused.

Cher: Well, uh, I thought they declared peace in the Middle East.

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17. Cher: Christian said he’d call the next day, but in boy time that meant Thursday.

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16. Josh: You look like Pippi Longstocking.

Cher: Well, you look like Forrest Gump. Who’s Pippi Longstocking?

Josh: Uh, someone Mel Gibson never played.

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15. Cher: It’s like that book I read in the 9th grade that said, “‘Tis a far, far better thing doing stuff for other people.”

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14. Heather: It’s just like Hamlet said, “To thine own self be true.”

Cher: Hamlet didn’t say that.

Heather: I think I remember Hamlet accurately.

Cher: Well, I remember Mel Gibson accurately, and he didn’t say that. That Polonius guy did.

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13. Tai: Cher, I don’t want to do this anymore. And my buns, they don’t feel nothin’ like steel.

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12. Tai: Do you think she’s pretty?

Cher: No, she’s a full-on Monet.

Tai: What’s a monet?

Cher: It’s like a painting, see? From far away, it’s OK, but up close, it’s a big old mess.

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11. Cher: Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex. And anything you can do to draw attention to your mouth is good.

10. Cher: Searching for a boy in high school is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie.

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9. Tai: Cher, you’re a virgin?

Cher: You say that like it’s a bad thing.

Dionne: Besides, the PC term is “hymenally challenged.”

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8. Cher: (in regards to losing her virginity) You see how picky I am about my shoes and they only go on my feet.

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7. Cher: Been shopping with Dr. Seuss?

Dionne: Well at least I wouldn’t skin a collie to make my back pack.

Cher: It’s faux.

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6. Cher: I was surfing the crimson wave. I had to haul ass to the ladies’.

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5. Tai: Why should I listen to you, anyway? You’re a virgin who can’t drive.

Cher: That was way harsh, Tai.

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4. Amber: Ms. Stoeger, my plastic surgeon doesn’t want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose.

Dionne: Well, there goes your social life.

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3. Cher: That’s Ren and Stimpy. They’re way existential.

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2. Tai: I could really use some sort of herbal refreshment.

Dionne: Oh, well we do lunch in ten minutes. We don’t have any tea, but we have Coke and stuff.

Tai: No shit. You guys got Coke here?

Dionne: Well, yeah.

Cher: Yeah, this is America.

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1. Cher: So like, right now for example. The Haitians need to come to America. But some people are all, “What about the strain on our resources?” Well it’s like when I had this garden party for my father’s birthday, right? I put R.S.V.P. ’cause it was a sit-down dinner. But some people came that like did not R.S.V.P. I was like totally buggin’. I had to haul ass to the kitchen, redistribute the food, and squish in extra place settings. But by the end of the day it was, like, the more the merrier.And so if the government could just get to the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Haitians. And in conclusion may I please remind you it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty. Thank you very much.

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1. Yoga Pants

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They aren’t restricting and barely feel like you’re wearing pants, so immediately I’m sold on ‘em. Would I actually do yoga? Nope, but I used college-ruled paper in high school so I’m used to living a lie. I’ll keep wearing my full length workout spandex that I use as imitation yoga pants, but can get away with wearing as a dude because of that trusty Nike swoosh.

2. Uggs

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These boots get whispered about and made fun of a lot, but they appear to be colored clouds molded & shaped perfectly for a foot, and I’m all about comfort. The other appeal of these soft, snug looking kicks is their ability to be worn with anything, at any time of the year. I’d be worried about people snapping shots of my attire and tweeting them while mocking me to the masses, but the cavalry of rebellious ladies who refuse to live within socially enforced fashion guidelines and confidently rock their Uggs with sweatpants in the middle of the summer would be my confidence boosters.

Side note: I’m aware of Uggs for Men, but I’m also aware of ice cream for dogs. Both are tempting, but not leaps I’m willing to take.

3. Army Pants & Flip-Flops

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Because Cady Heron.

4. Sundresses

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ALL I KNOW IS HOW I FEEL ABOUT SUNDRESSES, THEREFOR MY WARDROBE WOULD ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO FEATURE AN ARRAY OF SUNDRESSES. I hate back sweat, getting burned by seatbelts & hot weather, and I’m not big on public swimming pools, but sundresses make every summer worth it. I’ve literally never seen a sundress that I didn’t find aesthetically pleasing. Put a dirty clothes hamper in a sundress and I’ll do a double take. Put Fred, the mannequin from I Am Legend in a sundress – I’m staring. Look, I know it may seem strange but I’m wondering if I should hit a Macy’s located far, far away from my house and try one on, just to see how it feels. Unfortunately I won’t, as I fear that could be a slippery slope.

5. Galaxy Leggings

BlackMilk

These bring that whole are-those-space-pants-because-your-butt-is-out-of-this-world? pickup line to life. I feel like these are probably widely considered ugly attire, but I’d say to each her own as I swiped my debit card, filed it back in my Versace clutch, flipped my hair, put on my sunglasses (as to not see the haters), and happily carried my bag of stretchy, cosmic, universe pants to my closet.

6. Head Jewelry

s_bukley / Shutterstock.com

This desire to douse my dome in dangly jewelry derives from seeing Xerxes in 300. That man was decorated in shiny things like a rapper’s mouth/Christmas tree, and the concept of accurately bling-blinging from head to toe is something I’d make certainly make come to fruition as a lady.

7. Gaucho Pants

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I know it’s no longer 2006, but why are these things an endangered species? As a fan of the look, and someone who constantly heard how comfy they were, I’m wondering if gauchos are completely extinct or if somewhere in a closet hangs an old pair, with the potential of a full-blown comeback in the future. Also, shout-out to the gaucho wearing model pictured above. If her pants didn’t give away the fact that the photo was taken 7 years ago, her MySpace default photo peace sign pose erased any uncertainties.

