When Mean Girls Hit Reality TV

We all knew a mean girl in high school.

The tone that felt less like playful banter and more like sharp cruelty. The eye rolls. The whispered commentary disguised as concern. The strategic exclusion. The thinly veiled digs delivered with a smile.

But usually, maturity and a high dose of real life knocks manages to beat that terrible teenage behaviour out of you once you’re in the real world.

Last night on MAFS the whole country got a front row seat into some of the most despicable mean girl behaviour to have been aired on prime-time reality TV.

Mean girl behaviour … by women in their 30s.

I am not suggesting there wasn’t a fair amount of editing by producers here. But on face value, brides Brook and Gia’s behaviour at the MAFS dinner last night showed us that sometimes the school yard reign of terror doesn’t stop after leaving high school.

Watching the ringleader Brook was especially jarring, because it wasn’t just conflict with another person at a dinner party. It was the glee in undermining others. The subtle group dynamics that echoed the cafeteria politics of Year 10. The way vulnerability from others became ammunition. The way alliances formed not out of loyalty, but out of shared disdain.

Reality TV magnifies personality traits. Editing plays a role, yes. But patterns are patterns. When someone consistently centers themselves as arbiter of who’s worthy, who’s embarrassing, who’s delusional, who’s “too much,” it stops being personality and starts being power play.

And what makes the “mean girl” archetype so enduring, and so damaging, is that it rarely looks like outright bullying. It’s social manoeuvring. It’s tone. It’s who gets interrupted and who gets supported. It’s the raised eyebrow that invites others to laugh. It’s saying, “I’m just being honest,” when honesty is clearly weaponised.

The hard truth? We don’t leave that dynamic behind at graduation.

We see it in workplaces. In friend groups. On social media. Definitely social media. And, yes, we see it on reality television. The difference now is that we have the language to call it out. We recognise gaslighting. We recognise exclusion tactics. We recognise when “confidence” crosses into contempt.

Watching this season has been a reminder of how deeply those teenage hierarchies shape us. For anyone who was ever on the receiving end of a mean girl’s campaign, it’s hard not to feel a flicker of that old anxiety watching it unfold again.

But here’s the hopeful part: the audience sees it. The cultural tide has shifted. Where once the mean girl ruled unquestioned, now people dissect, critique, and reject that behaviour. We’re less impressed by dominance and more drawn to empathy.

Maybe that’s the real evolution since high school.

The mean girl may never disappear entirely. But she doesn’t get to control the narrative the way she used to.