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Post by CazPar on Sept 1, 2006 14:10:14 GMT
beajie said:
Sorry - long post, but it may help. I've posted some of this before. It's an extract from my book on female bullying. Again, soz about the length!"bi@tching. It’s such a shrug-off word. What’s our response to it? ‘Oh, ignore her. She can be such a bi@tch!’ “She’s a right cow, don’t let her get to you!’ ‘You’ll get over it!’ We say, ‘Girls will be girls!’ When our daughters come home from school and say that their friend isn’t speaking to them, again, or doesn’t want to be friends any more, again, or has found another best friend and they won’t play, the solution most parents resort to is distraction, a gentle shrug, a quiet word about getting another best friend, maybe, and meanwhile how about getting a DVD tonight?
But if we called it bullying, maybe that would change the perception? Bullying, sadly, is something we associate with physical injury, gang warfare, boys’ stuff, and the word itself is often defined as ‘picking on someone weaker’, something boys do in order to show off their prowess. But unlike boys, girl bullies rarely use physical violence. The method they use to establish their superiority is more brutal, because it’s furtive, concealed behind masks of friendship, as they whisper and scheme, spread lies and rumours, refuse to communicate with the outcast, and finally separate her from the social order. This is the psychological damage they’ve been taught to inflict. Withdrawal of approval.
Indirect aggression (hurting someone behind their back rather than openly), social exclusion (leaving someone out of a group of friends or refusing to speak to them), relational aggression (spreading lies and rumours to destroy their target’s relationship with others) – these tactics are difficult to identify and present an impossible task to those who may be more familiar with dealing with the kind of bullying which is physical, open and all too obvious. Boy bullies bluster, brag and lash out. Girl bullies plot and plan and sneak and whisper. This is a covert operation which proceeds by stealthy manipulation, but although this type of female bullying takes more time, it’s far more effective than a fist-fight. The target is left friendless and ostracised. And because the target is always a girl, and because girls value relationships above all else, the entire belief system of that girl is crushed and her self-esteem plummets.
From their earliest years, girls are more socially aware than boys. They develop patterns of compliant behaviour which earns them friends, with whom they gossip and share secrets. Nurturing relationships, making friends, rallying round to show support, caring for others as a way of showing emotional strength is what girls are trained to do, and their entire reason for living is to get on with others, and to have from others the support they give to you. But if your social network is destroyed by secret bullying and no one likes you, can you like yourself? Or do you begin to question your own worth, and go on questioning it day after day as the rumour mill grinds and more and more of your old friends turn their back on you? Bullying of this kind is slow, relentless, and horrifyingly cruel.
So who could do this to another girl? Psychologists tell us that the female brain is hard-wired for empathy, understanding how someone else feels, and actually feeling it yourself, deep down, like Shakespeare’s Miranda, the all-round uncontaminated female. ‘I have suffered with those I saw suffer’ said that empathizer. If this is so, and if psychologists are also right in saying that being empathic means that you can’t hurt someone else because you know exactly the kind of pain you could inflict and can’t bear to do it, the only way a girl could bully another girl would be if an emotion like fear or anger blocked her empathy, temporarily, then passed, leaving her with overwhelming feelings of remorse.
This doesn’t add up. Emotions like fear and anger are by their very nature temporary, aren’t they? Once the emotion has passed, then regret should follow. Yet the female bully can, and does, use her empathy to understand how to inflict emotional pain, and continues to inflict pain. Could it be, then, that female bullies habitually over-ride their fellow-feeling, because they’re continually in the grip of suppressed fear or anger? This question of empathy was the key to the first stage of an answer. If the female bully could shelve her empathy in a sustained attack on another female’s social and relational status, then the bully has to be so overwhelmed by fear, anger, hatred or jealousy, that she feels threatened by life in general, most of the time.
The common belief is that girls are bullied because of some vulnerability, because of some obvious ‘difference’ from the herd. They may be more shy than average, more bookish, larger or smaller than the norm, have some mild disability, be of a different race, religion or nationality, or wear unfashionable clothes. But when I started investigating this theory, experts in the field told me that many of the girls who were bullied had no discernable vulnerability, nothing that would mark them out as those who could be manipulated by the kind of secret aggression which girls and women use. There was no pattern in the type of target chosen by the bully. Therefore, there was little point in investigating bullying through trying to find similarities and patterns in the girls who were bullied.
But what if we’ve been investigating female bullying wrongly, trying to make it fit into the male pattern of stronger versus weaker, and therefore classifying the target as the one who is in some way vulnerable, out of step with the herd?
I’d come to a different conclusion all together. If female bullying consists of trying to destroy another girl’s treasured relationships, and if highly-developed empathy is the defining factor of being female, then it’s the female bully herself who is the odd one out, isn’t it? The female bully, for reasons known only to herself, feels vulnerable, afraid. And it’s that, and that alone, which makes her act as she does. "
I agree with you about the behaviour of female bullies and the way it is perceived by others. I was bullied at work in such a manner by two other female emplyees, but when I explained to what I thought was an ally what had been going on and how the guys just ignored it I was told "yeah, well, they probably thought it was just girls bi@tching, you know?" As if that makes it okay! Why, you might ask, did I care what the blokes thought? Well, not surprisingly all the managers were blokes, at least they were until they promoted one of the bi@tches (who promptly went off on maternity leave of course).
I have no idea why one is the target of a bully and another isn't. I think it is odd-one out to a large extent, and also has something to do with reproduction. You only have to look at how hateful and spiteful many young women are to older women. I don't really understand what the social benefit is, but that it happens I have no doubt.
I think you may be overemphasising the empathy aspect of the woman. Yes, most women are capable of great empathy, because that is necessary for their role of mother, but they are are also capable of very cold-blooded responses because that is also necessary for their role as protector. It is possible for an individual to be empathic on some occasions and cold-blooded on others. During the times in my life that I have been bullied, it is usually because I was taller, well-spoken, fairly well-mannered (at school), or tall, blonde and not entirely unlike Aisleyne (in my 20s), or not gracefully accepeting my naturally ordained position of underdog at work, where I was bullied by both males and females, a situation which occured largely because I was older than the average and yet still thought I should be entitled to the same opportunities as I had not graduated until I was 31. That was naive of me and I quickly learned that I was never to be given those opportunities and stagnated there for 12 years until blissful redundancy last year.
I always pretended the dog ate it when I was at school! 
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