Sympathy for the Bullies: Our New Villains

by Mike Barthel

Pity the poor bullies: it is not easy being the cultural villain of the moment. (Just ask Mexicans, or Muslims!) The Google Trends spike over the last year for “bullying” is impressive, and it’s all around us: the car ad that was recut to change a kid fleeing bullies into merely a friendly race between youngsters; the members of the Westboro Baptist Church being described as bullies (rather than, say, insane bigoted cultists, which would apparently be less damning!); and, of course, the Times Styles section on bullying in kindergarten. The government’s Secretary of Education threw a “Bullying Prevention Summit”! There’s a “Stop Bullying Now!” program! 45 states have anti-bullying laws! And so all this attention either reflects or has caused a shift in the connotation of the word “bully.” Calling someone a bully now has the kind of rhetorical force that it seems less like a description and more like an indictment that must be answered. It’s not just an accusation; it’s an identification of imminent threat. That’s new. And looking at how we came to hate bullying provides a case study in how cultural attitudes and debates slowly change-and also makes me wonder if we shouldn’t be a little more leery in how we choose to assign blame.

It was never really good to be a bully, but they used to be seen more as a fact of life, like getting shit on by a bird. Bullies were the thing that necessitated stalwart heroes to protect the weak. (See also: the Team America theory of geopolitics.) Then came the school shootings of the 90s, which were interpreted as, among other things, the result of bullying. This changed bullies from harmless thugs to the precipitants of picked-upon teens going on homicidal rampages. And in the past few years, stories of “cyber-bullying” (cyber!) cases changed the equation by making the targets of bullying victims instead of merely threats. The most visible recent examples, of course, involve gay teens killing themselves after being bullied. That increases the perception that bullying is not just something vaguely unpleasant that you have to deal with, but a threat to the survival of our loved ones.

The equation, then, is this: bullying is bad not because it’s unpleasant to endure or because it can screw you up psychologically, but because it can result in teenagers killing themselves. But there’s a sense that something’s changed, that there’s something new here-even though of course teenagers have always killed themselves, and probably sometimes because of bullies. We have statistics! One particularly well-established statistic is that the suicide rate for gay teenagers is several times the rate of that for straight teens. We know this because some people have been talking about gay teen suicide for a long time. What’s interesting, though, is that the statistics have come to mean different things at different points in that debate. Today, the higher suicide rate among gay teens is being used by gay-rights advocates to show the increased risk of teens to bullying, and is effective enough that anti-gay groups feel the need to question it.

But a few short decades ago-and even sometimes now, this same statistic was used to support arguments that homosexuality was a kind of mental illness (as it was officially classified by the American Psychological Association until 1973). Suicide was seen as a sort of co-morbid symptom of homosexuality, another sign-like gays’ well-known proclivities for cultural deviancy, tragic personal lives and difficulty maintaining romantic relationships-that homosexuality was a sort of disease that some were just deciding not to treat. The higher suicide rate played into this: if homosexuals keep committing suicide, it must be because they are all crazy. (Rather than, say, because people were awful to them.) It’s an effective enough argument that, yes, some people are still making it, but that seems far more fringe now.

So the statistic didn’t change-the facts didn’t change-but the power those facts hold now runs to the other side of the equation, in favor of gay rights, instead of against them.

How did this come about? Well, a few things shifted. First, many people stopped seeing homosexuality as a choice, and so the bullying wasn’t the victims’ “fault” anymore. At the same time, many of us became far more understanding of mental illness as a medical condition (so that suicidal depression, for instance, was seen as something to be treated), and also many became far less tolerant of overtly threatening or predatory behavior as the rights of women and minorities became more culturally cemented. Being an asshole is now a lot less acceptable in American culture, unless you are British and on a reality show. And now, it’s all filtering down to schools and children. Which is good! But what do we do with the assholes?

Let me tell you a story. In fifth grade, I was being bullied by this boy named Jason. As a weird little kid, I was not new to this sort of thing, but this experience was particularly shitty. It was one of those situations that you particularly must endure as a child, where you can’t choose to avoid the person who’s tormenting you. Jason was awful to me and yet I had to see him on a regular basis both at school and at Cub Scouts, where his mom was our den leader. It made me miserable. But after a lot of thought (of course!), I decided I was going to stand up for myself the next time the opportunity presented itself. That opportunity happened to be when we were taking our class photo. While getting lined up in the back row, Jason jostled me, and I responded by giving him a bloody nose.