8. High Waisted Shorts

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They’re just s’cute. Unfortunately I fear that I’d had a disproportioned waste that would get made fun of. Girls would take pictures of me, not looking good in my high waisted jeans and they’d post ‘em online with captions like, “OMG, this style isn’t for everyone!” My feelings would be hurt, but I’d keep my head and the waistline of my shorts held high.

9. Kentucky Derby Hats

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These festive hats shield the sun from your face as if you’re wearing an umbrella, and I’d wear ‘em anywhere whether it’s at the horse track or the movie theater, obstructing some non-Kentucky Derby hat wearing loser’s view. Maybe this is my love of fedoras translating to more feminine wear, but the thought of combining one of these hats with a summer dress is just too much style for one daydream.

10. Business Attire

Jose Gil / Shutterstock.com

I automatically relate pencil skirts and all that good stuff to strong authorities. Hilary Clinton, Linda McMahon — y’know, powerful women. If the professional getup isn’t your thing, pantsuit yourself, but I’d have a section of my closet reserved for stylish blazers with incredibly intimidating shoulder pads. 

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Back in the day, we had Chicken Soup for the Soul to cheer us up, a little book of wisdom and aphorism that made us feel as if we were going to be okay, no matter what. It was always there to make us feel good again. Today, we have Mean Girls, a little film that happens to be applicable to every life situation. There’s a Mean Girls reference for every situation and if you really wanted to, you could communicate only in Mean Girls quotes. However, that takes a level of devotion I do not possess.

When you’re feeling down, here are some Mean Girls gifs to help get you through the day. October 3 is the official observance of Mean Girls Day, but let’s be honest: Mean Girls Day is every day.

1. When You’re Feeling Not So Fresh:

2. When You Just Need To Let Out Some Feelings:

3. When You Need To Let Out Some Really Not Nice Feelings:

4. When You Binge Watch ‘Orange Is The New Black’ (And See Laura Prepon):

5. When You Give Zero Fucks:

6. When There’s Friend Drama And You Just Want Everyone To Get Along:

7. When You Go Out With Friends And One Of Them Gets Way, Way Too Drunk:

8. No Seriously, Gurl, You’re Drunk:

9. When You Go On A First Date And You’re Not That Into Each Other:

10. When You Just Want To Hide From The World:

11. When You Have a Jennifer Lawrence Moment, But Are Way Less Cool Than Jennifer Lawrence:

12. When You Have To Play Sports:

13. When You Have To Dance In Public:

14. When Your Friend Says Something Dumb And You Just Smile And Nod:

15. When You Can Tell It’s a Night When You Should Just Stay In:

16. When You’re Feeling Overly Affectionate And Just Want To Hug Someone:

17. When Your Mom Wants To Catch Up On The Phone And Gossip:

18. When It’s Your Cheat Day:

19. When You’ve Had A Lot of Cheat Days:

20. When You Love Your Body Anyway:

21. When You’re Feeling Lonely (And Don’t Want To Admit The Last Time You Had Sex):

22. When You See Your Ex With Someone Else:

23. When You Get Bad News That You Don’t Want To Deal With:

24. When You’re PMS-ing:

25. When No One Invites You To The Party On Facebook:

26. When You Just Can’t With People Today:

27. When You Finally Get To The End Of The Work Week And You’re All TGIF:

28. When You Don’t Remember Saturday Night And Someone Has To Remind You What Happened:

29. When You See Someone You Hate And You Wish You Could Tell Them Off:

30. When Your Hot Friend Is Fishing For Compliments And You’re Over It:

31. When You Wake Up In The Morning:

32. When You Have To Run To Class In Your Pajamas Because You Woke Up Late:

33. When You Have To Interact With People Before You’ve Had Your Coffee:

34. When You Want To Impress Someone And You’re Trying Way Too Hard:

35. When You Just Need Affirmation Today:

36. When Your Ex Keeps Texting You:

37. When The Internet Doesn’t Like Your Facebook Status Or That Article You Spent Weeks On:

38. When It’s Like Christmas Came Early (See: A New Woody Allen Movie Comes Out):

39. When You Feel Like No One Notices You:

40. When You Know You’ve Always Got Your Best Friends By Your Side, No Matter What:

Note: That last GIF may cause nightmares. Sorry I’m not sorry, Harry Potter.

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Sometimes, we contain within us talents which may lie dormant for many years until the moment where we are the bitch intern at a movie website who wants to see what kinds of stupid pet tricks we are capable of performing. This is one of those times. You go, intern. You recite that movie super-fast. Your professional hazing is our gain.

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Mean Girls was very obviously inspired by Heathers — the original Mean Girl movie, starring the timeless Winona Ryder. However, there’s another movie that should get credit for doing the damn thing first: The Craft. The Craft is basically Mean Girls + witchcraft, and if you run down the movie’s shared plot points, the parallels are spookier than Fairuza Balk’s facial expressions.

Here are 15 reasons that Mean Girls and The Craft are soul twins:

1. The Craft and Mean Girls prominently feature four girls, each of them impossibly beautiful for high school standards. They really like to play pranks on those around them to get power over them (through witchcraft, through trickery and gossip) and walk down the school halls in slow motion, as if they own the joint. Love ya!

2. The movie begins when a new girl from moves to the clique’s town (LA, Evanston) from somewhere else (San Francisco, Africa) and has a difficult time fitting in.

