Bullying and friends

[andrewducker]

This post rang a lot of bells with me. I was bullied a lot by boys (at an all boys school) - and nowadays a large chunk of my friends are female. I don't think it's nearly as simple as that, but I'm intrigued.

[Poll #1329681]

Comments

[meihua.livejournal.com]

(x) I was bullied a lot as a child and most of my friends are female.

[celiaka.livejournal.com]

Where's the I was bullied a lot as a child and most of my friends are 50/50.

[andrewducker]

That sentence only parses if your friends are each half male and half female :->

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Vaguely related comment: I got in to a debate with someone recently who described themselves as pan sexual.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

That's pretty normal in my circle. I know a lot of people who label themselves as pan- or sapio-sexual.

[captainlucy.livejournal.com]

So they fancy kitchen utensils...?

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

On first reading I read 'Kitten utensils'.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

No silly, they're into forest gods.

[cheekbones3.livejournal.com]

So animals, walls, vegetables, as well as boys and girls then?

[giantbedsprings.livejournal.com]

I thought queer was the used and excepted term. Shows how much I know!

[celiaka.livejournal.com]

Ah yes. Read before you type, Ce.

Anyway - There are too many variations on this question. You may as well add - I was bullied a lot as a child and my friends are now mixed and I had an absent father figure.

[andrewducker]

See my response to the autopope below...

[autopope.livejournal.com]

You forgot: single sex school, or mixed?

[andrewducker]

Yup, that's going to complicate things a lot, but I couldn't think of a decent poll that would be simple and contain all the multitudes of answers.

I thought of "I was bullied a lot and most of my friends are of the same gender as the bullies." but that wouldn't capture it either.

What I want is a massive sample size, and being able to see the deviation friends-makeup from the average that being bullied by people of a particular gender gives.

[lebeautemps.livejournal.com]

Bullied some, and until recent times, most of my friends were boys. It's not that I don't like girls, its just that I'm not into the pettiness/nastiness/stuff.

[cdave]

Picked on a bit, but not a lot. A fair mix of gender between friends. But now I think about the ones I generally feel closest are women.

[communicator.livejournal.com]

I really don't know whether I have more male or female friends. I used to have more male friends, when I was at school.

[palmer1984.livejournal.com]

I was bullied at school, by both boys and girls. I've got an equal number of male and female friends now. Being bullied has made me a bit suspicious of people who remind me of the bullies at school - laddish men and very fashionable girls!

I hope you don't mind, but I'm going to steal the poll, but make it more complicated :).

[andrewducker]

Please do!

I'll point people your way once it's up :->

[redshira.livejournal.com]

This thing. The bullying took different forms depending on the gender of the bullies, and for years I preferred the company of boys/men, but now I have a pretty even split between male and female friends, and am wary of other characteristics in people which remind me of the bullies.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

neither bullied nor have friends predominantly of one sex.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Bullied a fair bit in the lower years of senior school. No idea whether most of my friends are male or female, I'd guess at roughly 50/50.

[ophelia-complex.livejournal.com]

There should be a tick box for 'no close friends'

I was bullied by both boys and girls incidently. Lovely!

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

meh, people are overrated anyways - apart from those on LJ and the interwebs of course.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

Your poll displeases me! You haven't included different options for the social group that did the bullying.

[draconid.livejournal.com]

I have very few real "friends" nowadays so can't really vote.

I was bullied as a child because I was nerdy.

I had more male friends than female friends in Uni because I was nerdy (and had masculine hobbies).

I don't think the bullying has made any difference to the sex of my friends, but the bullying and large number of male friends have the same cause.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I was bullied, but still managed to develop a pretty balanced misanthropy. The only reason I have almost all male friends is because there just aren't any women in our social circles, close or extended. We've all clustered together is male only groups. Which likely actually means geek only groups, and we just lack any geek women.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Oops! Apologies, didn't mean to make that as a reply to your comment, sorry for that.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

That post seems to me to boil things down to the argument "boys are mean, girls are not" and therefore I don't really agree with it. It is true that the majority of my bullies were male, but my perception of gender in regards to cruelty isn't based on that alone. Maybe I wasn't scarred deeply enough, but I believe I know that what evil lurks in the hearts of men also lurks in the hearts of women.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I struggle to see how anything in the post suggests that whatsoever.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I've quoted and highlighted some of the passages that stood out to me, hopefully that will make what I was getting at clearer.

"The girls were nicer; they yelled less, they didn’t expect me to know stupid things like sports, and when they smiled it wasn’t like monkeys baring their teeth at me."

"I knew the guys might beat me up if they found out, but dammit, they didn’t deserve to win. Girls read more. They knew more.

Why shouldn’t they triumph? "

"Men were the people who waged psychological warfare upon me, threw stink bombs at me, twisted thick metal bands of pinching scorpion-clips into the skin of my arm, humiliated me in the shower so badly I started changing in the bathroom stalls."

