This is my home! This is my home! How can you sit here within it and tell me that nobody lives here?!

(and say it like it’s obvious, say it with condescension, I am so fucking sick of my lived experience being met with condescension and casual declaration of impossibility, or at best saying that it may well have happened but I should still shut up and just let the first-generations speak, their problems their experiences are more numerous more important the only ones worth public acknowledgement)

(You say you want a world like mine, a world with people like me in it. You say you work to achieve it, to achieve us. Decide now how you will react to us when we come to be, for we are already here. You cannot afford to wait until you deem the tide to be turning in your favour, for the world is vast and contains multitudes and the tide is always in your favour somewhere, even if those places are small. Even if those places are small, they may still be big enough to raise a child.

Decide now. Decide wisely.)

This is kind of how I feel about a lot of SJ/feminist discourse about what men are like.

Context of that: Brin-Bellway was raised in liberal social circles and is talking about how SJ makes her feel, and I’m a man, basically cis though I suspect I’m at least a little gender-weird.

I think my System 1 is sexist, but its sexism is more like misandry. I don’t think I have an intuitive feeling that women are less competent and intelligent than men. I don’t think I have an intuitive feeling that women owe me service, deference, or sex. I do have an intuition that women are nicer and prettier than men and kind of basically are better people and make better companions. I think I empathize with women more easily, see them as more vulnerable and sympathetic, and am more likely to imagine sympathetic motives for them when they do something I consider bad. I think female characters tend to feel more emotionally alive to me. I think I’m more driven to make social connections with women. I think I probably am less deferential to women, but this is a function of me having more fear of men, not less respect for women. Being very unpopular in school made me into a fairly timid, deferential person who tends to try not to take up too much space. I do feel I have an obligation to support women in a “chivalrous” way, and I think the guilt and anxiety I feel about still being supported by my mother is partially a gendered feeling of this kind. SJ/feminist descriptions of the entitlement and confidence men are supposedly raised to feel don’t feel like descriptions of my condition at all, but something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the “I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me” line in The Maiden and the Selkie. Empathy for women’s arousal and pleasure is a pretty big part of my sexuality, and I think I’m low-key sexually submissive.

I don’t think I have what SJ/feminism thinks is typical male socialization; either I didn’t get it or I didn’t “properly” internalize it because I have a weird brain.

okay i’m not an expert but here’s my hot take: dress as if you were going on a date. like you don’t have to feel super shy or pressured to impress anyone, but show some basic respect for other people by making sure you’re clean and at your cutest. like, you’re way more likely to ping women as ‘with it’ and ‘nice’ and ‘worth a shot’ if you’ve also made a bit of an effort to dress well. guys in ‘snarky’ t-shirts, scruffy/worn jeans, dirty sneakers, they often seem kind of clueless and lost at a scene. you’re inviting people to look at you, and like what they see. 

specific tips: make sure your clothes fit. a lot of men’s fashion is cut very generously, very baggy/one-size-fits-none, and this can keep guys from learning how to flatter their figures the way women do. run some google searches on men’s fashion tips– there’s a lot of sites and tutorials out there to teach you how to fit any item to any body type, though of course try to take any fatshaming bullshit with a huge grain of salt. 

basically, clothes shouldn’t be so loose you’re wearing a tent, or so tight it rides up around the armpits and stomach. obviously no holes, no stains. if you’re wearing a graphic t, it should be a nice graphic, something artsy. snarky/funny slogan t-shirts generally come off as immature. anime  t-shirts are a red flag to a lot of ladies that you’re an idiot (who might murder them). superhero and nerdy  t-shirts are more okay if they’ve got a ‘vintage’ look, but still, i’d avoid it. solid color or simple pattern is always a safe option. 

a good look: t-shirt with button-up flannel. works for any gender. cuff your sleeves enough to show off some forearm. girls look at guys’ arms! doesn’t even matter if the guy isn’t buff. girls look. 