3. She’s much smarter than a lot of the other students around her and sits in class behind the object of her affection, a popular jock who used to be involved with the head “mean girl” of the clique. In each, he’s clean shaven, has short brown hair and is generally kind of clueless about what’s going on around him.

4. Although the clique taps new girl to come sit with them, she’s initially reluctant but gives in after they take her shopping — because a girl can resist friendship, but she can’t resist new shit.

5. The clique’s leader is a sociopath with rage issues who seeks to control those around her, and in each case, the actress who plays her gives the movie’s most memorable performance. Do you think anyone cares that much about Robin Tunney? The Craft is all about Fairuza Balk. If you weren’t obsessed with her in Middle School or High School, you’re doing it wrong.

6. One of her friends has large breasts and is just along for the ride. She would be the prettiest and most popular girl in school, if not for one thing (her scars, being “such a slut.”) Both of the actresses who play this character end up (arguably) becoming the biggest stars outside of their respective.

Debate: Who is more successful post-Mean Girls, Rachel McAdams or Amanda Seyfried? Go!

7. The other friend often talks for her and is generally forgotten about amongst the castmates, as she had the least successful career afterward. (None for you, Rachel True.) In each case, this fourth mean girl has curly hair and her follicles are a huge plot point. Fourth mean girl will have to get revenge against a pretty blonde girl for various reasons (racism, going out with Jason).

8. The girls get their power from a book that holds all of their secrets. They battle over this book with an older woman with long brown hair and Greek cheekbones who is more wise than they are — but they don’t know that yet. Later the new girl will have to seek counsel from her to destroy the book and take down the clique.

9. Although the group accepts the new recruit, the head mean girl distrusts her — knowing that she’s more powerful than she is. The other girls might be her worker bees, but she knows the new girl has the power to be the new queen bee.

10. Regina George is rich the whole film, and Nancy’s class status is also her defining background characteristic. Like Regina, she has a blonde mother who likes to drink and wear loud clothing and has a habit of embarrassing her in front of her friends. After Nancy gets rich, she buys a nice car to drive all of her friends around in. It’s not a Silver Lexus, but it will do.

11. The new girl starts to become more like them and lose her sense of identity in the group but snaps out of it — after the head mean girl betrays her by hooking up with the guy she’s interested in (or in the case of The Craft, the guy she put a love spell on who is now monomaniacally obsessed with her). Because the mean girl used to go with him, she feels entitled to date him again and doesn’t seem to feel that badly about the repercussions (the new girl’s feelings of social isolation, death).

12. The new girl’s house gets trashed when her parents are out of town. In Mean Girls, it’s because they’re seeing Ladysmith Black Mambazo (“You love Ladysmith Black Mambazo!”). In The Craft, it’s because Nancy was duping Sarah into thinking her father was dead.

13. Each film’s climactic scene entails a large confrontation and showdown between the new girl and the mean girl, one in which the new girl has to come into her full power (as a witch, as the new queen bee). Each scene will involve one of the two being hit by a large object (a dresser, a bus).

14. After the climax, the queen bee’s power is taken away (through binding spells, having her spine shattered) and the new girl has the option of taking over. In each, the worker bees offer her their allegiance — because they have no power without a leader and don’t know what to do. The main difference here is that in Mean Girls, Cady takes them up on it, until learning an important lesson during a Mathletes competition. In The Craft, Sarah has already learned her lesson.

15. Both films are awesome and you should watch them immediately.

Your turn, readers. There are a slew of parallels between The Craft and Mean Girls. Which are some that you’ve noticed? In the comments, let’s start a conga line of overanalyzing pop culture. It’s a Friday morning. What else are we going to do?

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Unfortunately, in life, there are always some things that can never be. Whether it is the perfect relationship, the perfect maxi dress that doesn’t make you look pregnant, or the perfect movie — some things will always be just out of reach. Luckily for us, there are diligent humans over at YouTube who are there to tantalize us with trailers of all of the wonderful things we could have. Here’s to hoping that everyone’s personal problems will eventually subside, and this can actually happen.

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1. You love Starbucks as much, if not more than your least favorite family member.

Don’t be ashamed, venti frappuccinos have done more for you than your douchey cousin Zach ever will. While I’ve managed to refrain from Instagram-ing my beverages, I have reached Starbucks ‘Gold Card’ status from being there often enough to make my clothes reek of coffee beans. If white girls had a sponsor, it would definitely have to be Starbucks, as this is undoubtedly the product they are most notorious for endorsing in numerous photos run through every last Instagram filter.

2. You quote Marilyn Monroe… Even if it’s not actually Marilyn Monroe you’re quoting.

Hey, I went years thinking it was Tupac who said “F-ck bitches, get money” and it was actually Biggie, so I can  relate to being totally wrong about who said something.

3. You love Pretty Little Liars.

I got a secret, can you keep it? I binge watched like two seasons of Pretty Little Liars and I kind of enjoyed it. Look, I’d just finished Breaking Bad and found myself browsing Netflix in a vulnerable state — one thing led to another and Ashley Benson was all over the screen so I stuck around, perhaps for too long.

4. You love Katy Perry.

“I just like the beat” and “I’m just hate-watching it” are my go-to excuses for listening to Katy Perry’s music and watching Katy Perry’s videos. In these moments of dishonesty I envy white girls who have the luxury of listening to any artist they please, facing minimal judgment.

5. You love the Cupid Shuffle, the Cha Cha Slide (Part 2) & the wobble.

Something about music with very specific instructions is alluring to white girls and I’m right there with them, doing my right foot two stomps, left foot two stomps with the utmost enthusiasm.

6. You forget about close friends’ birthdays but you’re well aware when Pumpkin Spice Latte’s are returning.

But seriously, why can’t we have pumpkin flavored EVERYTHING as an option year-round?

