Sometimes I absolutely hate writing, and at times like that I wonder why on earth I bother, because it’s not like the world needs another maybe-sometime-aspiring writer. H-E-Double-Dandelions NO, we do not need one more person saying “If only I had time, I’d love to write.”
Dick didn’t like my Rory post, the post that gave me FITS. He said I didn’t make the epiphany part clear enough or engaging enough, and he hated the first paragraph and I should’ve included examples from the Reviving Ophelia book of what truly bad bullying looks like because to him the stuff I said Rory did sounded plenty bad.
So here was my point:
For years Rory was THE Bad Guy in my mind. Whenever I thought about boys teasing girls, or church youth activities, or riding the bus, or walking the halls of my high school in my bathrobe after swim class, or Survival, or juvenile espionage, or Sally entering junior high school, or about driving past the K. home on my way to see my parents, I always thought about Rory and what a terrible, awful, no good, very bad kid he was.
He was THE PITS.
Then Sally got punched in the face, and I stupidly provoked my middle school mean girls on Facebook, and my mom and my good friend from that same middle school recommended the book that gave me an incredible epiphany.
Which epiphany was this: Rory was actually not quite as terrible as I thought. In fact, compared to the book’s description of sexual harassment, the grabbing of breasts and pressure for meaningless sexual encounters and physical objectification and demeaning of mental aptitude and basically treating of young women as stupid, shopping-consumed, fluffy, inane, valueless sexual kleenex –
COMPARED TO THAT?
Rory was . . . someone I almost wish I had gotten to know when we were young.
Oh, fine, I’ll say it:
COMPARED TO THAT?
Rory was a nice boy.
And you might think, well, things have changed: that book is probably describing what goes on in schools today, so of course Rory’s hyper-juvenile pranks would look endearing and Wally-from-Leave-it-to-Beaver nostalgic.
But that book was published in 1995, the year we graduated from high school. Now, I know that not everyone experiences the sexual harassment-type bullying. I didn’t, not really. And trying to avoid it is one of the reasons we moved to a small town in Utah for our daughters to grow up in. I expect that if there are problems at school or church, I will know the parents of the kids causing problems, and I will have some say in how things are handled. (Oh, will I HAVE SOME SAY.)
Mostly, though, the point is that I would love for the neighbor boys to toilet-paper our house when my daughter is thirteen, and for the sex talk she hears when she is seventeen to be about NOT HAVING SEX ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT BUT JUST HOLDING EACH OTHER INSTEAD.
What mother wouldn’t want that for her daughter?
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I thought it was a great post and I got where you were coming from. I am going to have to check out that book. I was lucky enough that I developed well and early and consequently that was what made me stand out to those boys. I was lucky enough to have a good core group of friends in high school and a very nice boyfriend who completely negated the nastiness of junior high. If I were to have a daughter and have those issues go on homeschooling would definitely be an option.
And yes I agree what mother wouldnt want that kind of boyfriend for her daughter. Its not often that happens in this day and age though…I hope that my boys date girls with those knd of values as well.
Steff
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Thanks, Steff. I tried to explain to Dick that the women who did comment totally got my point, and the reason I think they did without my being explicit about the much worse kind of bullying is that because, as women, we know what that looks like from our own experience or friends’ experiences. We know what the really bad mean girl stuff is like, and the truly bad sexual harassment stuff from boys is like.
Dick said something interesting — that he had been bullied too, because there were stretches of his schooling where he got in fights every day. And I asked, Well, did you lose every fight? Were you picked on, or were you fighting and pretty evenly matched. And he admitted that his fighting was always more of the evenly matched-regular-boy-fighting type thing. I think there’s a big difference in boy-boy bullying based on whether they’re physically and socially well-matched and neither is a consistent “victim” or “loser.”
I like Rory, too.
