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The Bullying Thread (HD!)
Allllrighty, so. It's about that time again in whatever region of California I live in, in which you keep hearing and reading PSA after PSA on radio broadcast and advertisement billboards. You know, the usual thing: Over-embellished scenarios, melodramatic lines, all of it said or written with a kind of rhetorical gallowsy sarcasm.
I've been with friends riding around town whenever these come up, and one guy in particular (who works in a Boys n Girls club, no less) bursts out in laughter whenever he hears or reads these things.
I don't really share his enthusiasm, though he tells me his reasoning. "Don't get me wrong. Bullying is bad. It's really bad. Its the worst. But nowhere near as bad as you think. Do you think your life would be better than it is now than if you had never been bullied before?"
The "nowhere near as bad as you think" is waaaay too open to interpretation, really. It's a little too obvious to take away that he meant misery is a character builder. How bad was my experiences with bullying? ... welp... Bad enough that violent retaliation was less of a last resort and more of a "Do this NOW or suffer a total career ender" sorta thing. I didn't know what he meant, and I'm kind of afraid to pry. Did he mean "bullying as children know it today is exaggerated" or did he mean "Of course bullying is horrible, if you don't deal with it"? It's another one of those "you don't talk about politics and religion" things for me. I wouldn't want to argue with them stupidly over cloud talk.
And what about the resolve to "deal with it"? I feel lucky to have had that resolve, thinking it over now. If the bullying threads TVT had one or two years ago are anything to go by, this sticks with people and they just won't let it fucking go. Though it's funny: when you think about bullying and bullies as a "deal with it" sort of thing, it makes them come off as more force-of-nature on the scale of conflict more than actual human beings. More dehumanization. Just perfect :V
Well, I'm navel gazing and blathering at this point, so go ahead and have your stab at this, if you wish.
Comments
Uh...learning 8 years earlier how to talk to people without instantly getting castigated by a small group of douchebags that scared off potential friends during critical years of social development would have had a pretty unambiguously good influence on my life, yeah.
ITT everyone quotes this line and says some variation on "yes". Bullying has a way of intercepting the development of young people, and plenty of us would no doubt be further along in life if bullying hadn't planted irrational fears that had to be worked through.
I think confusing the idea of being challenged and asked to life hardships with the intentional desire to destroy someone both emotionally and physically is a dangerous way to look at emotional growth. Most of us have probably grown up with those coming-of-age movies where the kid challenges the bullies and beats him because he's the coward. The problem there is when people actually pick a fight -stalk prey as it were- they go for people they know they can dominate. Emotional is more often, but as Fairly Odd Parents put it 'Sticks and Stones can break your bones but words leave psychological scars that never heal.'
That's a difference. While the challenges in school -theoretically- are meant to better and teach you, whereas bullying is meant to hurt.
The bleed-over effect is pretty easy to see when you look at a lot of nerd culture and how much self-hatred we've internalized. There's the people who see characters like the Punisher as the epitome of manliness, the people who go 'at least I'm not that kind of nerd', the people who overreact to bad fashion sense, the people who portray the nerd culture they're a part of as the core of a social problem rather than an extension of it... not all of it, but a good deal of it stems from a social problem that these people were taught there was something wrong with being the way they were.
Granted, there probably was something they did wrong. Some social cue they didn't pick up on. I'm still working on this shit and still have trouble around big crowds. But the thing is, bullies don't help you evolve out of those problems, they just make you see every aspect of yourself as a problem. What we need to do is encourage the ideas of where these people need to grow rather than destroying them for their social flaws. The idea that bullies spread that kind of self-awareness is a poison of laziness and regressive ideologies.
Admittedly, this is from a male white nerd perspective. There are no doubt gender and racial aspects I'm not covering.
Well, I have a stuttering problem, and the period when I was bullied for it in grade school managed to coincide with another horrible period in my life - parents going through a divorce. I don't want to bother anyone with what exactly happened, but the consequences were pretty devastating and it took me several years to fuly recover.
YES, I definitely do believe that life would be better without it.
Life would be A HELL OF A LOT easier if I hadn't have been bullied throughout my life.
We really need to grow out of the idea that all challenges build us, when it's positive challenges that do so. Ideally school is the perfect time for this, but it does fail in this regard.
I don't think anybody around me has ever told me that getting bullied is a good thing. If anybody every thought that, they never outright said it to me. I guess I'm lucky in that regard, huh?
Bullying teaches zero lessons except how to make one's bullying behaviour more socially acceptable. However, such stuff as social ostracization and call-outs sometimes get classified as bullying, despite them being acceptable responses to unacceptable behaviour. Problem is, a bully will easily home in on such a low-hanging fruit: we can even see this on here with the clueless posters we have from time to time(take the Draven dogpile debacle, which the mods thought of as excessive if I recall).
I'm glad I'm reading these responses from you guys, by the way.
Earlier, I had touched upon the idea of "dealing with it". I'd be perfectly fine with bullying and accept it as an everyday thing for young if there were various, clear cut, viable methods to counter it, avoid it or brush it off and have it still be socially acceptable. But there aren't, and as much as these billboards and radio broadcasts keep saying "teach your kid not to be a bystander when they see bullying", most people who suffer through it can't really be saved because they're isolated and out of the public eye when it happens.
and then theres that disgusting attitude you see from time to time like the more alpha as shit posts you'd have seen back in TVT. well, it reminds me of the whole rape culture brewhaha. (believe me, I can't say the phrase "bully apologist" without thinking about some stupid tumblr).
Telling them off/talking to a teach/offering support to said person is an effective method, at least in my experience. Excluding them beforehand is plain silly, unless you know for a fact your school is frequented by shank-happy proles.
What are those alpha-as-shit posts you talk about?
I think he's referring to the attitude that began with Guitar Bizarre.
I didn't really pay attention to that guy, was it tryhard revenge fantasies or autismal I-dealt-with-it-why-are-others-not-exactly-like-me attitudes?
More along the lines of the second. Guitar Bizarre started out with a legitimate, decent point about people engaging in self-delusion, but built up a miniature cult of personality around himself on TVT and let that get to his head. Eventually his posts moved from trying to be genuinely helpful (if poorly considered) to being fuel for his online ego.
The Draven dogpile was mostly people calling him out for having some damm right dodgy opinions and having no sense of self-awareness.
Whether he needed some stiff words isn't a contended point, but I sustain the notion that it became less and less constructive until it was actively malicious in nature.
It turned pretty mean-spirited towards the end of it all, what with the whole social-obliviousness-measured-in-Chagens stuff. I for one always get giddy when such a bi-monthly dramamagnet shows up, hoping for the opportunity to cut loose in such a manner. The post pretty much describes my attitude during some of my more unsavoury moments.
What were people supposed to do when he kept going on about it thinking it was okay?
Perhaps zap down his arguments, and dump victim accounts/descriptions of what pedo prison life looks like? Or else disengage until the banhammer swung.
^^ They could have simply not acknowledged him until a mod dealt with it.
^ Or that, for those who would have been willing to put the effort in.
^^
Okay, I think thats a fair point.
edit: god damm ninjaing dragons.