don’t wear a hat. just…. for fuck’s sake. do not wear a hat. trilby, newsboy, baseball, vintage fedora, tricorn, none of your options are good. also wash your hair. also if you have long hair, awesome, but learn to do something besides Sad Nerd Ponytail. a braid or a man-bun sends a real good message to any watching women than you care about hygene and are probably fun to know. 

also, if you must wear a trench coat, take it off and hang it somewhere as soon as you get in the door. under no circumstances pair any kind of hat with a trench coat and then hang around at the edges of things staring at titties. it’s sad. no one is impressed by your trenchcoat. no one.

clean socks, clean undies. c’mon. you can wear fun socks! fun socks are great! boring grey socks with the elastic all worn out? no. surprise stockings? fun.

side note: guys in thigh-high socks or stockings are hot as hell. the confidence is very attractive, as are pretty much any set of legs in stockings. 

and the thing is that jeans are fine if they’re clean and neat. if there’s holes, they better be fashionable holes, like pre-distressed kind of holes. if you’re wearing slacks, again, do a google search to see how to fit them nicely. show off your butt! 

shoes: if you only have sneakers, please at least run them through the washing machine every now and then. and then try and get something besides only sneakers. converse, vans, leather brogues, whatever. just don’t look like a guy who only has one pair of dirty, tattered sneakers.  

should you wear a tie? if you’re going for classy business like with the full office button-up and sports/suit jacket, then hell yeah. if it’s ironically flopping around on top of a tshirt, no. 

jackets: unlike trench coats, jackets can be a real nice final piece for your outfit. something that makes your shoulders and/or waist look good is A+. denim and leather are like force-multipliers for a bad fit, though, and say ‘i care deeply about being manly and i’m not even any good at it’. 

THOSE ARE MY OPINIONS ON GOOD MAN LOOKS. if you have any more questions i’d honestly suggest going to a scene and trying to strike up a conversation with the women there about what THEY like to see guys wearing. it will be very educational and probably also fun. 

this kind of makes me terrified to ever go to a play party again, and i am neither a dude nor lackign in hygiene

“ it will be very educational and probably also fun.”

yes going to a party where people apparently care even more than usual about how well dressed you are and how confident you are sounds like TONS of fun for the type of person who has trouble with these things.

like, ignore me because you’re not interested and i give off inexperienced vibes fine, but holy shit i’m never going to a party again if this is apparently the consesus from people about people who “hang around edges/ look lost/clueless”. I get the hygeine/ ripped clothes stuff and i take care to wear clean clothes etc.,  but holy shit the rest.

honestly reading that made me go all deer in the headlights because i was in the kink scene for around a decade and i always thought the rule was “wear what you feel sexy in” where now i’m sitting here going “…fuck fuck fuck did that jacket i loved give off too much of a trenchcoat vibe OH GOD THEY WERE ALL LAUGHING AT ME”

nah, most of them were asking to play

Mhm. This whole story arc really sent me into a panic, even though I’ve never thought about going to a kink party in my life. It’s just not great.

It… seems like it’s talking about crossover with a certain kind of geek, but… it still kind of puzzles me.

I think this is probably context, for what it’s worth.

I’m poor and have trouble finding comfortable clothes because of what I suspect are autistic sensory sensitivities. As a result my wardrobe is limited, mostly “casual,” and much of it is not in the best condition. I think I could dress passably by roachpatrol’s standards, but that post I linked to makes me think “I don’t think I’m the kind of person this is complaining about, but I might be adjacent to them.”

Not that it matters much, because I’m probably too vanilla and too normie for kink parties and they seem likely to be social anxiety hell for me. I doubt I’ll ever go to one.

I grew up with a compressed brain stem?! o_O That explains a lot! →ATLAS SUBLUXATION COMPLEX!

