Cliques

As I said before, ideology can be described as something that people can go along with, or hide behind. Cliques are a great way for people to lose their individuality and hide behind something, because it is very easy for people to get lost in a big clique. Cliques mainly consist of girls - from what I have seen, I don't think boys necessarily fall into cliques, I think they are friends with whomever they want to be friends with. But with my experience as a girl, I can tell you that girls definitely want to "fit in" with the "popular" people at school, and so they will join a clique and follow whatever is going on in that clique. As a middle school girl, I definitely bought into the idea of cliques. I had just lost a bunch of friends and didn't want to end up with only one or two friends, so I joined a clique. It was fun until the girls decided they wanted to start drinking at the age of 13, and I just wasn't into that. I thought I could "live within the lie" for a little bit by making excuses to not hang out with them when they were drinking, and just hang out with them at school or when they weren't, but eventually it caught up with me and they stopped inviting me to hang out with them.

Another thing about cliques is that they generally have a leader, which people like to call the "Queen Bee". When I think of this term, and cliques in general, mainly I think of Gossip Girl. For those who do not know anything about Gossip Girl, it is a show about a bunch of rich teenagers who live on the Upper East Side in New York. The school that all of the main characters attend are separated into a boy school and a girl school, but we mostly see what happens at the girl school. Blair is considered the Queen Bee of the school, and she has a group of followers who would do pretty much anything for her. Jenny is a character on the show who is not rich, but who so desperately wants to fit in with Blair's clique. In order to achieve this, Blair makes Jenny do a lot of things for her, including doing errands for her before a Masquerade Ball, which can be seen in the video below. Jenny does everything Blair asks - getting her dress, jewelry, etc. - and believes that this will help her get an invite to the ball. Jenny is willing to do anything to be a part of the clique, even though she knows that if she does join it she will lose her individuality and have to go along with everything that Blair says to do. But Jenny so badly wants to be a part of it that she goes along with everything Blair tells her to do. Unfortunately, Blair, as Queen Bee, was just using her, as can be seen below from minute 2:07-2:42.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cr7OYL_J5nM

It seems kind of a stretch to relate this back to Havel, but his idea of ideology and living within the lie as a way to find something to hide behind can be seen in everyday experiences, and on TV. Shows like Gossip Girl are promoting cliques, because even though it is clear that Blair is not a great person and Jenny shouldn't want to follow her, Jenny still tries and even when she doesn't succeed, she ends up without any friends. Gossip Girl is making it seem like you need to be a part of a clique in order to have thoughts and ideas that will make people like you. This is why girls in our society today end up joining cliques and sometimes don't end up thinking for themselves or speaking up when people in their clique says/does something that goes against their values. This is why it is important to recognize that living within the truth can seem scary, but it helped Jenny become her own person and stand up for her values, even though she ended up not having friends. The message of Gossip Girl should be that everyone should choose to live within the truth.