The Insidious Ranking Lists of Middle + High School

Cara Natterson (0:00)

So good, so good, so good.

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

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Cara Natterson (0:18)

We are talking about laws that are being violated by not just high schoolers, but middle schoolers and sometimes grade schoolers. These are not kids who are intentionally trying to manufacture pornography. Law enforcers are so fed up that they've decided, we're just going to make an example.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (0:49)

Hi, Cara.

Cara Natterson (0:50)

Well, hello, Vanessa.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (0:52)

Today's conversation is about something that's both age old, like even affected us old ladies here on the podcast, and a decidedly modern take on that phenomenon for kids growing up today. That is what we will call broadly the ranking lists.

In middle school, it looks like one thing, and in high school, it looks like another thing. Then even in college, there's another iteration of ranking lists.

Cara Natterson (1:30)

Yeah. On the cover of People magazine, there's another iteration.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (1:35)

So our celebrity-obsessed culture has another version of the ranking lists, which we will dive into all of that. But it's essentially the sort of hot or not version of putting people into buckets and ordering them according to their appearances.

Cara Natterson (1:54)

Correct. I mean, lists are as old as time. I'm the biggest fan of lists ever. You know, Vanessa, my lists have lists.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (2:04)

But not those kind of lists.

Cara Natterson (2:06)

But not these kinds of lists. And what's especially complicated about these kinds of lists is the experience people can have when they make a certain list and they feel both great about having made the list and terrible about the existence of the list or what someone else's experience might be on the list or vice versa. They feel terrible about making a list depending upon what the list is on. And someone else feels buoyed. And the human experience of ranking ourselves by comparison against one another and sort of where does that fit in to this amped up, tech driven, easily circulatable hierarchy?

And then also, we got a layer on middle school or high school and all of the social dynamics that shift and change as these lists are being circulated. So this is a, it's both a very, very simple topic and one of the most complicated topics that we get asked about all the time.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (3:23)

Right. So let's start with like the most sort of basic version of this, which is the 10 hottest girls or the 10 hottest boys in seventh grade, right? Like that was the version that I experienced when I was in middle school. I'm sure you experienced a version of it. And then, you know, the high school version became top 10 people that you would want to insert explicit word.

Cara Natterson (3:54)

You need to finish that sentence because I wasn't sure where that was going.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (3:58)

You need to insert explicit word that I have vowed not to use on this podcast. And then in college, it might have been going through the Facebook, right? The literal Facebook, the literal, the hard copy photos and descriptors of different people entering the freshman class. Those people got ranked by people coming into college, by the people who were already at college ranking about who their quote unquote targets were going to be. And then in the workplace, people have found in the printer rankings of colleagues according to people they either in the nice way find attractive or again, not to be repeated, explicit terminology, referring to sexual actions, ranking their workplace colleagues, right? So there's levels of it. Many of us have experienced one or all of them. And when you said earlier about making the list, you didn't mean constructing the list.

You meant being added to the list or included in the list or not being on the list.

Cara Natterson (5:08)

You're right. I did mean that. Although there is a whole secondary conversation about the physical making of the list.

Vanessa Kroll Bennett (5:14)

Right, which we will get to because technology has, along with everything else in our lives, transformed that process as well. Yes. So let's start with a little bit of memory walk down memory lane, maybe even traumatic walk down memory lane. I have a memory of, I went to a small middle school and there weren't a ton of kids in the classes. So the list was actually a combination of seventh and eighth grade.