Finally! Did my best to explain it. I’m still healing, trying other new things, and keeping a close eye on any changes I notice. New’s Atlas Subluxation and Chronic Illness timeline Update: 1.23.17 Disabled and sick aren’t bad words! Medical marijuana edibles (and a vape pen!) that I use for managing chronic illness! Check out my chronic illness and health playlist for more guidance and tips!

Huh, I wonder if I have this problem. I have a bump on the base of my neck and a lot of back pain and my health was never very good. I vaguely remember my mother mentioning that I got handled kind of roughly by the doctor at birth, and I fell from a kind-of high wall onto a rocky creek-bed once when I was a child.

How expensive is it to get checked for atlas subluxation? I’m pretty poor...

Thank you for posting this video!

Anxiety has no object permanence. You know when you put everything into your bag and then you have to take everything out and count it to make sure it’s still in the bag you just put it in at least 3 times? Because anxiety is like “if you can’t see it are you sure it’s there bro??”. Conclusion: anxiety is an infant

bruh

OCD-ish anxiety for me is things like putting on deodorant for the fifth time, because some part of my brain thinks I might have forgotten to do it, even though I clearly remember doing it five minutes ago. It’s a combination of lack of trust in my own memory and lack of trust in knowledge I have source amnesia about. This isn’t the same thing as lack of object permanence, but it feels possibly related.

normal gay people: seeing gay couples is so pure and good

me, a miserable failure: there were two gay couples at the diner and I almost had to dash-and-dine because being reminded that I will never know love makes me want to kill myself

I’m straight and it sounds like you've got this worse than I do, but I can relate. Seeing couples kissing in public and so on makes me a little depressed and envious.

it occurs to me that tagging a post “X don’t touch/reblog/interact,” if the post is about attraction to women and X=men or male-aligned people, is specifically a manifestation of Pure Queers discourse (”my post is fine when I do it but immediately becomes creepy and gross if a straight man endorses it in any way. Go away, straight men, this post about how girls are hot is for the wlw community only, and as we all know my attraction is qualitatively different from yours. Your presence here is so contaminating that you’re not allowed to even click ‘like’ in solidarity with my queer expression, let alone express object-level agreement”

This reminds me of the reaction I had when I saw this post. I think if I ever transitioned I also would feel weird and uncomfortable about calling my attraction to women “lesbian,” and it has a lot to do with the pure queer thing. Because I suspect some people would do to me things like this:

“Oh, honey, you don’t understand, everything good and soft and nice and loving about your sexuality was always actually femininity or queerness. The benign emotions you feel toward sexual women have nothing in common with the ugly lusts of real men. That’s why it’s OK for you to post things like this or this or this: as a lesbian you cannot possibly replicate the Male Gaze.”’

And identifying as a lesbian would feel like complicity in people doing that.

I agree that giving moral valence to different kinds of sexual attraction is wrongheaded. A full rejection doesn’t stop at stating that a tendency is wrong. There are two more steps to follow before the illusion is dispelled. The process looks like:

(1) Declare “This thing is wrong!”

(2) Explain why the mistake keeps happening in the first place.

(3) Give a coherent model of reality.

Your explanation generally satisfies the criteria when confined to the world of possible questioning under a *sociological* lens. There are lingering points of entropy given the explanations.

It makes sense to me that people want to spread memes about all of the traits of their in-group being good. This explains why certain kinds of sexual attraction is tagged as terrible and creepy.

It doesn’t explain how memephilic people located “sexual attraction women hold for women is less violent, focuses on the entire body, and is less aggressive and more receptive” as a set of things to glamorize.

Like most memes this is a funhouse mirror reflection of reality. The meme creating fantasies and false memories that the brain uses as evidence to update more than once once on an initial piece of information. Which get told to other people who then update on the inflated stories *they* hear and create a kind of unreality speculation bubble.

I still think there is a human-scale observable reality that powers these bubbles and that the difference in neurotype between male and female brains in certain metrics is around the order of magnitude of the difference between autistic and allistic people.

