What’s the Male Equivalent of “Heathers”?

“Heathers” was a satirical movie about high school. As this site notes:

The film’s main characters are the Heathers, the cruel and beautiful leader, Heather Chandler, secretly jealous Heather Duke, and the weak, dependent Heather McNamara. The clique also includes former “good girl” Veronica Sawyer, who is tiring of the exclusiveness and cruelty of the Heathers, and the whole high school in general. She eyes the sneering and mysterious new guy Jason Dean across the cafeteria. He seems to be the perfect escape from the shallow Heathers, intelligent, attractive, a loner… After a hellish college party, Heather Chandler and Veroncia get in an argument and Heather Chandler tells Veronica that she is being stripped of her popularity, and Veronica knows that Heather has the power and influence to fulfil her threat. Veronica shouldn’t care, yet she still does.

The entire storyline is described here.

Calling a group of people “Heathers” is a particularized insult, denoting personal enmity, pettiness and vapidity. Maureen Dowd referred to Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith as “hawkish Heathers” in this column. This blog referred to the Bush White House as “The Pathetic Beltway “Heathers” Remake.”

Much more common is the use of the term to disparage media reporters. Last fall Michael Berube had a post entitled “Thank You, Heathers,” which links FEMA incompetence in the Katrina disaster to press coverage of the 2000 Gore campaign. More recently he referred to “the widespread Heather Outrage that constituted press coverage of Clinton and Gore,” and asked to be told “…what the hell is going on in the world of the Heathers” in this post. There was comments-based commentary about the term that followed, in which Berube linked to a “Heathers” reference noted in 1999 by the Daily Howler that was also aimed at the press. It was Time reporter Eric Pooley’s description of a debate between Al Gore and Bill Bradley. Pooley observed, “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of 15-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.” It’s the oldest one that Google and I could find this afternoon, but neither of us put all that much effort into it. In 2001 Eric Boehlert put the episode into context, writing in Rolling Stone:

There was a certain sort of hubris and arrogance how the Gore people handled the campaign,” reports the Chicago Tribune’s Warren. One senior Gore campaign aide agrees: “We clearly made some mistakes. Especially in the beginning, we were very guarded about access to him. It played into the idea that Gore was not at ease with the press.” Journalists did little to hide their contempt. During a primary debate against former Sen. Bill Bradley in New Hampshire, Gore was openly booed – not by Bradley supporters but by reporters. “The 300 media types watching in the press room at Dartmouth were, to use the appropriate technical term, totally grossed out,” said a 1999 Time report. “Whenever Gore came on too strong, the room erupted in a collective jeer, like a gang of fifteen-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd.”

Eric Alterman also mentioned this in 2002 here, at The Nation. Here is a 2003 Heathers-of-the-media reference by David Podvin:

Peter Hart of Fairness And Accuracy In Reporting offered the following reason that reporters are so hostile to Democratic candidate Howard Dean: “He doesn’t seem to like journalists, and the feeling is mutual. That leads the press to jump on unflattering stories, even if they’re not quite accurate.”

Hart has given the standard progressive explanation of why mainstream journalists have savaged recent Democratic presidential contenders: reporters tend to be clique-ish sorority-like”Heathers”who are put off by the personalities of (all) liberal candidates. According to this theory, corporate reporters lied about Gore because he wasn’t nearly charming enough, and they lied about Clinton because he was just a little too charming. Dean is supposedly despised by the Fourth Estate because he is too”hot”, and John Kerry is equally despised because he is too”cold”.

In 2004, Digby wrote a post called “Come And Get It, Little Heathers.” Ironically, sort of, Maureen Dowd is one of the people called a Heather here, as Digby wrote:

This theme is one of those snotty, RNC-fed bitch items designed to thrill the little mediawhores and make them subconsciously further the image of Democrats as “soft.” And, it’s about making the little tarts mindlessly portray Junior and Gepetto as the “real men” instead of the empty codpiece and the flaccid chickenhawk they are.

They are very clever with this stuff. The tone is nasty elitist, both frat-boy macho and cheerleader exclusive, the greater purpose being to plant the seed in the minds of Wolfie, MoDo, Timmy and the other Heathers, which is best accomplished by using this patented high school form of ridicule.

See also this Digby post, “Pavlov’s Heathers.”

Also in 2004 “Heathers” was deployed by Molly Ivins, as she wrote in this column:

I need to counsel those innocent little Heathers in the Washington press corps who think the White House attack on Clarke is confused simply because it is often contradictory — “Democrat,” “disgruntled former employee,” “out of the loop” and “we did everything he wanted.” Y’all, Karl Rove often issues contradictory attacks — just throws a whole lot of stuff up in the air so people will think, “There must be something to all this noise.”

Here’s a very recent invocation of “Heathers” at Third Estate Sunday Review: “As you read the construct of this story, you grasp that the Mean Girls/Heathers have crossed over from the op-ed pages and now pose as reporters.”

With this kind of usage and traction among top notch liberal pundits, any complaint about the gendered nature of the “Heathers” epithet at this small blog would likely be ignored. Or, experience suggests, it could also lead to a barrage of personal insults, claims of “oversensitivity,” and accusations that I am undermining the blogospheric attack on the Republicancentric mainstream media. So, I’m not raising the misogyny concern. I’m just wondering whether there is a male equivalent out there, because the ubiquitous “Heathers” meme, in which a largely male press corps is disparaged by reference to the stereotypical qualities of a cohort of fictional, murdered teenaged girls, might hypothetically be growing tiresome to a person who did perceive any sexism at play here.

–Ann Bartow