Books, Girls and Bullying.
I just finished reading a YA book called Freak by Marcella Pixley. (I got a number of YA books out of the library today, because the teen room, unlike every other area containing fiction in the library, is on the first floor and therefore does not require an eternally broken elevator for access.) The book was very good and very painful for three-quarters of the way through, a spot-on description of what it's like to be bullied.
I can tell you the very minute that the story started to go wrong. It's when the heroine, Miriam, who, purely for the bullies' entertainment, has been physically and emotionally abused, has had her property destroyed and has had her most private thoughts (recorded in a journal) read out loud and mocked by a bunch of contumacious troglodytes posing as the in-crowd, stops reacting like an angry, bullied twelve-year-old who has had ENOUGH of this shit and starts acting the way that the author thinks that a good girl would react. This is the passage:
"Miriam," she said, "I know I'm supposed to punish you for hitting that girl. I know that I'm supposed to tell you that what you did wasn't right. But I can't. You stood up for yourself. And I'm proud of you."
I turned and stared at her. "You shouldn't be," I said.
And that is precisely where the author lost me.
Because I was bullied. Elementary school was dangerous to the point where I threw up every morning before breakfast and hid in the school library rather than go out to recess. The boys who hated me had baseball bats and hockey sticks. They knew how to use them. And they did. They also had the tongues of vipers, and they used insults with equally deadly effectiveness. Junior high only changed the gender of the bullies. They were still inclined to beat me up, steal my stuff, throw my books in the toilet...only the girls added making up lies to their agenda.
Decades have not changed my opinion of bullies. They were, are, and remain, vomit-worthy swine. If hate could have hurt them, mine would have vaporized them like a neutron bomb. And the only thing that I would have felt would have been unmitigated joy, because they would not be hurting me (or anyone else) ever again.
Naturally, I heard the same lies that every grownup tells kids who are bullied. You could probably recite them from memory. I certainly can. And I can recall my own mental commentary on the lies as well:
"You don't REALLY hate them." (Don't tell me how I feel. And yes, I damned well do.)
"They're just unhappy." (Lots of people are unhappy. I'm unhappy. I'm not tormenting other people for entertainment, though, am I?)
"All they want is attention." (They're popular, have tons of friends and the teachers love them. And they get away with this shit on a daily basis--half the time with tacit approval from teachers!)
"If you just ignore them, they'll stop." (No, if you ignore them, then they get angry because they aren't getting the attention they crave. So they up the ante and make things geometrically worse for their victims in order to force said victims to give them attention.)
"You should feel very sorry for them." (What? What am I supposed to feel sorry about--that they're not beating up MORE people? Or that they haven't succeeded in making every other kid's life hell?)
And the number one lie--the one that Miriam buys into:
"You really shouldn't be fighting with them."
I got that one a lot. And I always protested that I would have been perfectly happy to leave the bullies alone, but that they wouldn't leave ME alone. And if they were going to attack me in groups, then as far as I was concerned, I had two choices: just standing there and taking the abuse or going down swinging and maybe, just maybe, hurting them enough to convince them that bullying me wasn't worth it. That there were easier pickings elsewhere. (I hated to have to hope that they would pick on someone else, but...well, I knew that they weren't going to stop bullying people--why would they? They got a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure from it, so far as I could tell.)
But, according to my teachers, I should not stand up for myself. I should not fight. I should be more accepting. Calmer. Nicer.
You know. A better victim.
Now, if Miriam just had a momentary lapse due to guilt at beating up her chief tormentor, I wouldn't have understood it, but I could have accepted it. But no. After this, Miriam goes to a party held by the girls who are bullying her--which is insane and suicidal behavior. She is more or less ignored, rather than being greeted with venomous hatred for daring to rebel against the judgment of the bully...and worse, physically striking her. Strike two, so far as I was concerned.
The chief bully is sitting on the couch making out with multiple boys. This did not surprise me; the chief bully had boasted several times of doing exactly this. Miriam then has another reaction which told me that the author was a mother--she sees the bully, who is older than her and far more physically developed, seeming to grow younger and younger with each kiss. This is the way that an adult would look at the situation: "She's too young for this. She can't handle it yet." That may make sense coming from an adult, but it doesn't make sense coming from a twelve-year-old who's looking at a thirteen-year-old who appears to be at least three or four years older.
Anyway, the message we're supposed to get is that the bully is desperately unhappy and is being abused by all these boys. And I'll be honest. They did sound abusive, trying to strip off her clothes and get her to drink. And if Miriam had seen this at school, I could have understood her having a sudden impulse to help out any girl, possibly even the chief bully, because, yes, it's nasty.
But that isn't what happens here. The bully kisses, hugs, makes out with and eventually gets mauled by dozens of boys...and Miriam just stands there and watches. Nor does anyone react to her standing there and watching the makeout sessions--though the bullies at my schools would have had plenty to say about voyeurs.