7. You love leggings/yoga pants/Victoria’s Secret/The North Face.

White girls love to wear these brands and articles of clothing, and while visually I can share a mutual appreciate their existence, I won’t know how pleasant yoga pants or leggings physically feel. Unless men’s fashion takes a drastic turn, wearing The North Face is my best bet as far as dressing like a white girl goes.

8. You take pride in your ability to quote Mean Girls.

It has basically become second nature for you to blurt out lines in response to any applicable statement. I’ve shouted “She doesn’t even go here!” at the most inappropriate of times and I don’t regret it in the least bit.

9. You’ve driven a bug at one point or another.

When my rusty, weathered Cavalier crapped out on me years back, the only option available was to borrow a VW Beetle. In the short stretch that I used it, there was one instance where, upon pulling up to a red light, a mother and who I’m assuming was her teenage daughter blatantly pointed and laughed at me. Longest 20 seconds at a stoplight, ever. 100% true story. Apparently brothas driving bright red bugs isn’t a social norm, so would you rather be a stereotype or a spectacle?

10. You love being tan.

I was born 27 shades darker than the average white girl, but I get it. Giving yourself a brown skin complexion is probably a great deal of fun as long as people can tell there’s a white woman under than bronzer.

11. You enjoyed Pitch Perfect and have practiced the cup song before.

It’s a hilarious, quotable movie so there’s that, but oh boy, then there’s the cup song. If you’ve ever searched YouTube for a cup song tutorial and found yourself on the brink of tears from pure frustration after failing miserably, well join the stereotypical white girl club.

12. You find it slightly aggravating when Starbucks spells your name wrong.

Okay, this is the last Starbucks related point, but it isn’t like that green and white twin-tailed mermaid logo isn’t a significant part of the stereotypical white girl’s life. Now in the barista’s defense, it’s hard to remember if have one of those names like Kirsten or Kristen or Chelsea or Kelsey and there are countless variations to spelling your name. My name is Chris, so I’ve seen Kris, Khris, Cris, James, etc. and experienced the incorrect spelling struggle firsthand. Somehow I still always manage to gulp down my iced coffee despite it being wrongfully labeled. Impressive? Duh, but I’m no hero. I’m just a black, stereotypical, white, girl man.

13. You love Nutella.

Fried chicken is to black folks as Nutella is to white girls.

14. You love Uggs.

Stereotypical white girls treat Uggs similar to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the sense that there’s no wrong way to wear them in their eyes. Winter, summer, at the store, at the club, in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse, here or there, anywhere.

15. Drake Is Your Favorite Rapper.

I can appreciate Aubrey because I’ve enjoyed him since the Degrassi days, but boy do stereotypical white girls love them some Drizzy. Wait, don’t go trying to remove his lyrics from your Twitter bio now, own it.

16. You have an iPhone that you love like a living, breathing pet.

Bonus stereotypical white girl points if you have a very specific phone case for aforementioned cellular device.

17. You love a good acronym.

OMG w/e irdc tbh tbgdekwhta. First person to decode that last one, gets a $25 gift card to Starbucks or like, an acronym solver of the year trophy.

18. You have a frequently maintained Tumblr & Pinterest.

They’re chockfull of pictures of all the things you want at your wedding, and the shirtless celebrities you adore. Pleated wedding dress! Channing Tatum! Unique wedding invitations that are so cute! Mark Wahlberg! And so on, and so forth.

19. You’ve picked up the art of twerking.

It had been around for a while but perhaps Miley Cyrus made it a mainstream trend for some ladies. The white girl specialty seems to be wall twerking, but don’t put ‘em in a box because they appear to be hell-bent on conquering the booty shaking game over time. Seriously, search the term “twerking” on Twitter or Vine and try to count how many white girls you see gyrating. The quantity of stereotypical white girls twerking is evergrowing — almost as if the limit does not exist.

20. You kind of don’t care about stereotypes.

I tend not to care what pigeonholes people jokingly place black folks in because meh, whatever. I don’t like watermelon, I’m not a criminal, and while Kool-Aid is a personal favorite, who cares what people say? I find stereotypes somewhat amusing and the fact that White Chicks made over $100 million in the box office indicates that plenty of white girls do too. When you have enough intelligence to know who you are and a decent sense of humor, stereotypes can be taken lightly. As Katy Perry says, “Baby you’re a firework, c’mon show ‘em what you’re worth…” Not exactly sure how that applies but it felt so right. 

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Rejoice, 30 Rock and Mean Girls fans! The reigning goddess of TV comedy is coming back to the small screen with a new show. Described as a “Cheers-style comedy” set in Fire Island, the show is about a woman reconnecting with her family as she struggles to make a home for herself and teams her with much of the same crew that she worked with on 30 Rock.

Liz Lemon might not be coming back, but this is the next best thing. To celebrate, here’s 59 of the funny lady’s best quotes — coupled with some GIFs from 30 Rock.

30 Rock

1. “I feel about Photoshop the way some people feel about abortion. It is appalling and a tragic reflection on the moral decay of our society… unless I need it, in which case, everybody be cool.” [from Bossypants]

2. Whether blondes have more fun: “Let’s admit it, yellow hair does have magic powers. You could put a blond wig on a hot-water heater and some dude would try to fuck it.” [from Bossypants]

3. “When I was in my early twenties, being called sexy was not part of my experience in any way. There’s such a small window of time when people want to write any articles about you. If you’re a woman and they say anything complimentary about your appearance, well, I’m not going to complain. I fully intend to keep all of these magazines in the attic and bring them out for my daughter someday. ‘You see? There was a time when people thought your mother was a sexy bitch.’” [The Believer]

4. “Glasses would make anyone look smarter. You put glasses on Woody Harrelson in Indecent Proposal and he’s an architect. You put a pair of glasses on Denise Richards and she’s a paleontologist.” [The Believer]

5. On nicknames for body parts: “I do love cooter. I suppose I like cooter because it’s one of the least graphic ways to describe a lady’s genitals. Not that I don’t have an appreciation for other euphemisms. There’s an SNL writer named Matt Piedmont who used to write these unairable but hilarious sketches, and one of them had over fifty euphemisms for the female genitals. I don’t remember most of them, except for ‘meat drapes.’ That really stuck out for me. Meat drapes. It leaves you with such a vivid and disturbing image.” [Entertainment Weekly]

30 Rock

6. On getting older: “I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn’t used to have to do that. But now I do.” [Bossypants]

7. “I see these stories like, so-and-so works three days a week on whatever — listen, if I could get a job where I go in three days a week and pitch stories on Smash, I am there. I will bring my own scarves. I have a lot of ideas.” [Entertainment Weekly]

8. “I spend most of my time in my daily life trying to be like a fashion noncombatant. My hands are up! I’m not even trying! That said, to talk about the impact of fashion is really interesting. I think so much of it is tied into feminism. I am a post-baby boomer who has been handed a sort of Spice Girls’ version of feminism. We’re supposed to be wearing half-shirts and jumping around. And, you know, maybe that’s not panning out. But you can tell different generations of women by whether or not they wear that Hillary Clinton blue power suit or the re-appropriated Playboy-symbol necklace worn ironically. I think women dress for other women to let them know what their deal is. Because if women were only dressing for men, there would be nothing but Victoria’s Secret. There would be no Dior.” [Vogue]

9. “I don’t hate animals and I would never hurt an animal; I just don’t actively care about them. When a coworker shows me cute pictures of her dog, I struggle to respond correctly, like an autistic person who has been taught to recognize human emotions from flash cards. In short, I am the worst.” [Bossypants]

10. “Gay people don’t actually try to convert people. That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses you’re thinking of.” [Bossypants]

30 Rock

11. “Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite, Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.” [Bossypants]

12. “A Harvard Medical School study has determined that rectal thermometers are still the best way to tell a baby’s temperature. Plus, it really teaches the baby who’s boss.” [Brainy Quote]

13. “There are a couple of things I want to impart to ladies who want to be in comedy: One, you don’t have to be weird or be quirky to get your job done. And two, comedy skill is not sexually transmittable. You do not have to sleep with a comedian to learn what you’re doing. Male comedians will not like that advice, but it is the truth.” [Bossypants]

14. On cutting back at work to be at home more: “There should be a new, more honest euphemism. Like, I’m leaving office because I plan to solicit more anonymous sex in bathrooms… I am going to dedicate myself, full time, to my day-drinking… Yeah, I am actually spending more time with my family — which is nice.” [NPR]

15. “A co-worker at SNL dropped an angry c-bomb on me and I had the weirdest reaction. To my surprise, I blurted, “No. You don’t get to call me that. My parents love me. I’m not some Adult Child of an Alcoholic that’s going to take that shit.” [Bossypants]

30 Rock

16. “I’m not really one for status symbols. I went to public school. I have all my original teeth and face parts. When left to my own devices, I dress like I’m here to service your aquarium.” [Bossypants]

17. “But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.” [Bossypants]

18. On being a working mom: “I had to get back to work. NBC has me under contract. The baby and I only have a verbal agreement.”

19. “If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.” [Brainy Quote]

20. “By the way, when Oprah Winfrey is suggesting you may have overextended yourself, you need to examine your fucking life.” [Bossypants]

30 Rock

21. “I grew up in a family of Republicans. And when I was 18 and registering to vote, my mom’s only instruction was ‘You just go in and pull the big Republican lever.’ That’s my welcome to adulthood. She’s like, ‘No, don’t even read it. Just pull the Republican lever.” [Brainy Quote]

22. “Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying “like” all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster.” [Bossypants]

23. “How do you juggle it all?’ people constantly ask me, with an accusatory look in their eyes. ‘You’re screwing it all up, aren’t you?’ their eyes say. My standard answer is that I have the same struggle as any working parent but with the good fortune to be working at my dream job. Or sometimes I just hand them a juicy red apple I’ve poisoned in my working-mother witch cauldron and fly away.”

24. On food and sex: “That’s Peter Pan doughnuts in Brooklyn. It’s a Polish bakery. We shot nearby once for 30 Rock. Its white-cream-filled powdered doughnut. And I really believe, when I first tried it, if I had a penis, I would put it in this doughnut. I finally understand what you guys are thinking about and what motivates you guys.” [Esquire]

25. “It’s an honor to work with Mark Wahlberg’s nipples in Date Night. They’ve been in a lot of amazing movies and music videos. I’m actually impressed the director, Shawn Levy, got him back to Shirtless Town. Because obviously he’s done some serious movies since he was a Calvin Klein model. He doesn’t have to give us the nipples. I don’t know if it’s that his nipples wanted to work with Steve Carell, or maybe his nipples are fans of The Office. But they showed up. No, I couldn’t see the third nipple. And I was paid to stare at them for a day.” [Esquire]

30 Rock

26. “If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?” [Bossypants]

27. “Ladies gotta say no to their husbands at the movies. They gotta say: “No, we are watching back-to-back cancer movies. And then this movie about a cat.”

28. “I think for women especially, you need to have a plan. I need to have some other ways to generate income, so I don’t have to stretch my face or lift the top of my head with surgery or something.” [Brainy Quote]

29. “I never dreamed I would receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, mostly because my style is so typically Austrian.”

30. “I was a little excited but mostly blorft. ‘Blorft’ is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years.” [Bossypants]

30 Rock

31. “I really love cursing a lot. But as I get older, I realize it’s a little unseemly for women of a certain age. But then once you pass sixty-five, you can hit it full tilt again and it’s charming. Once you’re Lauren Bacall’s age, you can be like, ‘What the f*ck.’”

32. “Lesson learned? When people say, “You really, really must” do something, it means you don’t really have to. No one ever says, “You really, really must deliver the baby during labor.” When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.” [Bossypants]

33. On casting for 30 Rock: “The part of Jack Donaghy was written for Alec Baldwin. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the courage to introduce myself to him and tell him that at the time, so for several months I met with some of the best actors in New York…it just became clearer and clearer that this part was for no-one except Alec Baldwin. And so I knew what I had to do: I got pregnant and I stalled for a year.”

34. “This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. ‘You’re up for a promotion. If they go for a woman, it’ll be between you and Barbara.’ Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.” [Bossypants]

35. “When actors are too good-looking, I can’t memorize them. For example, I’ve never seen a picture of Sienna Miller where I didn’t say, ‘That girl’s pretty. Who’s that?’”

30 Rock

36. “I have a suspicion — and hear me out, ’cause this is a rough one — I have a suspicion that the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore. The only person I can think of that has escaped the ‘crazy’ moniker is Betty White, which, obviously, is because people still want to have sex with her.” [Bossypants]

37. “Amy Poehler and I have been friends for so long, we’re like Oprah and Gale. Only we’re not denying anything.”

38. “To say I’m an overrated troll, when you have never even seen me guard a bridge, is patently unfair.” [Bossypants]

39. “Ah, babies! They’re more than just adorable little creatures on whom you can blame your farts.”

40. “Politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women — except, of course, those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape kit ‘n’ stuff. But for everybody else, it’s a win-win. Unless you’re a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years– whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know — actually, I take it back. The whole thing’s a disaster.”

30 Rock

41. “I regularly ate health food cookies so disgusting that when I enthusiastically gave one to Rachel Dratch, she drew a picture of a rabbit and broke the cookie into a trail of tiny pieces coming out of the rabbit’s butt.”

42. “Whitney Houston’s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’ was constantly on my FM Walkman radio around that time. I think that made me cry because I associated it with absolutely no one.” [Bossypants]

43. “Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion.”

44. “My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.” [Bossypants]

45. “If you’ve been to high school, chances are you’ve got a yearbook lying around that’s full of enough cringe-worthy quotes and photos to mortify you until your dying day.” [Huffington Post]

30 Rock

46. “I’m not a mean person, but I have a capacity for it. I have the biting comment formed somewhere in the back of my head — like it’s in captivity. Sometimes people expect that I’m going to be tough. It’s not a bad situation. People treat you better. People are on time.” [Reader’s Digest]

47. “I’ve been reading the ‘50 Most Beautiful People’ issue for years, and there’s always one person on the list who makes you think, ‘Give me a fucking break.’ This year, I’m proud to be that person.” [The Believer]

48. “I was walking home alone from school and I was wearing a dress. A dude drove by and yelled, ‘Nice tits.’ Embarrassed and enraged, I screamed after him, ‘Suck my dick.’ Sure, it didn’t make any sense, but at least I didn’t hold in my anger.” [Bossypants]

49. When people ask how she got famous: “I don’t fit the mold. In this country, success usually happens when you are 22 and six feet tall. Clearly, by asking that question, they are kind of letting me know that I am an aberration.” [Vogue]

50. “Some people say, “Never let them see you cry.” I say, if you’re so mad you could just cry, then cry. It terrifies everyone.” [Bossypants]

30 Rock

51. “It was scary to be in that world of politics. I felt uncomfortable to be in that discussion. The weird thing is, when Darrell Hammond or Will Ferrell or Dana Carvey did an impersonation of a president, no one assumed it was personal, but because Sarah Palin and I are both women and people think women are meaner to each other, everyone assumed it was personal.” [Vogue]

52. “On Fox News, they address her as Governor Palin. Which is like calling me ‘Dairy Queen employee.’ I was once, but I quit.”

53. “Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? ‘I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.’ The crowd cheers.” [Bossypants]

54. “I developed very early. I was probably in, you know, fifth grade, getting a bra. I say in the book that I developed breasts so early, and so strangely high, that it wasn’t — the bra was more to clarify what they were — that they were not a goiter, or something.” [on Fresh Air]

55. On whether or not women are funny: “It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.” [from Bossypants]

30 Rock

56. “When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: ‘Is this person in between me and what I want to do?’ If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.” [Bossypants]

57. “You know what? Bitches get stuff done.”

58. “Don’t be too precious or attached to anything you write. Let things be malleable. For sketch writers, remember they’re called sketches for a reason. They’re not called oil paintings. Some of them are going to stink. You have to let them stink.”

59. “I know for sure that you can tell how smart people are by what they laugh at. I know for sure that a hard-boiled egg is two points on Weight Watchers. I know for sure that my kid needs my husband and me to be with her more. And I know for sure that I can’t get comfortable with all the attention I’ve been getting because it won’t last forever. It’s just a moment — and there will be other moments when people don’t care what I’m doing.” [Oprah]

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If you’ve never seen Heathers before, you haven’t lived. The 80′s best teen movie, Heathers is movie royalty, my personal favorite satire of high school life, a satire as razor sharp as it is infinitely quotable. Written by Daniel Waters (brother to the director of Mean Girls, Mark Waters), this the movie that started it all, the one all other mean girl movies must bow down and worship. Lick it up, baby. Lick it up.