(Though not on the same metrics as we use for austim! On tests for autism we see allistic female and allistic male clustered together at one end and autistic female and autistic male clustered together at the other.)

On average, sexual attraction to women actually functions differently on an estrogen dominant system vs a testosterone dominant one.

See things like:

Even though Vincent is attracted to women, she said she was never aroused during her visits to the clubs. “I really ran smack up against the difference between male and female sexuality. It’s that female sexuality is mental. … For a man, it’s an urge,” she said.

“At its core, it’s a bodily function. It’s a necessity. It’s such a powerful drive and I think because we [women] don’t have testosterone in our systems, we don’t understand how hard it is,” she said.

[ http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Entertainment/story?id=1526982 ]

And accounts by {lesbian trans women, straight trans men} who have hormonally transitioned on how their sexuality has changed.

People who haven’t intentionally modified their hormone profile much might say: “Hey! This seems wrong, I certainly have times where I wanna do more snuggly things with people and times where I want to treat someone like an object and [see my f-list].” Which is similar to the thing where people whose brains aren’t hypersensitive to stimulus saying things like “Yes this party is pretty bad but why are you in the fetal position and also crying. This is very rude to everyone.” instead of “Here are your earplugs, a cookie, and a proof that humanity won’t destroy itself in a *bad* way.”.

A few trans people I know have had the /opposite/ effect. (Trans guys going [impersonal sex]t[obligate cuddler].) There remains a significant group difference in how sexual attraction works dependant on which hormone pervades your body.

Oh yeah, I think there are biologically rooted differences between how typical male sexuality works and how typical female sexuality works. For instance, I think women trend more demisexual than men, or at least that would explain a lot about gender divides. I also suspect a lot of women get squicked by aspects of by male-typical sexuality and this is a big subterranean factor in gender antagonism. I may write an effortpost on this someday. And yeah, I expect hormone therapy probably changes your sexuality - I mean, it makes sense that it would, and I’ve read testimonials that suggest it does.

My personal discomfort is with that the idea of people combining “if you’re a trans woman you were always a woman and never meaningfully a man” with uncharitable assumptions about how straight male sexuality works and viewing me through that lens.

it occurs to me that tagging a post “X don’t touch/reblog/interact,” if the post is about attraction to women and X=men or male-aligned people, is specifically a manifestation of Pure Queers discourse (”my post is fine when I do it but immediately becomes creepy and gross if a straight man endorses it in any way. Go away, straight men, this post about how girls are hot is for the wlw community only, and as we all know my attraction is qualitatively different from yours. Your presence here is so contaminating that you’re not allowed to even click ‘like’ in solidarity with my queer expression, let alone express object-level agreement”

This reminds me of the reaction I had when I saw this post. I think if I ever transitioned I also would feel weird and uncomfortable about calling my attraction to women “lesbian,” and it has a lot to do with the pure queer thing. Because I suspect some people would do to me things like this:

“Oh, honey, you don’t understand, everything good and soft and nice and loving about your sexuality was always actually femininity or queerness. The benign emotions you feel toward sexual women have nothing in common with the ugly lusts of real men. That’s why it’s OK for you to post things like this or this or this: as a lesbian you cannot possibly replicate the Male Gaze.”’

And identifying as a lesbian would feel like complicity in people doing that.

Some Observations On Cis By Default Identification

Some Observations On Cis By Default Identification

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“In general, if you can write an entire paragraph about all your emotions about your gender, you are probably not cis by default.”

I feel called out by this cause I kind of like “cis by default” as a description of my relationship to gender and I can and have written paragraphs about my emotions about my gender (see: here and here).