I understood your post and agreed with it. And if writing it was anywhere near as difficult as my commenting on today’s has been, then it is a masterpiece. (I had a lot more to say, but then when I reviewed it, the tone was all wrong, and I thought it might be misconstrued)
And isn’t it amazing when we look back and see things in a whole new light! What a gift that you have gained a new perspective on Rory. My nemesis was my best friend’s little brother. We didn’t get along, to say the least, and our bantering was very passive aggressive to avoid trouble. Anyway, he was humanized, recently when I found out his wife and I are struggling with a similar medical problem, and my heart broke for them.
Amazing how a few years and some new experiences change everything.
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:53 pm
Yes, perspective changes everything. I read somewhere today that Comedy = tragedy + time. I think it’s similar for these bullying experiences, as long as they’re more the garden variety bullying I’m describing, rather than the horrific, demeaning kind.
(And yes, that post was hard to write! I find it so hard to write about past experiences with the right tone. I don’t want to sound “hung up” on things or too nostalgic or too whiney, blahblahblah.)
And I forgot to say that I love the new title and I think the banner is kind of funny. I must say I imagined something a little more like a statue of seagulls standing on some rock with water pouring out, but yeah, I guess the other stuff cascades too.
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
I’m so excited — I’ve been able to negotiate with Alma of LovelandMisc to do a professional banner for me. Can’t wait to see what she comes up with. (I am so not artistically-inclined!)
You did a fine job getting your point across in the Rory post, I got it! We laugh, smile, and cry along when we read posts…most of us are just too lazy or too much in a hurry to get on to the next thing to leave a comment
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Thanks, Cindy B. Hope you’re enjoying Oklahoma!
Somehow I missed that one. Not surprising with how brain dead I am. I really liked this post, though. I hope I am raising sons that you would want your daughters to be friends with.
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
I feel confident that you are!
Nine times out of ten, you’ve made your point so well that I can think of nothing to say as a comment. Like now.
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
Thanks Sue. When are you gonna start posting again? We miss you! (Hope the pregnancy and everything is going well!!!)
I LOVE Reviving Ophelia. I first read it back in highschool for my pyschology class. It impacted me so much, in fact, that I bought my husband his own copy 5 years ago when we had our first child. Our first child was a boy. I wanted to open my husband’s eyes to the world of teenage girls, even if we did just have a son at the time. After all, wouldn’t it be wise to educate our son on what his fellow classmates were going through and up against and teach him how NOT to behave? Now we have a daughter and the book means that much more to me. I’m scared to death for the future… but as you say, we could only be so lucky if another Rory-type were their childhood tormentor rather than some real creep.
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 8:57 pm
Yes, talking to my husband yesterday and trying to decide if his incomprehension of my point was a fault of my writing or a just a matter of him having the perspective of a male, made me want him to read this book — so he’ll be better equipped to help our daughters.
i must say did not understand what your point about Rory was. you start out describing some awful experience and then it doesn’t turn out to be that awful at all. when in junior high, some guy spit on my face, and when i was walking home, he had his girlfriend beat me up. I was all bruised up for weeks, and i didn’t even speak English so i didn’t even know what it was about, or how to report it. my mom was drooling, screaming, and staring at the wall, because the mafia was after her (paranoid schizophrenia) and my dad was busy abusing my sister. so no i did not tell my parents about the incident…
sorry to be so callused to your situation, but what you went through really doesn’t seem like a big deal. at least you had a loving family at home, and the kid was just probably flirting with you.
i don’t know much about the abuse girls in genral go through at school. but,I’ve been told by mothers of daughters, that it’s the girls who are most often mean to girls, not the boys. maybe they were wrong. i don’t know.
anyone could be bullied, boy or girl. my boys are not allowed to be mean to anyone, boy or girl. i sure hope my daughter doesn’t grow up to have a weak personality and let anyone hurt her. maybe i’ll sign her up for some street fighting type martial arts when she is older, so she can defend herself.
Jane Reply:
May 12th, 2009 at 9:00 pm
“what you went through really doesn’t seem like a big deal. at least you had a loving family at home, and the kid was just probably flirting with you.”
