Education Quote by Jonathan Bennett

There is a calculated innocence to this line: it frames high school cruelty as an internal girls-only weather system, while casting the speaker as the lucky, unthreatening bystander who never got rained on. Even if we take Bennett at his word, the rhetoric does something sharper than it admits. By insisting "girls aren't mean to guys", he re-centers the story around male experience while claiming to decenter it, using personal exemption ("never mean to me") as proof of a broader social rule. That move has the clean logic of a thought experiment and the blind spots of one.

The subtext is a familiar cultural script: female social life as inherently competitive, relational aggression as its native language. It's an idea that flatters guys with the implication that they are spared the worst of teen cruelty, and it also lets male listeners off the hook for the ways they can benefit from, provoke, or weaponize those dynamics. Mean Girls-style mythology is doing a lot of work here, offering a neat, pop-psych explanation for a messy ecosystem.

Context matters: high school hierarchies are not single-axis. Girls can absolutely be mean to guys, and not only in ways that read as "romantic rejection". But the quote is less interested in mapping cruelty than in drawing a boundary around it, treating gendered meanness as a closed circuit. It's revealing, too, that the final clause is autobiographical. It signals status: I was safe. I was liked. The speaker's immunity becomes the credential, even as it narrows the lens.