I think I may have taken a different interpretation of it than you intended? “Cis by default” to me suggests:

1) A lack of whatever powerful sense of having a right gender trans people seem to have (any by implication at least some cis people probably have). People occasionally try to get cis people to empathize with trans people by saying things like “imagine being trapped in a body of the opposite sex, imagine how horrible that would be!” and that actually makes the trans experience seem more alien to me, not less. I think if I woke up in a woman’s body I’d probably kind of just ... shrug. Being a woman doesn’t seem like it’d be anything terrible or anything wonderful, it’d have some advantages and disadvantages vs. being a man and probably be more-or-less a wash (I think I might be overall happier if I’d been born female, but mostly because I suspect I’d have better access to emotional and financial support that way). It could just be that this is a failure of imagination on my part and if I actually woke up a woman I’d feel the same kind of dysphoria trans men feel, of course, but I don’t see why it can’t be a “humans are diverse” thing.

I think somebody without a strong sense of having a right gender might still have a complicated and fraught relationship with their gender, if their personality just isn’t a good fit with the social expectations of their gender. A conflict-averse, sensitive, dependent person with stereotypically feminine traits and interests likely won’t like being a man very much, even if they don’t have the sort of dysphoria that “born in the wrong body” trans women have.

2) A gender identity that is only contingently normative. I fit pretty well into the “cis straight man” big tent, but I think there might be potential life-paths that would have led to me identifying as something else, and I can imagine societies that might consider a man like me some kind of third gender person (I once wrote dystopian fiction set in one). Even if I’m bad at introspection here, I find it very easy to imagine that there are people who’d be about equally happy with a variety of gender identities (and that most of them are cis because that’s almost always the path of least resistance).

Incidentally, I don’t find it hard to believe that half the population is cis by default. “I’ll just go with whatever everyone wants me to be” seems like a pretty good strategy to avoid being abused for not fitting with whatever gender roles the society you’re born into has. Why shouldn’t it be successful enough to be a major human phenotype?

I’m too tired to be posting, good night

…anyway,

I’m *bewildered* at how well the ‘negating’ concept is working for me, because I never considered myself agender (I always conceptualized it as having more gender than I knew what to do with) but, like, I was very happy on T as long as I perceived it as removing feminine attributes (periods/fertility, high voice) but when it crossed over some invisible line and started giving me masculine attributes (deep voice, facial hair) I became uncomfortable and stopped. I was degendering myself wthout regendering in the other direction. even the bit about being attracted to androgyny in others rings true??? like

I’ve also noticed my gender probably maps better onto "negating" than any of the other categories. I think the best description of my gender might be "sissy" in a reclamation of the old sense of the world (a  girlish boy, with strong connotations of being less competitive, aggressive, given to rough and tumble play etc. than other boys).

Why would you ever like/want to read age gap where a grown adult is with a teenager!?

Maybe because it’s the only way to write about someone inexperienced with someone experienced without being mocked or told you’re writing “Born Sexy Yesterday” (and then being mocked and condemned for that particular offense).

I feel like the second you write anyone over 20 as sexually inexperienced, people either start laughing at how pathetic it is or start wondering what’s wrong with the character. The older the characters get, the more intense it gets

If you’re single at 30, most people assume it’s because you have a few failed relationships under your belt (or are widowed). Being 30 and inexperienced (or never have dated/married) is almost a crime to some people.

They literally can not wrap their heads around it.

Hell, that whole “Born Sexy Yesterday” video pretty much embodies this! The entire video is basically screaming: “How dare you write about a grown woman who has no sexual experience!? The only way they’d be that ignorant is if they’re a teenager or a child!!!”

Keep reading

As a rather socially isolated possibly autistic man with no romantic or sexual experience with real people ... my immediate reaction to that video was to think about how I love the movie Species because I love Sil (as a character; she’s kind of a bad person) and can empathize a lot with her.

Someday I may write an effortpost on the complex ways I think undiagnosed autism or whatever I have causes me to feel child-like, relate to the world in child-like ways, and be treated as child-like by others, even as somebody well into adulthood (31 years old now), and the way this complicates my relationship to gender. “Child-like outsider” is a figure I can relate to a lot.

