Even in era of solidarity, Mean Girls still scheme

It's the age of fourth-wave feminism, Wonder Woman and widespread girl-truce, and "I believe you."

But flip on the television, go to the movies or even slide into the soft velvet seats of a theater orchestra section, and still, somehow, the Mean Girl reigns.

She's the pop-cultural archetype we just can't seem to quit.

There's Mellie Grant in "Scandal," although Olivia Pope certainly has her moments. There's the sorceress with the enviable cheekbones in "Maleficent." And there's Miranda Priestly in "The Devil Wears Prada."

In the protracted blood feud between the Swifts and the Kardashian-Wests, the Mean Girl is definitely

Taylor. (Or maybe it is Kim; it’s all so unclear.)

And now? She’s Broadway-bound.

A free-wheeling 2 -hour “Mean Girls” musical, based on the 2004 cult movie written by comedian Tina Fey, is working out the kinks on the National Theatre stage in Washington before it heads north for a Broadway run.

A serious contender for one of moviedom’s most terrifying Mean Girls, Regina George, leader of the clique known as the Plastics, has a smartphone now and skinny jeans, platform heels and tight leather jackets, not to mention a few slithery rock numbers.

She’s also just like the Regina George of Fey’s film, doling out her affection and seriously warped teenage vengeance in equal measure, until her victims attempt to turn the tables and replace her with one of their own.

“They betrayed you; that’s what girls do,” her mother, a gossipy Mama Plastic in her own right, sings to Regina in the show.

Outside the theater, 13 years after “Mean Girls” hit the multiplex, womanhood has changed. In our era of kindness and allies and pink-hatted sisterhood, is betrayal really still what girls do?

“I’m not mean! I’m a woman,” argued Donna Rodney, 49, of Silver Spring, Maryland, as she waited to enter the National Theatre on a recent rainy afternoon. Women form her support system, she said, but she has a theory about why the Mean Girl persists.

“I think there’s a lot of stereotypes people want to hang onto. It’s more interesting to be mean and nasty to other women than to be inclusive and understanding and to be a caring person.”

And today’s Mean Girl doesn’t just live — she thrives.

“Unfortunately, yes,” said Rosalind Wiseman, an educator and author who literally wrote the book on Mean Girls.

Wiseman’s 15-yearold book, “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” served as the source material for “Mean Girls.” In it, Wiseman described girlhood as an animalistic landscape of Queen Bees (moneyed pretty girls who alternate kindness with reproach, basically just to gaslight their entire social group); Sidekicks (the totally indoctrinated disciples of the Bee); Targets (fairly obvious, this one); and other girls you should hope never to cross in a dark alley.

But “Queen Bees” wasn’t fiction; it was a manual for parents whose teenage daughters were growing up so fast — and, potentially, into psychotic little Mussolinis.

Not everyone faces a Mean Girl, Wiseman said, but some girls — and women — continue to “disproportionately make life miserable for the other people around them.” Nowadays, she might just use social media to do it.

“For women, there’s a sense of having to be this billboard of yourself, this Instagram post of yourself,” Wiseman said of the 2017 version of the Mean Girl, who has us all striving to appear as if we have achieved perfection.

Worse, “her friends are mandated to say, wherever they are: ‘Aw, girl, you’re so cute. You’re so hot.’ And none of that is necessarily true,” Wiseman said. “The girls feel obligated to say it.”

Even if Fey had never decided to adapt “Queen Bees and Wannabes” into a film, Wiseman might not have escaped the attention showered on her after the book was published. The media was obsessed with the Queen Bee — now better known as the Mean Girl — and with the notion that every day in America, girls were waging bloodcurdling emotional war against one another.

Wiseman, who has a quick laugh and a habit of dropping unprintable words, has written more than a half-dozen books, including one on boy behavior.

She acknowledged, though, that her field report on girls who feed on the destruction of other girls is the one that has endured.

Just like the Mean Girl herself.