Nowadays, every guy seems to have a story about a “crazy,” controlling ex-girlfriend. Get a group of men talking and you can bet the stories will go on for hours.
That in itself is not surprising and has probably been going on for decades. What is surprising is the topic is often more enthusiastically spurred on by girls, who are just as ready to vilify other members of their sex for their relationships with men.
Stories about the extreme measures some girl went to in order to avoid being broken up with by some guy, or the way another made her boyfriend give up his friends, or the way yet another “lead on” Nice Guy #3 are traded as eagerly among both sexes today as Pokémon cards were among their elementary school selves.
Now, while it’s bad for any human being to play with another person’s feelings and manipulating others is generally not a nice thing to do, I don’t think these girls deserve the backlash they get.
In fact, as someone who has been accused of both, I would like to present a sort of explanation on the behalf of them all.
Let’s talk about the life of the typical girl. She’s young and just as strong as boys her age, and she’s told she can be anything and that she should “follow her dreams.” 
But in the movies she watches, the princess always ends up with a prince at the end.
She is told over and over the absolute happiest ending is to get a man to fall in love with her.
She has 30 Barbies but just two Kens, and those Kens get married repeatedly to different Barbies.
The Velcro on Barbie’s glittery white wedding dress is too worn to stick together.
Fast-forward to middle school. Suddenly, everything is important; how she looks, how she dresses, what she does. Boys are suddenly growing stronger than her. She’s confused about just about everything.
All of her friends are getting boyfriends, and everything seems to revolve around boys, from the football team to the way she does her hair in the morning.
She now wants a boyfriend not just for romance, but because having one is a status symbol.
Having a boyfriend would mean something about her was good enough for a real live boy to take notice.
Then, her very first “real” boyfriend asks her out and she’s delighted. She blasts Taylor Swift and dances on her bed until her mother comes in to tell her to turn it down.
The all-powerful male species has finally taken notice of her. After all of this waiting, how could it possibly occur to her she might also have power over this guy?
To a girl who has constantly been told one special man has the power to change her life, the idea she could manipulate him in some way is foreign.
Just as boys of that age objectify women, so do girls see boys as the answers to all life’s problems.
But then, she spends a lot of time with the guy she celebrated so freely, and she realizes  boys aren’t really all that different from girls, and that if she plays her cards right, she can actually make him do things.
It becomes a power rush, a game to see what she can make him do. And then, as Britney so aptly pointed out, she does it again.
She experiments with her clothes, with the way she acts, seeing if she can use her newfound knowledge to manipulate other men.
In a life which men rule in so many aspects, she can’t help but want to take back whatever power she can.
So really, can we blame her for cutting her boyfriend off from his friends or for flirting with the guy she has no intention of dating?
 In a world where a 16-year-old girl can be publicly sexually assaulted in Steubenville, Ohio, by football players at a party, and nothing can be done about it, can we blame any woman for trying to take back what power she can?
When being called a feminist is more of an insult than the names often attributed to the women who like to manipulate the male species, these “crimes” might just be the best way she has to feel some small ownership of her life.
So let’s cut these “crazy” girls some slack and find a new topic of conversation. I hear newspapers are good for that.