And yes, unsurprisingly, benign romantic relationships between young men and older women and benign sexual initiation of sexually inexperienced young men by experienced older women are appealing and arousing fantasies for me. Even a romantic relationship with a woman my own age would probably have something of this character for me, because she'd probably have far more romantic and sexual experience, more experience of independent living etc. than I do. "Age gaps are always bad and power imbalances are always bad" implicitly makes me undateable for most women.

As somebody who wants to write SF/F, my reaction to the end of the video was “yeah, I think I’m going to keep writing child-like outsider figures, because they’re my representation.”

I feel like saying something about the general assumption that power-imbalance fantasies must appeal on the basis of letting people vicariously experience dominance, but I’m not sure what.

My cousin refuses to tell her five-year-old son he’s autistic. Won't​ even hear the word spoken in his presence.

And the thing is - I really empathize with why she's​ doing it. She’s not your average shitheel ~autism mom~; she indulges the hell out of his special interests and comes down hard on ableist teachers and doctors. She’s not trying to cure him or correct him. I think in her mind every day he spends not knowing is a day he can remain blissfully ignorant of an ableist world. It’s like having The Police Talk with a black child: it’s a loss of innocence. Let a child be a child, you know?

“I don’t want him to underestimate himself,” she keeps saying, and I *get* that. In a world where his fucking kindergarten teachers are already giving up on him (she’s changed schools twice), it’s easy to imagine him internalizing that. The world is shitty.

But the thing is - having no way to contextualize or defang ableism won’t make it go away. Raising a black kid to be color-blind isn’t a get-out-of-police-brutality-free card, and withholding an autistic child’s identity won’t mean strangers won’t treat him badly for it. All it means is that he won’t have anything to reclaim and take pride in when he invariably gets ableist bullshit.

This reminded me a little of the reaction I got from my mother when I talked to her about possibly being autistic, though the context there is very different (I have no diagnosis and am an adult).

I suspect a lot of older people want the invisible disabilities of their children to stay invisible (or rather, don’t want their traits to be medicalized) because they associate disability diagnosis with stigma, abuse (especially medicalized abuse), and fatalism. I think this may have to do with growing up in a time when disabled people weren’t treated very well. In the age of eugenics and lobotomies it probably was better to be known as dull or quirky than to be known as disabled.

Even today I’m not sure it’s entirely irrational. I think one of my big assets is I have the kind of personality that impresses people who are impressed by stereotypical “intellectual” behavior (I like to call this “smart passing” cause I don’t think it comes from intelligence so much as my personality playing to a stereotype of what a smart person looks like). Among the people this tends to work on are academic types, like teachers. I’m not sure I’d have had that advantage if I was known as a special ed kid; then people might have pattern-matched me onto the “retard” archetype instead of the “eccentric smart geek” archetype, and taken me a lot less seriously (I didn’t get the impression there was a lot of awareness of autism as something separate from mental retardation in my schools).

But yes, illegibility doesn’t save you from being abused for atypical traits, and it has its own disadvantages (it can be very lonely). There’s a reason a lot of people self-diagnose. I’ve probably lived what a “high functioning” autistic child can expect if their autistic traits are treated as just personality quirks, and it wasn’t terribly fun.

So I was doing spring cleaning and found some old cds

Including mixes that my abusive exgf made for me so I could listen to some “real dyke music” instead of metal

(if that sounds controlling and ridiculous it’s because it was)

It was very satisfying to toss them. :-)

But it got me thinking about trigger warnings and

What happens when the trigger isn’t dubcon, it’s Ani?

What happens when your mind won’t stop going “I am thirty. Two flayvahs. And then some.”

and you’re not sure if you should be singing along or putting out your own eyes?

what’s the tw for that?

what happens when your trigger is

“sit down, shut up, and listen”

because in an abuser’s opinion

you can never be silent enough?

(god help you if you are a phoenix / and you dare to rise up from the ash)

what happens when you want to say it feels like grooming

and you’d rather look at gore?