This was precisely my point. The other part being that what I had considered to be so awful, was in fact nothing compared to the sort of bullying you describe.
I am often inspired to write when I have epiphanies or small moments of understanding things differently than I previously had, especially if I have long-held beliefs or perceptions that are suddenly changed by something new I’ve read or seen or experienced.
My new understanding of Rory’s bullying/teasing would not have been so significant to me if I had not labored for so long under the complacent certainty that he was a real Pill.
good, now i understand…
ITA that the boy-boy variety of bullying is completely different. Now I did have a friend who was tormented a lot for being “gay” he wasnt and the guy who tormented him was equally tormented by a group of older boys when we were a bit younger for the same thing…i truly think its the only reason he picked on my friend.
I think boys pick on each other completely differently than girls/girls or boys/girls….and for different reasons.
yes perspective allows us a bit of freedom in looking back because I know now some things about those boys I didnt know back then, but also because I am more confident in myself and would never allow such a thing to alter my own worth now.
steff
so. First. Haven’t been blog-hopping in a long time. So, Hello again.
second. The bullying. My bullying in junior high was very real, even though I was not beat up or sexually abused. And it mostly came from very insecure girls (well, only NOW do I know that). My husband and I think that the person who invented junior high should be taken out and SHOT. I mean, c’mon. Throwing a bunch of kids who are going through puberty together for three years, by themselves? While they’re not even sure who they are yet? Yikes.
third. Sadly, my husband’s sisters were sexually teased in junior high, both verbally and physically. It was eye-opening perspective to me, as much as my middle-school girl tormenters plunged my self-esteem and sent me home in hidden tears after school each day.
One sister (my SIL) was very black-and-white about it, and told her mom that some boys held her down and groped her, and my MIL got those boys suspended right away and no more problems for that sister, from those boys.
The other sister didn’t realize she could say something about it, and some boys who made lewd and sexual comments to her each day, deeply scarred her innocent little heart. By the time I got to high school, I had moved a few times and learned a lot from education week classes over the summer, and felt like I really chose to stand up for underdogs in high school rather than be one. I felt very blessed that we had phenomenal class presidents who also looked out for the underdogs, and especially the mentally &/or physically handicapped kids at school. The ones who made it sure to teach that it wasn’t “cool” to bully others, were my “senior” heroes (I was a sophomore that year, my first year of high school).
fourth. Perspective. Since this post is about perspective (You thought Rory was awful until now you see he nearly treated you with kid-gloves), I had to share a story about nursing old wounds. It was a story told through church, I think it was Pres. Monson who shared it, that his grandma had a nemesis. These two ladies didn’t like each other at all, and they both did their upmost to outshine the other in community events, and even convinced their grandkids to do little pranks to each other. When one of them passed away, imagine her distress when she went to the nemesis’s funeral and learned that all those years, through a newspaper column, they had actually been the best of friends as well, and had not known it. At the funeral, the nemesis’s family had put out a big scrapbook. In it were columns and columns cut out of the newspaper where diff. moms would post with anonymous names, and write things to each other. Monson’s grandma was crushed when she saw all her very own articles written to this lady, all lovingly preserved. At home she also had a scrapbook all lovingly preserved of her nemesis’s columns, written to her. They had been corresponding via newspaper for years under pseudonyms, and could have been such good friends, and instead spited each other in person, not knowing how much they loved each other via written words.
Now that’s a story about perspective. Plus, I just gotta say, what were they teaching their children and grandchildren about human dignity by openly spiting someone?
Wow. Interesting story from Pres. Monson.
I love the epiphany/perspective shift type stories. Reminds me of Paul Harvey’s “The Rest of the Story” radio show. Things can look so differently, huh.
And yes — JR High (middle school)= HELL.
I just hope I can encourage my daughters to be matter-of-fact and not self-blaming over any kind of bullying they face.
.
Sometimes getting your point across too well kills the conversation. Get it totally wrong and then they’ll talk.