5:39pm February 17, 2012

“
On a somewhat serious note today because of a conversation the other day:

I am sure every girl can recall, at least once as a child, coming home and telling their parents, uncle, aunt or grandparent about a boy who had pulled her hair, hit her, teased her, pushed her or committed some other playground crime. I will bet money that most of those, if not all, will tell you that they were told “Oh, that just means he likes you”. I never really thought much about it before having a daughter of my own. I find it appalling that this line of bullshit is still being fed to young children. Look, if you want to tell your child that being verbally and/or physically abused is an acceptable sign of affection, i urge you to rethink your parenting strategy. If you try and feed MY daughter that crap, you better bring protective gear because I am going to shower you with the brand of “affection” you are endorsing.

When the fuck was it decided that we should start teaching our daughters to accept being belittled, disrespected and abused as endearing treatment? And we have the audacity to wonder why women stay in abusive relationships? How did society become so oblivious to the fact that we were conditioning our daughters to endure abusive treatment, much less view it as romantic overtures? Is this where the phrase “hitting on girls” comes from? Well, here is a tip: Save the “it’s so cute when he gets hateful/physical with her because it means he loves her” asshattery for your own kids, not mine. While you’re at it, keep them away from my kids until you decide to teach them respect and boundaries.

My daughter is `10 years old and has come home on more than one occasion recounting an incident at school in which she was teased or harassed by a male classmate. There has been several times when someone that she was retelling the story to responded with the old, “that just means he likes you” line. Wrong. I want my daughter to know that being disrespected is NEVER acceptable. I want my daughter to know that if someone likes her and respects her, much less LOVES her, they don’t hurt her and they don’t put her down. I want my daughter to know that the boy called her ugly or pushed her or pulled her hair didn’t do it because he admires her, it is because he is a little asshole and assholes are an occurrence of society that will have to be dealt with for the rest of her life. I want my daughter to know how to deal with assholes she will encounter throughout her life. For now, I want my daughter to know that if someone is verbally harassing her, she should tell the teacher and if the teacher does nothing, she should tell me. If someone physically touches her, tell the teacher then, if it continues, to yell, “STOP TOUCHING/PUNCHING/PUSHING ME” in the middle of class or the hallway, then tell me. Last year, one little boy stole her silly bandz from her. He just grabbed her and yanked a handful of them off of her wrist. When I went to the school to address the incident, the teacher smiled and explained it away to her, in front of me, “he probably has a crush on you”. Okay, the boy walked up to my daughter, grabbed and held her by the arm and forcibly removed her bracelets from her as she struggled and you want to convince her that she should be flattered? Fuck off. I am going to punch you in the face but I hope you realize it is just my way of thanking you for the great advice you gave my daughter. If these same advice givers’ sons came home crying because another male classmate was pushing them, pulling their hair, hitting them or calling them names, I would bet dollars to donuts they would tell him to defend themselves and kick the kid’s ass, if necessary. They sure as shit wouldn’t say, “he probably just wants a play date”.

I will teach my daughter to accept nothing less than respect. Anyone who hurts her physically or emotionally doesn’t deserve her respect, friendship or love. I will teach my boys the same thing as well as the fact that hitting on girls doesn’t involve hitting girls. I can’t teach my daughter to respect herself if I am teaching her that no one else has to respect her. I can’t raise sons that respect women, if I teach them that bullying is a valid expression of affection.

The next time that someone offers up that little “secret” to my daughter, I am going to slap the person across the face and yell, “I LOVE YOU”.
”

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You Didn’t Thank Me For Punching You in the Face « Views from the Couch (via golden-notebook)

A very good post on casual sexism and the asshole apologists who defend it.

(via stfuapologists)

OMG.

How did I never, ever work this out or question it?