I faced no disciplinary action for this. As I recall, I got a subtle nod of approval from my teacher. I did, however, get a reaction from one of the other kids. During a lull in class, a guy named Dave showed me a piece of loose leaf paper, on which was written a list of all the people in our class. “This is the list of who’s most popular,” Dave explained, and pointed to my name: “See? You moved up.” And indeed, there I was, now four spaces from the bottom of the list rather than two. And at the very bottom was Jason.

I’m pretty sure that was the exact moment I decided that popularity was stupid, an attitude that would cause me no small amount of trouble later in life.

But it also drove home that, as scary as bullies are, they’re not exactly society’s winners. Unless we’re prepared to say that a ten-year-old kid deserves to be a loser and has permanently entered a class of loser-hood by his own fully-informed choice-entering a class that may run him up one side of the criminal justice system and down the other-then we have to be willing to entertain the prospect that people like Jason ended up on the bottom rung perhaps through some situations that were not entirely of their own making.

Of course, this thought was of little comfort when I spent most of middle school hiding from a whole different group of dudes that were awful to me.

And where is Jason today? Well, the one web hit I turned up is… a picture of my former tormentor in SWAT gear, participating in a simulated takedown of a school shooter. I kid you not: this is true. If I were making it up, I would be the first to condemn it as psychologically simple-minded, but reality has given the lie to complex art yet again. Of course the bully ended up as a cop! Of course he is training to deal with the consequences of his own bullying! Oh, how neat and tidy.

So, okay. Maybe we shouldn’t have too much sympathy for bullies. But at the same time, there are some problems with the current rhetorical climate. For one thing, ,” and the widespread use of that phrase-even by people with the best of intentions!-says depressing things about our inability to deal with a social problem without perceiving ourselves as floating in some ahistorical moment. And we’ve been through this sort of hysteria before. Think of Heathers, the comic masterpiece about adolescence and suicide that makes a good case for the dangers of a John Hughes morality. Adults like to think that teenagers are innocent creatures, free of sin, and that if we could just remove all pressures on our precious youth, they could frolic in peace. That’s one theory! But there are others, too.

As much as we feel like we’re doing good by painting a Hitler mustache on bullies, it’s not like it’s a problem that no one was aware of before. And one that wasn’t, at least mildly, improving. There’s no evidence that going to these rhetorical extremes will force improvements any more quickly than what people are already doing to fight the problem-whereas there’s ample evidence that allowing ourselves to think about social ills with a crisis mentality degrades our ability to embrace the difficult, gradual solutions that most long-standing problems actually require. We paint social conflicts in these terms only because we can’t stand the thought that we might not be doing everything we can to make things better for everyone.

Meanwhile, we’re telling kids that it gets better. Which means we’re pretending that adults are far less terrifying creatures. I’ve known enough friends who’ve gotten gay-bashed as adults that I know bullying doesn’t stop at graduation, and that seems like a far bigger issue. (Technically speaking, I once got my nose broken for being gay, but that’s a story for another time.) It’s hard to escape the feeling that things like Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project, National Coming Out Day, and this nightmare have only been successful because they make straight people such as myself feel better about ourselves, like we are doing something to help the cause of equality, even though we’re not really doing anything substantial.

They may make us tear up, but it also makes gay people into Sanrio dolls for the enjoyment of the straights-cuddly creatures who, like John Hughes characters, are pure of heart. That’s better than being seen as child molesters, but it still seems unproductive. And on one level, anti-bullying campaigns are just one more way to delude ourselves that human cruelty is something we can overcome.

In a few months, when the media (whether “mainstream” or LiveJournal) have all forgotten about Bully Crisis 2010, the people who were working before to improve things one interpersonal interaction at a time will still be at it, and will still be making a difference. Making the world a better place is mostly a small, boring affair. Those tiny but persistent efforts, that slow stacking of brick upon brick, is the only way we might approach an attainable semi-utopia: one in which teenagers might still sometimes kill themselves, but at least gay teens don’t do it any more than straight teens do.

Mike Barthel has written about pop music for a bunch of places, mostly Idolator and Flagpole, and is currently doing so for the Portland Mercury and Color magazine. He continues to have a Tumblr and be a grad student in Seattle.

Photograph from Flickr by Thomas Ricker.