(a thousand eyes will smolder with jealousy / while you are just flying past)

what happens when it terrifies you, right down in your gut

that one of the words you’re supposed to laugh at is “empowering?”

Sit down. Shut up and.

Sit down. Shut up and.

Sit sit sit down.

shut up and

{Sometimes the only way to find a safe space

IS TO MOTHERFUCKING LEAVE.}

Somewhat related:

I had intensely (conservative-flavor) sex-negative beliefs as a teenager. It was an immense relief to switch to a sex-positive feminist liberal view in which sexual exploitation was bad but there was nothing inherently wrong with sexual pleasure. “There’s nothing inherently bad or dirty or sexist about looking at fanservice/bikini pics/strip-dancing/erotica/porn/etc.” is a principle I’m pretty attached to, because for me taking unashamed sexual/aesthetic pleasure in looking at attractive and sexual women feels like giving a liberating life-affirming middle finger to my self-harming old beliefs.

*whispers* “bullying” is what we call it when kids treat each other the way adults treat kids

I mean, I kinda see what you’re saying but like, if an adult had treated me the way other kids did it would’ve been called abuse not just “the way adults treat kids.”

(I don’t really know how to express how angry the way kids are treated makes me but non-abusive adults don’t treat kids the way bullies do. I’m not saying that that treatment is necessarily better just different.)

I’m not trying to dismiss the experiences of anyone who’s a victim of bullying from fellow young people. but I think it’s worth acknowledging the hypocrisy of the fact that dynamics that are problematized among age peers are normalized across generational lines. adults berate and belittle kids, use fear and strength to control them, hit them, talk over them, gaslight and victim-blame them, mock their interests, target them for their identities, embarrass them for their flaws and failures, use their insecurities as pressure points…and most of it never gets called abusive.

Yeah no I totally get what you’re saying, and I agree with the principle I just disagree with the comparison. I understand you didn’t mean to sound dismissive but as someone who was bullied for most of my life it /feels/ dismissive.

I also think it’s worth mentioning that bullying is absolutely not taken even remotely seriously. so I would disagree that it’s hypocritical, because I think some of the things you described are frankly probably more likely to be taken seriously than bullying.

Bullying is never called abuse, it’s “kids will be kids” it’s “oh okay nice kids” it’s punishing the victim for daring to fight back, it’s putting the victim and their abuser in a room together so they can “talk it out”, it’s “oh they only want a reaction, just ignore them” on repeat three million times it’s every teacher you’ve ever had knowing exactly what goes on in their classroom and not taking it seriously enough to bother to put a stop to it, bullying the but of a million jokes on TV, or the origins story of countless “bad guys.”

ultimately, bullying’s just seen as a normal and expected secondary/high school experience, in exactly the same way that a lot of those behaviours are just seen as normal and expected parenting technique.

that’s…probably a good perspective for me to hear. because as a teacher I hear a lot about anti-bullying strategies and initiatives, and it’s usually from the same people trading tips about how to enforce control over kids in ways that sound remarkably similar to what those things are trying to stop. easy to forget there are so many people who are less hypocritical because they really don’t care about either problem.

This post made me kind of uncomfortable, and I’ve figured out why. This model implies that bullying is just kids using the social strategies that adult authority figures use on them. I think that biases people away from noticing a very important difference between the way adults inflict unpleasant experiences on other adults and on children and the way kids inflict unpleasant experiences on other kids.

It’s true that adults often subject kids to highly unpleasant experiences, but they usually do so instrumentally. A teacher will punish you for getting bad grades, or for breaking the rules, for instance. There’s a fairly straightforward cause and effect, and fairly obvious things you can do to appease the authority figure (you may not actually be able to do them, but at least there’s a clear instrumental aim). The closest mainstream adult hierarchical relationships come to bullying that I can think of is stereotypical drill instructor and PE teacher techniques, but even there there’s a clear instrumentality to it; the drill instructor doesn’t just yell at and degrade the recruits for the lulz, he’s working to establish dominance and modify their minds and behavior.