There was this boy at my school who asked me out. I was… confused by the whole thing. I thought that I just wasn’t ready to date anyone. Because I hadn’t had the thoughts about boys my mom told me I’d have. I didn’t even begin to understand the thoughts I was having about girls, or even that they were in the same category. Even when I was later on dating a guy and thinking about nothing but girls, I didn’t get it. It took me awhile. I eventually came out as bisexual (because I thought if you’d dated a guy you couldn’t be a lesbian). Later on I drew a chart of people I’d been attracted to, and the “female” column filled up the whole page while there were two or three guys (and even those were iffy or had mitigating circumstances). And then I came out as a lesbian. But this was long before that.

So I said something to him. I forget exactly what. Something along the lines of “I don’t think I’m old enough to date.” And he said okay and walked off. I thought that would be the end of it.

Instead, any time I was in the same room with him, he would spend the entire time screaming at me. A lot of it was incoherent but cruel. Or he’d try to pull other people into it, pointing at me and yelling weird things like “SEE HER? I ASKED HER OUT AND SHE TURNED ME DOWN BECAUSE OF THE COLOR OF MY SKIN!” There was this constant cornering me and yelling at me, or cornering other people and yelling at them about me, or putting me down in every possible respect. A lot of what he said just seemed to be every random insulting thing he could think of, whether it made sense or not. It was this barrage of verbal abuse that made me afraid to go to classes that he was in.

No teacher ever stepped in, even when he shouted at the top of his lungs during class. Nobody ever told him to quit yelling at me. Nobody of any kind stood up to me or told me that what he was doing was wrong.

And when my mother found out, she thought it was funny. “Oh I bet everyone thinks you argue like a married couple!” is the only thing I remember her saying. And I’m pretty sure I heard the “he’s doing it because he likes you” thing about both him and other boys who bullied me.

I remember one year when the boys were pretty uniformly awful to me. It was absolutely nonstop, even in class. They never got in trouble. I did if I responded to it. Again I heard they must like me. My report card said that I needed to work on silently tolerating minor inconveniences caused by classmates. I am pretty sure their report cards didn’t say anything about needing to work on not bullying and ganging up on classmates. Judging from the fact that they never once got in trouble for this, and I was always in trouble for showing even the slightest sign that they hurt me.

What weirded me out the most at the time though, wasn’t the words people said when they said these boys must just like me. Words were always second, tone came first.

It was this thing they did, a combination of tone and movement. Their head would tilt to the side, and their voices would sound… amused, reminiscent, nostalgic, sing-song, fond, something that combined all of these things into one. There was a smile in their voice. I could almost write down the series of musical notes their voices sang as they said it (except part of it involves complex notation I never learned)

So I would get the sense that this was something they remembered fondly, that everyone goes through, like a rite of passage, an ultimately good rite of passage at that, and that was no big deal. Also, a sense of “You’ll see, you’ll like it some day.”

I never grew to like or appreciate what they did. Mostly I’ve tried to forget it because it was one of the things that contributed to a great deal of school-related PTSD.

And it’s not just because I’m a lesbian, I wouldn’t appreciate that kind of thing from girls either. (But there was so much assumption of straightness in my life that I never would have imagined what a lesbian was let alone that I was one. And even after I learned the word, it took a long time to realize what experiences in my life that it applied to. So my parents would never ever have told me that girls bullying me was just because they liked me. Even though my dad figured out I was a lesbian before I did — my “coming out” to him was utterly comical — he didn’t figure it out that early.)

I’m amazed though that until I read this, I never realized how much was wrong with what happened to me. I mean I figured out that the boys who picked on me were assholes, at least before it turned into complex psychological bullying. But I never figured out that people were wrong to tell me boys were assholes because they liked me. But now that someone said this, it seems perfectly obvious and I’m pissed off about it. It’s just one more way that other people got to tell me stories about my life that weren’t true, but that everyone accepted more than they could accept what was actually going on. And I hate those kind of stories, they’ve done more damage at times than the bullying itself did.

Notes: