A million years ago there was a TV show called “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”. It was a good show but it could trigger such anxiety in me, Molly was alone! in the big city! what was going to happen to her?!! I couldn’t watch it if I’d had a bad day and it was a half-hour comedy show!

Thank you for this, it’s not about child bullying, it’s about the way women are socialized to be the sex class and the lesser. Thank you.

As a young child (and continuing into today), I was always tall and gangly, with the physical anatomy that was more visible than most dummies used in biology classes. I was radically thin. This was more of a confluence of two family trees where both parents were on the naturally thin side and my genes just grabbed both ends.

Now, this seeming preternaturally thinness, coupled with always being at least a head taller than classmates also went along with a shyness that bordered on being aloof. I didn’t understand how to relate to people and spent most of my time reading books or drawing and doodling. I counted myself as relatively intelligent because I never had to work hard to achieve respectable grades. This further distanced me from the rest of the class population. Inevitably, this led to a collective and continued harassment by people on both sides of the sexaul boundary. While the boys were more physical about their attacks, the girls used a combination of psychological warfare as well as using their sexuality (later when it became an issue) to cause further problems for me. There were few punches pulled when it came to humiliating me, whether it was the giggling of girls pushing one another and teasing each other about how they’d like to kiss me while visibly turning green at the prospect to the girls mimicking a spraying of repellant or cleansing spray whenever they were forced into physical contact with me.

The final straw happened during 8th grade graduation practice where the boys and girls sitting directly behind me started to pull my hair out and comparing the size of the clumps and trying to get more out. I’d learned early on that complaining did little to make a difference. My father expected me to fight back while my mother would make an entreaty to an indifferent school administration, never going any further. So, for the first hour of practice, I endured sitting there, clenching my fingers and teeth while the whispers behind me and occasional tug of hair would cause me to wince and silent tears would fall. It wasn’t until I heard a remark about seeing blood in my hair that I finally broke and ran out of the auditorium. Of course, I was immediately accosted and the tears merely confused teachers.

The worse part came when I was forced to wait on the “Principal’s Bench” with my tormentors while the administration inside decided what to do. The kids next to me continually asked, “If it hurt you so much, why didn’t you just say something? I would have stopped.” Even when confronted with evidence of clumps of hair and tears, my tormentors were not punnished. I was grilled and painted as an enabler of my own torment with questions like, “Why didn’t you say something when it started? We would have helped you!” By then I was now angry, at my tormentors but, more at the school staff who blissfully ignored the warning signs or subtly enabled their favored children (there was a teacher who was not so subtle about encouraging the bullying of me). I lashed out and yelled at the administration and was sent home.

The simple truth of the fact was that the administration felt that this sort of behavior was natural child behavior and that punnishment for something that was “normal” was inappropriate. The tormentors involved were chided but nothing changed except for me being phsycially separated from the rest, further marking my separation.

The truth of the matter is that adults look at children differently than they are. Children are far more like adults than most people would like to think, with a single biological exception: Children have yet to develop their brain to be able to make truly informed and rational decisions. Because bullying is often seen as an extension of the natural child relationship, adults enable them by not properly training the behaviour out of bulies and by frustrtrating victims with often useless reassurances. The system, as they say, is broke.

Thankyou for helping me frame some thoughts of mine, along a similar (thankfully less sinister) line.

And I am so glad that you realised that manipulating men’s feelings is what you were trained to do, not what you have to do. You’re damn smart.

All things considered, I have been pretty lucky on the sexual harassment scale in life- pretty low so far, but who knows how long that will last.

This story astonishes the hell out of me, though. I shudder to think how this would have gone down at an age where putting out was more likely.

There was an episode of Burn Notice on recently where a female undercover DEA agent enlists Michael (ex-spy, now sort of a PI) to help her because her target for her case has now started stalking her and is convinced she’s his girlfriend. (She’d rather bust him than get pulled from the case.) There’s one scene where Raul finds out that Michael’s been calling Sophia’s cell phone and calls Michael over while he’s holding a gun to Sophia’s head. Michael manages to convince Raul that he was trying to get some kind of info out of Sophia and “she wouldn’t give you up.” Sadly, it seems like the safest way of dealing with sickos is to act like the world is their reality.

I hate it hate it hate it when adults ignore kids’ concerns, tell them to take it or ignore the agressor, or, apparently, chastise them for tattling. The fuck?

Of course, it’s even better for girls, because the pigtail-pulling narrative is so, so prevalent. I’m sure that when you announced that Drew was your boyfriend, any adult in hearing range thought it was just so cute. “Aww, they were fighting because they liked each other!”

Excuse me. Vommit.

Sabotabby: You inspire me to write a post about the wildly effective tactic of “minimalization” that is so often used against feminist issues. Probably the one that’s most familiar to everyone is the “sense of humor” meme.

Pepper!: Yeah, that was part of the whole problem–Drew escalated with me over a period of three years. He could have been stopped at any time prior to that, and not in a way requiring police intervention, either. Just a simple school policy.

Ginger: (sigh) My mom…that’s a whole set of issues in of itself. I honestly think that she sort of was refusing to really listen to me, because she felt guilty because she couldn’t be home when I got home from school so there was nothing she could do so she didn’t want to deal with it.

I also told my mom though. My mom volunteered in my class once a week and she somehow took the kid aside and told him in her scary serious mom voice that he was going to leave me alone or she was going to “get him”. And that was it. He didn’t have anything to do with me from then on.

I wonder now if my mom could have gotten in trouble for threatening a 7 year old. She wasn’t like, “I’m going to kill your puppy” or anything, but it was probably pretty scary for him. But I needed something to happen so I could feel safe at school again and that worked. That jackass kid could live with a little fear in his heart in return for my safety and well being. And it just proved once again that my mom is a total badass who gets shit done and apologizes for nothing.

I have some half-formed thoughts about whether and how the sexual harassment of young girls is related to bullying of young boys as well, but I think I’d better sleep on it right now, I think I’ve used my brain up for the evening and I’d just end up saying something stupid.