Finally a high school boy climbs on top of the bully and starts trying to pull her tank top off. The bully tries to push him off. This doesn't work. After watching the bully struggle for a while, Miriam flips on the lights. This provokes a sitcom-scene of everyone grabbing for their pants. Then Miriam--a twelve-year-old--walks over, pulls the high school boy off of the bully and gets between the two. The fact that a twelve-year-old could move one of the biggest boys in the room did not strike me as probable.
Then Miriam asks the bully if she is okay.
And the bully--in front of everyone--starts howling in what we're told is shame and fear. Since the only emotions the bully had ever evinced prior to this were pettiness and malice, I figured that she was ashamed of being seen as unwilling and was afraid of what this would do to her reputation. The switch from malicious swine to unhappy and frightened teen--who was Just Like The Heroine--was too much of a jump for me.
And then as the crowning touch, the icing on the cake, the bully voluntarily buys Miriam a notebook to replace the one she destroyed. Because bullies apologize to their victims all the time, you know. (Every girl-bully that I have known would have been more likely to give Miriam hell the next day for putting her in an awkward situation where people would laugh at her.)
I do see what the author was trying to do. She was attempting to send a message--that everyone feels like a freak during the teen years, everyone is unhappy and alone and if we help each other, everything will be fine. It's not accurate, but it sounds good. It certainly sounds well-intentioned.
The problem is that it's an inherently dishonest premise. Well-meaning, certainly, but a lie. For the underlying presumption is that if we just were nice to bullies, then they would be nice back. The corollary is that the victims of bullies have not been sufficiently nice. Because if they were being kind and helpful and whatnot, the bullies would be kind, helpful and whatnot in return.
It's a way of blaming the victim.
The interesting thing is that throughout the book, no one--Miriam, her best friend, her teachers or her principal--ever comes out and says that the chief bully and her cohorts (gleaming in purple and gold) are wrong and should not be bullying. Miriam's parents don't want to hear that she has any problems at school; her English teacher knows what's going on but wimps out, never even telling the bullies to cut it out NOW, much less threatening them with punishment; Miriam's friend tells her to keep quiet and ignore them; and Miriam's sister Deborah states openly that she feels it's all Miriam's fault that she's being bullied, since she's bright and not boobtacular. What she needs to do, Deborah says, is hide her intelligence, dress better, be more feminine and blend in. Then she won't get bullied. This is Deborah's technique. It is worth noting that it is the only way of avoiding bullying that canonically works.
So yeah. Lie about who you are, blend in with the crowd and never, ever fight back. Then you'll be safe. Above all, be nice to bullies, no matter how cruel they are to you, because wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice?
What an unintentionally poisonous message to send to young girls.
I can tell you the very minute that the story started to go wrong. It's when the heroine, Miriam, who, purely for the bullies' entertainment, has been physically and emotionally abused, has had her property destroyed and has had her most private thoughts (recorded in a journal) read out loud and mocked by a bunch of contumacious troglodytes posing as the in-crowd, stops reacting like an angry, bullied twelve-year-old who has had ENOUGH of this shit and starts acting the way that the author thinks that a good girl would react. This is the passage:
"Miriam," she said, "I know I'm supposed to punish you for hitting that girl. I know that I'm supposed to tell you that what you did wasn't right. But I can't. You stood up for yourself. And I'm proud of you."
I turned and stared at her. "You shouldn't be," I said.
And that is precisely where the author lost me.
Because I was bullied. Elementary school was dangerous to the point where I threw up every morning before breakfast and hid in the school library rather than go out to recess. The boys who hated me had baseball bats and hockey sticks. They knew how to use them. And they did. They also had the tongues of vipers, and they used insults with equally deadly effectiveness. Junior high only changed the gender of the bullies. They were still inclined to beat me up, steal my stuff, throw my books in the toilet...only the girls added making up lies to their agenda.
Decades have not changed my opinion of bullies. They were, are, and remain, vomit-worthy swine. If hate could have hurt them, mine would have vaporized them like a neutron bomb. And the only thing that I would have felt would have been unmitigated joy, because they would not be hurting me (or anyone else) ever again.
Naturally, I heard the same lies that every grownup tells kids who are bullied. You could probably recite them from memory. I certainly can. And I can recall my own mental commentary on the lies as well:
"You don't REALLY hate them." (Don't tell me how I feel. And yes, I damned well do.)
"They're just unhappy." (Lots of people are unhappy. I'm unhappy. I'm not tormenting other people for entertainment, though, am I?)
"All they want is attention." (They're popular, have tons of friends and the teachers love them. And they get away with this shit on a daily basis--half the time with tacit approval from teachers!)
"If you just ignore them, they'll stop." (No, if you ignore them, then they get angry because they aren't getting the attention they crave. So they up the ante and make things geometrically worse for their victims in order to force said victims to give them attention.)
"You should feel very sorry for them." (What? What am I supposed to feel sorry about--that they're not beating up MORE people? Or that they haven't succeeded in making every other kid's life hell?)