"Girls aren’t perfect, but I don’t have to guard myself around them in the same way; they can break my heart, but they’re not going to humiliate me in that way that only men can. And if they do humiliate me, at least I don’t have the extra helping of see, that’s what guys do, you fell for it again."

His problem, that he has more female friends because he's leery of men, is perfectly valid. After all, it's an observation of his own nature. It's the analysis of said problem that I find flawed. He's essentially disguised an argument (men are worse than women in situation X because of reason Y) as a story about his own experiences, and that's something both common and distasteful (to me) about the personal anecdote.

In fact, I want to thank you for commenting, because it wasn't until I wrote this reply to you that I realized that what bugged me wasn't his statement, but that it was an argument in disguise.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Ah ok, I never even noticed the "this post" bit. That explains a lot.

Sorry 'bout that.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

No, no, my apologies. I should've been clearer at the start.

[andrewducker]

He's essentially disguised an argument (men are worse than women in situation X because of reason Y) as a story about his own experiences

I disagree. I think he's just relating his own experiences. I don't think he's trying to say that all men are like this - just that his formative experiences were of this type.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

This.

I've a tendency towards androphobia myself. It's something you have to work against. Yup, women can be just as heartevil as men can.

After the last bruhaha with ferret, I'm really not surprised that he'd post about his own sexism. But it's interesting that he'd admit to being treacherous at heart.

I wish he hadn't, though: it just reinforces my own androphobia towards him. I'm sure he's got some likeable qualities. Even if his unlikeable ones are pretty nasty.

[andrewducker]

So, he realises that his choice in friends is based on having been bullied by a particular kind of person when young, and treated better by a different kind, and posts trying to explain his realisation - and that's _nasty_?

He doesn't say women can't be evil - he says that they weren't, while the boys he knew were. It's understandable that he'd be put off by that. Hell, I was.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Good to see you'll stand in his defence ;}P>

Sadly, you're misreading me. I said his unlikeable qualities were nasty. You've turned my words around somewhat.

You should get that looked at. It might turn malignant ;}P>

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I was bullied in school and my friends are roughly equally male and female.

[babydyke-82.livejournal.com]

i went to an all girls school and was never bullied but when I got to uni loved having the (previously denied) chance to have male friends.

Re: bullying

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

Like many of the others here, I used to have predominately opposite gender friends but as I went through my 30's, the gender balance sorted itself out.

As for bullying, I was the omega dog. That was lots of fun.

[neferet.livejournal.com]

Bullied a lot by both genders. I usually have more male friends than female, because I can relate to men more easily. What is possibly interesting is that I am reticent in developing physical aspects of trust with men (who used to beat me up), but develop a mental/emotional sense of trust quite quickly, whereas women are the complete opposite; I'm very slow to develop mental/emotional sense of trust(the girls used to be more psychological in their bullying).

[themongkey.livejournal.com]

Where's the option for "I was bullied a lot and have no friends"?

Hmm... wonder if there's a cause and effect there. And which is which.

Snowflake answer

[yalovetz]

I was bullied a little bit by both boys and girls, and my friends now are a mix of various different genders.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

This may be your least useful poll yet for telling you anything that means anything much...

[andrewducker]

42 comments and a spin-off poll here later, I think it did a pretty good job :->

Also, see my response to autopope - I don't expect polls like this to be terribly useful as polls, they mostly inspire conversation - if I was doing a decent study there'd be a lot more detail and the questions wouldn't be loaded like that.

[moniqueleigh]

Meh. I'm in agreement with others that the wording on this poll leaves your results of little good. You don't mention whether the bullies in question were of the same or of different gender.

Personally, I was mostly psychologically/emotionally bullied by the same gender (girls) at a mixed school. The boys would join in sometimes, but not overly often. My friends were a mixed bag, but a slightly higher percentage of girls who experienced similar bullying from the "popular" crowd (or those who wanted to be in that crowd).

In high school & college, most of my very close friends started veering more towards guys (I'm of a geeky persuasion, leading me to hang out with the geeks, meaning more guys). Now in my mid-30s, I have three truly close RL friends: my hubby, JD, & Suzanne. So, 2 of opposite gender & 1 of same. But I've never been one to have lots of close friends anyway. I've always had lots of acquaintances & very few actual friends.

[meico.livejournal.com]

I must remember that your technique of purposely providing inadequate options in a poll to cause intense discussion is worryingly effective...

In any case, that does not mean I'm immune...

Bullied a lot in early years by same gender and now have friends of all sorts...

[davesangel.livejournal.com]

What about options for those who were bullied in their youth, and who now bully those of the opposite gender because it's easier to project all their hatred onto a group that's less likely to hurt them in return?