Abusive interactions I experienced from peers was something quite different. The descriptive term that comes to my mind for it is casual recreational sadism. Here’s the kind of stuff other kids in middle and high school would do to me:

- Take advantage of periods of forced proximity to trash-talk me at length to my face, and engage in spontaneous mockery.

- Deliberately lure large numbers of pigeons toward me by throwing scraps on the ground at lunch (I have a weird disgust/phobia thing about pigeons).

- Steal my things (pencils, pencil sharpeners etc.).

- Throw things (e.g. a kleenex box) at me, mark me with pencils, spit soda on me etc..

- Suggest other girls were interested in me sexually, or pretend to be sexually interested in me, which was hilarious because the idea that anyone would be attracted to me was clearly absurd.

- Trip me up or engage in low-key physical intimidation. I was relatively lucky here that stereotypical “let’s beat up the nerd lol!” stuff didn’t seem to be really a thing at my schools; there seemed to be a tacit understanding that physical bullying should be kept to a level low enough that it could be dismissed as no big deal, I’m guessing because it was one thing the administration would take seriously.

These things rarely seemed to be direct responses to “bad behavior” or attempts to achieve some instrumental aim. I’m sure there was an important dynamic of these things being considered OK because I was seen as weird and annoying and a bad person and therefore vaguely deserving of it, but there was no direct instrumental goal. Rather, these acts seemed to be a form of entertainment. It was simply amusing to hurt and humiliate me. I remember reading a self-defense site years back that talked about various motivations for violence, one of which was predatory violence, in which the violence itself is the goal (the guy wants to beat your ass in order to experience the pleasure of beating your ass). Teenage horizontal abuse as I experienced it was like that.

The moralistic logic to schoolyard bullying as I know it isn’t “if you do thing I don’t like, I will punish you” it’s “if you do things I don’t like, I will reclassify you as a social/moral untouchable, and then I will have moral and social license to hurt you whenever it amuses me.”

The best adult analogy to how schoolyard bullying works that I can think of isn’t parent/child and teacher/student relationships, it’s the relationship between online trolls and “lolcows.”

An adult who openly related to children this way would be considered weird and awful and creepy and more than a little pathetic and probably mentally ill, and would probably be kept away from children. I’m sure there are abusive adults who relate to children under their authority this way in their hearts (the psychological mechanisms that underlie casual recreational sadism don’t just magically disappear at 18), but I expect they usually disguise it under a veneer of instrumental punishment, because being too open in indulging their sadism would harm them socially.

Which kind of gets to the important thing here: I notice people started treating me radically better when I left high school, and I think a big part of that is casual recreational sadism is much less socially acceptable in the adult world. There’s probably adult subcultures where you can get away with it (such as, I suspect, subcultures that are big on machismo), but generally the adult world seems to have stronger civility norms than the teenage world; civility norms strong enough to preclude a culture of normalized casual recreational sadism. Adults experience more pressure to hide their sadism (behind closed doors, behind moralistic outrage, behind instrumental punishment), and that circumscribes it.

The toxic culture of middle/high school probably does have a lot to do with the way adults treat teenagers (e.g. the way they’re given few sources of status besides popularity games), but I don’t think teenage bullying is an extension of the logic of the way children are treated by adult authority figures. I think it’s feeds on its own, unusually toxic social dynamics.

its HARD to sell yourself to a school admissions program when you struggle with low self-esteem. I think at one point I said “I take direction well!” like I was a sheepdog or something -___-

I know, trying to talk yourself up feels so immodest and fake.

I’m 27, happy birthday to me

Living in my Mom’s house, having never had a real job. Spent it alone.

I don’t know when birthdays started depressing me. Maybe around when I graduated high school. I feel like more of a failure with each passing year. Long ago, I thought I’d have a PhD by now, have published important work. Or built something great. Or something. Anything better than this.

I’m in the same boat. I sympathize.