Girls and bullying

[dolorosa_12]

I have just read something so awesome (and yet so depressingly obvious) that I felt I should share it with you: a post on Tiger Beatdown about, among other things, girls and bullying.



One of the things that I am really into studying, lately, is adolescent female friendship. It is this hugely complicated and fascinating thing, wherein girls create immensely powerful spaces of resistance, but also put each other through Patriarchy Boot Camp, and I am starting to hold the opinion that studying it extensively will reveal to you the Secrets of Life. I won’t go into all of that right now! But I will say that I have, recently, been reading a book called Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons. One passage in this, which grabbed me and blew my mind and suddenly made about a thousand troubling incidents way more easy to understand, was about how female bullies pick their victims. The author interviewed a whole bunch of girls about this, and she came up with a really good, really obvious answer. So, do you want to know how they pick their victims?

They pick the girl who seems the most confident.

Yes, that’s really it! In the particular seething cauldron of insecurity, unhappiness, and fear that is female adolescence, girls tend to feel shitty about themselves for about a million reasons, and to think that they need outside approval – from friends, from boys, from the culture at large – in order to be worthwhile. But if a girl seems not reliant enough on outside approval – if she doesn’t hate her body enough, if she’s too successful at getting guys to like her, if she’s not interested enough in getting guys to like her, if she thinks she’s smart or cool or worthwhile or pretty (or if she just is smart or cool or worthwhile or pretty, and it’s pronounced enough for the people around her to take notice) – then the wolves start circling. Because they’ve all been bullied, too; they’ve all been undermined; they’ve all made the mistake of standing out, at one point or another, and they’ve been punished for it. And now, because they feel like shit about themselves, you have to feel like shit, too. A girl who doesn’t feel like shit is a threat to the entire social order, the extensively complicated and crappy system whereby women have to earn their way into a pretense of self-esteem by getting enough approval from other girls or from other outside sources in general.

What girls learn to do, in order to survive in this particular dynamic, is to race each other to the bottom. It lasts for a lifetime. They maneuver, hiding the urge to matter and succeed under an appropriately self-loathing demeanor, so that they can get ahead and climb up without ever appearing to do it.

I should reiterate the qualification that Sady Doyle, the blogger, begins this post with: 'If we’re talking about gender, we’re (hopefully) not trying to talk about behaviors or traits that every single member of each gender shares to exactly the same degree and in the same way. Because there are none of those! What we are talking about, though, are behaviors that are widespread within each group, including some differences between the two groups. '

Sadly, the stuff behind the cut really chimes with my own experience as a child (the one and only time I went to a counsellor, aged 12, she said to me 'Girls tend to want everyone to be average, and the same, and they'll bully anyone who steps out of those boundaries'). How depressing.

Comments

[katiefoolery.livejournal.com]

That's really fascinating and I think that both your former counsellor and the blogger have provided two parts of the puzzling solution. I never, ever saw the truly successful and confident girls bullied at school, but it did happen to the ones who were a bit different. I think it's more people who have the confidence to do their own thing or stand out in some way who attract the attention of the bullies, not the ones who are simply confident.

That was a fascinating quote though - I'll probably be thinking about that for a while.