And the number one lie--the one that Miriam buys into:
"You really shouldn't be fighting with them."
I got that one a lot. And I always protested that I would have been perfectly happy to leave the bullies alone, but that they wouldn't leave ME alone. And if they were going to attack me in groups, then as far as I was concerned, I had two choices: just standing there and taking the abuse or going down swinging and maybe, just maybe, hurting them enough to convince them that bullying me wasn't worth it. That there were easier pickings elsewhere. (I hated to have to hope that they would pick on someone else, but...well, I knew that they weren't going to stop bullying people--why would they? They got a great deal of satisfaction and pleasure from it, so far as I could tell.)
But, according to my teachers, I should not stand up for myself. I should not fight. I should be more accepting. Calmer. Nicer.
You know. A better victim.
Now, if Miriam just had a momentary lapse due to guilt at beating up her chief tormentor, I wouldn't have understood it, but I could have accepted it. But no. After this, Miriam goes to a party held by the girls who are bullying her--which is insane and suicidal behavior. She is more or less ignored, rather than being greeted with venomous hatred for daring to rebel against the judgment of the bully...and worse, physically striking her. Strike two, so far as I was concerned.
The chief bully is sitting on the couch making out with multiple boys. This did not surprise me; the chief bully had boasted several times of doing exactly this. Miriam then has another reaction which told me that the author was a mother--she sees the bully, who is older than her and far more physically developed, seeming to grow younger and younger with each kiss. This is the way that an adult would look at the situation: "She's too young for this. She can't handle it yet." That may make sense coming from an adult, but it doesn't make sense coming from a twelve-year-old who's looking at a thirteen-year-old who appears to be at least three or four years older.
Anyway, the message we're supposed to get is that the bully is desperately unhappy and is being abused by all these boys. And I'll be honest. They did sound abusive, trying to strip off her clothes and get her to drink. And if Miriam had seen this at school, I could have understood her having a sudden impulse to help out any girl, possibly even the chief bully, because, yes, it's nasty.
But that isn't what happens here. The bully kisses, hugs, makes out with and eventually gets mauled by dozens of boys...and Miriam just stands there and watches. Nor does anyone react to her standing there and watching the makeout sessions--though the bullies at my schools would have had plenty to say about voyeurs.
Finally a high school boy climbs on top of the bully and starts trying to pull her tank top off. The bully tries to push him off. This doesn't work. After watching the bully struggle for a while, Miriam flips on the lights. This provokes a sitcom-scene of everyone grabbing for their pants. Then Miriam--a twelve-year-old--walks over, pulls the high school boy off of the bully and gets between the two. The fact that a twelve-year-old could move one of the biggest boys in the room did not strike me as probable.
Then Miriam asks the bully if she is okay.
And the bully--in front of everyone--starts howling in what we're told is shame and fear. Since the only emotions the bully had ever evinced prior to this were pettiness and malice, I figured that she was ashamed of being seen as unwilling and was afraid of what this would do to her reputation. The switch from malicious swine to unhappy and frightened teen--who was Just Like The Heroine--was too much of a jump for me.
And then as the crowning touch, the icing on the cake, the bully voluntarily buys Miriam a notebook to replace the one she destroyed. Because bullies apologize to their victims all the time, you know. (Every girl-bully that I have known would have been more likely to give Miriam hell the next day for putting her in an awkward situation where people would laugh at her.)
I do see what the author was trying to do. She was attempting to send a message--that everyone feels like a freak during the teen years, everyone is unhappy and alone and if we help each other, everything will be fine. It's not accurate, but it sounds good. It certainly sounds well-intentioned.
The problem is that it's an inherently dishonest premise. Well-meaning, certainly, but a lie. For the underlying presumption is that if we just were nice to bullies, then they would be nice back. The corollary is that the victims of bullies have not been sufficiently nice. Because if they were being kind and helpful and whatnot, the bullies would be kind, helpful and whatnot in return.
It's a way of blaming the victim.
The interesting thing is that throughout the book, no one--Miriam, her best friend, her teachers or her principal--ever comes out and says that the chief bully and her cohorts (gleaming in purple and gold) are wrong and should not be bullying. Miriam's parents don't want to hear that she has any problems at school; her English teacher knows what's going on but wimps out, never even telling the bullies to cut it out NOW, much less threatening them with punishment; Miriam's friend tells her to keep quiet and ignore them; and Miriam's sister Deborah states openly that she feels it's all Miriam's fault that she's being bullied, since she's bright and not boobtacular. What she needs to do, Deborah says, is hide her intelligence, dress better, be more feminine and blend in. Then she won't get bullied. This is Deborah's technique. It is worth noting that it is the only way of avoiding bullying that canonically works.
So yeah. Lie about who you are, blend in with the crowd and never, ever fight back. Then you'll be safe. Above all, be nice to bullies, no matter how cruel they are to you, because wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nice?
What an unintentionally poisonous message to send to young girls.