To the other Heathers fans out there, you’re beautiful. Here are 49 of the best lines from Winona Ryder’s shining hour, presented in no particular order. Just for you.

Heathers

1.

Veronica: “Dear Diary: My teen angst bullshit now has a body count.”

2.

Heather Chandler: “Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?”

3.

J.D.: “Our love is God. Let’s go get a slushie.”

4.

Veronica: “If you were happy every day of your life, you wouldn’t be a human. You’d be a game show host.”

5.

Veronica: “Are we going to prom or to hell?”

6.

Heather Chandler: “Fuck me gently with a chainsaw. Do I look like Mother Teresa?”

7.

J.D.: “Wanna go out tonight? Catch a movie? Miniature golf?”
Veronica: “I was thinking more along the lines of slitting Heather Duke’s wrists open, making it look like suicide.”
J.D.: “Ah, now you’re talking. I can be up for that. I’ve already started underlining meaningful passages in her copy of Moby Dick, if you know what I mean.”

8.

Veronica: “I use my grand IQ to decide what lip gloss to wear in the morning and how to hit three keggers before curfew.”

9.

Westerburg Student: “Did you hear? School’s canceled today because Kurt & Ram killed themselves in a repressed, homosexual, suicide pact.”

Heather Duke: “No way!”

10.

Heather Chandler: “God, Veronica. My afterlife is so boring. If I have to sing Kumbaya one more time…”

 

Heathers

11.

J.D.: “I can’t believe you did it. I was teasing. I loved you. Of course, I was coming up here to kill you.”

12.

Dennis: “I’m not belittleing the foodless fund, Peter, but we’re talking teen suicide, here. I mean ask Alison; the number one song in America today is ‘Teenage Suicide, Don’t Do It’ by Big Fun. Jesus, man, Westerburg finally got one of these things, and I’m not gonna blow it.”

Peter: “Great, so Heather gets the front page and I get crammed in by the Taco Bell coupon.”

13.

Veronica: “What’s the up-chuck factor on that?

14.

J.D. “Let’s pretend I blew up the school…all the schools. Now that you’re dead, what are you gonna do with your life?”

15.

Veronica: “You know what I want, babe?”
J.D.: “What?”
Veronica: “Cool guys like you out of my life.”

16.

Heather Chandler: “Grow up, Heather. Bulimia’s so ’87.”

17.

Heather Chandler: “You were nothing before you met me. You were playing Barbies with Betty Finn. You were a Bluebird. You were a Brownie. You were a Girl Scout Cookie.”

 

18.

Heather Chandler: “I shop, therefore I am.”

19.

J.D.: “The extreme always seems to make an impression.”

20.

J.D.: “Well, let’s take a look at some of the homosexual artifacts I dug up to plant at the scene. All right. Got an issue of “Stud Puppy.”
Veronica: (laughs) “Great!”
J.D.: “Candy dish. Joan Crawford postcard. Let’s see, some mascara. All right. And here’s the one perfecto thing I picked up: Mineral water.”
Veronica: “Oh, come on, a lot of people drink mineral water, it’s come a long way.”
J.D.: “Yeah, but this is Ohio. I mean, if you don’t have a brewski in your hand you might as well be wearing a dress.”

 

Heathers

21.

 

Veronica: “I just killed my best friend.”

J.D.: “And your worst enemy.”
Veronica: “Same difference.”

22.

Veronica: “Betty Finn was a true friend and I sold her out for a bunch of Swatch dogs and Diet Coke heads. Killing Heather would be like offing the wicked witch of the west…wait, East. West! God! I sound like a fucking psycho.”

23.

J.D.: “Chaos is great! Chaos is what killed the dinosaurs, darling.”

24.

Heather Duke: “Veronica, you look like hell.”
Veronica: “Yeah? I just got back.”

25.

Veronica: “Well, it’s just like they’re people I work with and our job is being popular and shit.”

26.

Veronica: “If you think I’m doing another suicide note you’re wrong!”
J.D.: “You don’t get it do you? Society nods its head at any horror the American teenager can think upon itself. Nobody is going to care about exact handwriting.”

27.

Ms. Fleming: “Whether to kill yourself or not is one of the most important decisions a teenager can make.”

28.

Veronica: “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?”
Heather McNamara: “Probably.”

29.

Veronica: “Lick it up, baby. Lick it up.”

30.

Heather Chandler: “Is this a weak turnout or what? I had at least 70 more people at my funeral.”

 

Heathers

31.

 

Ram: “Jesus God in Heaven, why’d you have to kill such hot snatch?”

32.

Veronica: “What is your damage, Heather?”

34.

Veronica: “I can’t believe this is my life. Oh my God. I’m gonna have to send my SAT scores to San Quentin instead of Stanford.”
J.D.: “Ah, right. I’m just a little freaked here. Well at least you got what you wanted, you know?
Veronica: “Got what I wanted? It is one thing to want somebody out of your life, it is another thing to serve them a wake-up cup full of liquid drainer.”

34.

Veronica: “This isn’t just a spoke in my menstrual cycle.”

35.

Peter: “Dear Lord, please make sure this never happens to me because I don’t think I could handle suicide. Fast, early acceptance into an Ivy League school and please let it be Harvard. Amen.”

36.

Kurt’s Dad: “My son’s a homosexual, and I love him. I love my dead gay son.”

37.

Heather McNamara: “Suicide is a private thing.”
Veronica: “You’re throwing your life away to become a statistic on US fucking A Today. That’s about the least private thing I can think of.”

38.

Veronica: “I say we just grow up, be adults and die.”

39.

Veronica: “That knife is filthy.”
J.D.: “What do you think I’m going to do with it, take out her tonsils?”
Veronica: “Excuse me, I think I know Heather a little bit better than you do. If she were going to slit her wrists, the knife would be spotless.”

40.

Heather Duke: “Veronica, why are you pulling my dick?”

 

Heathers

41.

Heather McNamara: “God, aren’t they fed yet? Do they even have Thanksgiving in Africa?”

Veronica: “Oh, sure. Pilgrims, Indians, Tater Tots. It’s a real party continent.”

42.

Veronica: “You’re a rebel? You think you’re a rebel? You’re not a rebel you’re fucking psychotic!”

43.

Veronica: “Heather, why can’t you just be a friend? Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch?”
Heather Duke: “Because I can be.”

44.

Heather Chandler: “Ugh, such a pillowcase.”

45.

Veronica: “Tomorrow, I’ll be kissing her aerobicized ass, but tonight, let me dream of a world without Heather, a world where I am free.”

46.

Heather Duke: “I prayed for the death of Heather Chandler many times and I felt bad everytime I did it but I kept doing it anyway. Now I know you understood everything. Praise Jesus, Hallelujah.”

47.

Heather Chandler: “They all want me as a friend or a fuck. I’m worshiped at Westerburg and I’m only a junior.”

48.

Veronica: “Dear Diary: Heather told me she teaches people ‘real life.’ She said, real life sucks losers dry. You want to fuck with the eagles, you have to learn to fly. I said, so, you teach people how to spread their wings and fly? She said, yes. I said, you’re beautiful.”

49.

Veronica: “Why don’t we discuss it over a cheeseburger or some such?”
Martha Dumptruck: “I’d like that very much.”

 

Heathers

Heathers lovers, which are your favorite quotes? What did I leave out? Sound off in the comments.

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E! News

According to Lindsay Lohan’s recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, I have done more cocaine than the actress who has been sent to rehab six times.

“I’ve done it 10 to 15 times,” Lindsay told Oprah. “It allowed me to drink more.”

When Oprah brought up Lohan’s interview with Piers Morgan in which the actress admitted to only doing coke 3 or 4 times, despite having gotten busted for possession twice, Lohan admitted that she had lied because she was afraid of being judged. Apparently she thinks that the public perception of someone doing doing coke only three times versus ten is vastly different? White lies, Lindsay. White lies.

Lindsay’s interview on Oprah’s Next Chapter wasn’t the raw, uncensored conversation we were hoping for. Rather, it felt like a continuation of the big pile of bullshit Lindsay has been serving the press since her breakout turn in Mean Girls. Yes, she admitted to being an addict, which is something she hasn’t really done before. (When she got busted for possession for the second time, she tweeted that her life had become unmanageable by an addiction to drugs and alcohol. She later backpedaled, however, and remained vague about her troubles. Rehab was referred to as a chance to “focus on herself” rather than an opportunity to kick a serious addiction.) But, as a whole, the conversation felt dry and unconvincing. When I think of an addict who has “seen the light”, I think of Pretty Wild star Alexis Neiers who kicked a heroin habit in 2011 and has since been candid about the low places her addiction took her to. Lindsay, on the other hand, isn’t there yet. She’s still only done coke ten times, remember?

You might be thinking, “So what? Lindsay doesn’t owe us shit. If she wants to fudge about her shameful past, then let her.” But it doesn’t work that way, not with Lindsay, and it never has. She reportedly received $2 million for the interview on Oprah’s Next Chapter and for participating in an 8-part docu series that will follow the actress as she navigates life after rehab. With the offers for movie roles drying up long ago, Lindsay is now making her living by being herself. I just wish herself wasn’t still trying to pull the wool over our eyes.

Of course, it’s hard to take someone’s recovery seriously when you hear that they’ve agreed to do a sit down interview and a reality series shortly after leaving treatment. I love Oprah but a part of me is shaking my head at her for seeking Lindsay out like this. It’s no secret that her network OWN isn’t the ratings bonanza everyone thought it would be. By agreeing to help Lindsay, Oprah is also helping yourself.

Things that curiously weren’t brought up during the interview: The legendary New York Times article that detailed Lohan’s erratic behavior during the filming of The Canyons. Dina Lohan’s infamous interview with Dr. Phil in which she appeared pilled out of her mind and very combative. On the subject of her parents with Oprah, Lindsay absolved them of any wrongdoing, which I totally understand. Admitting that the two people you’re supposed to rely on the most are actually bloodsucking vampires isn’t easy. Still, the whole thing just made me feel sad. Lindsay’s been paying her family’s bills since she was a child. It’s in their financial best interest to keep her working, even when she’s clearly sick. That kind of toxic dynamic is unimaginable to me. I can’t fathom having parents who look at you as a potential dollar sign rather than a child who needs your help.

After watching the Lindsay/Oprah interview, I was left with the impression of a girl who has yet to reach her true bottom. She admitted herself that court-mandated rehab left her feeling angry and resentful but, uh, that’s where she’s been for the last three months. This rehab stay wasn’t voluntary. In one of the rare moments of honesty, Lindsay revealed that being raised in a chaotic home had made her ill-prepared for leading a calm and healthy life. If chaos is all you know, you seek it out in your adult life because it feels the most comfortable. Above coke, pills, and alcohol, I truly think that Lindsay’s most deadly addiction is the one she has to fame and attention. She just can’t bring herself to disappear and regroup. She needs to have a front row seat to all of the drama. It feels like home to her.

Maybe I’m wrong about all of this, maybe something finally clicked and Lindsay is finally headed on a path that isn’t paved with coke mirrors. I hope I am. 

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