When he finally entered his apartment five minutes later, he had just enough time to tidy up the worst of the mess—to stuff a bundle of strewn clothes into a laundry basket and to rinse a stack of dirty dishes—before the doorbell rang. He spun around as the chime sounded through his small apartment, reverberating against his pounding heart. He peered through the spy hole. Outside in the hall stood one of his classmates, her dark hair tucked into a loose ponytail, her hands grasping a heavy red purse.
Thomas drew a steady breath. He loosened the collar of his shirt and then unfastened the bolts. She was scrolling through her phone when he greeted her. “Hey, Julie. Hope you found the place okay.”
“Not really. Midtown isn’t really a place I hang out. Too many creeps, you know?” She looked past his shoulder. “You gonna invite me in?”
He sidestepped quickly, showing her inside. “Yeah, sorry.”
Still holding her phone, Julie took in the apartment with raised eyebrows. Twice he caught her inspecting the upswept floor and felt her disapproval palpably. He cleared his throat, unable to shake off the feeling of discomfort.
“Hey, I appreciate you taking a look at my term paper,” she said, taking a seat at the kitchen table and switching on her phone to send a text message.
“It’s no problem,” Thomas assured. He pretended to glance over her term paper, which was lying face-up on the kitchen table, even though he’d already proofread it a dozen times and written a few suggestions at the bottom. He took the chair across from her, hoping to alleviate the awkward silence. “I was thinking,” he said. “This might take a while. If you’re hungry, maybe we could go out for some food later?”
“Like a date?” she asked.
Thomas smiled. “If you’re okay with that, yeah. Or if you’re not up for it tonight, how about Friday? There’s a nice place I know on—”
“Look, I’m just going to tell you straight,” she said. She sighed, her face still illuminated by the light of her phone screen as her fingers flew over the keys. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Tom, but you’re not really my type.”
Abruptly his insides went cold. “Yeah,” he managed. “Sure…I get it. No problem.”
Julie stuffed her phone into her purse. She gave him a weak, almost imperceptible smile. “Look, I’m really sorry, but my friend needs my help with something. I gotta go. I’ll pick up my paper at school when you’re finished, okay?”
Thomas froze momentarily. She wanted to leave? A heavy feeling settled deep in the pit of his stomach. After a brief hesitation, he stood and opened the door to show her out.
“Just a tip, Tom,” Julie said as she stepped into the hall. “If you’re going to have a girl over, you could at least put on a clean shirt. And maybe clean your apartment.”
“I had a busy day,” he said.
“Still…the effort shows.”
Heat flushed down his face, his neck. “Bye, Julie,” was all he said.
She set off down the hallway, not bothering to return the farewell.
As illustrated in the scene above, some people choose to go about rejection in a cruel way. While rejection will never cease to be an uncomfortable experience, it doesn’t have to be unfriendly or hostile. (Of course, if the young man is being aggressive in some way, a firm reaction is justified). However, if the young man approaches respectfully and in good faith, it doesn’t take much of an effort to be kind, to show appreciation for the compliment of being asked on a date. If we girls fail to do so, we risk severely damaging a young man’s self-esteem. Harsh words might even make him feel too insecure to ask other girls out in the future.
There is another aspect to rejection which I feel is important to mention: fear of carrying out rejection. A young man I know, Jordan, asked his girlfriend to marry him a few months ago. While I don’t know Jordan’s girlfriend, it’s clear that he loved her at one point. Lately though, he’s been having serious doubts about their upcoming marriage. But since he doesn’t want to hurt the girl, he can’t find it in his heart to break up with her. Instead, he’s hoping that, by an act of divine intervention, she’ll meet someone else and then break up with him. Obviously, this is the worst plan in the history of mankind. Not only is it completely unfair to the girl, but it’s also unfair to him. Walking into a loveless marriage for the sake of protecting feelings is wrong. Of course, I and many others have advised Jordan to break up with the girl to no avail. Experiencing rejection is just as terrible for young men as it is for us girls, but in the end, the vast majority of us will be more grateful for a sincere relationship rather than a relationship with someone who is dating us simply to avoid hurting our feelings.
Even if we put romantic relationships aside, there are dozens of other areas of our lives where we might also be required to reject. Perhaps our colleagues or acquaintances are constantly asking us to help them in some way. Perhaps they need favors. Or perhaps they need emotional support. Wanting to be kind, we always say yes. But as time passes, we start to get worn down. Our energy is being drained. As a result, we start to lag in the more important areas of our lives, such as our familial and romantic relationships, and our material and spiritual goals. Saying “no” is necessary at this point. While it’s always good to help people, there’s a limit, particularly because there are many people who will never stop asking for our help, no matter how often we give it.
Despite what some people may claim, rejection is not failure. Failure involves the active decision to despair, while rejection is simply a sign of redirection or an opportunity to improve. Ultimately though, it’s up to us—whether it’s us being rejected or us doing the rejecting—to consider carefully what we’re being faced with. It’s also up to us to decide how we’re going to handle it.
4
“Courage is fire, and bullying is smoke.”
—Benjamin Disraeli
What Bullying Is (And Is Not)
Nowadays, if you were to ask a crowd of people to define the term, “bullying,” you’d likely get a hundred different replies. “Bullying is cruel words,” one person might say. A second person might take their definition a bit further: “Bullying is criticism.” And a third person might even go so far as to say, “Bullying is disagreement.”
The reason you would receive such a broad definition of bullying is due to the increased hypersensitivity of current society. Certain groups have come to value emotions over logic and facts. They expect and even demand to be shielded from the slightest offense. They disregard the notion that being challenged by others is a positive thing—that it can make us mentally tougher and supply us with the tools to successfully debate our opinions.
Let’s say that I publish a video on YouTube that took ten hours to film and edit, so I’m extremely proud of it. I can’t wait to witness my audience’s reaction to all of my hard work. The first comment arrives:
This video is awful. How can a person with as many subscribers as you allow herself to be so inaccurate? Next time, try being a little less lazy and take a look at the statistics. I’ll even send you some sources.
The comment is harsh, but is it bullying? No, it’s criticism. The major difference between criticism and bullying is that criticism recognizes what our end goal is and seeks to help us accomplish it. Bullying, on the other hand, seeks to insult us with no regard for our end goal.
Something else that current society often conflates with bullying is the act of disagreement. Imagine that you decide to see a movie at the theater with one of your friends. As you leave the theater, the movie finished, your friend is raving, telling you over and over about how much she enjoyed it.
“I didn’t care for the movie,” you say.
“What?” Your friend is stunned. “How could you not like it? It was directed by a woman.”
“The fact that a woman directed the movie has nothing to do with why I didn’t like it,” you explain. “There are plenty of movies directed by women that I’ve enjoyed. I just found the dialogue in this one cliché. I also found th
e hero’s character underwhelming.”
“You’re unbelievable,” your friend scoffs. “We’re supposed to support women. The reason there are so few female directors nowadays is because of people like you. You’re a hater.”
Muttering in anger, your friend stalks off.
Perhaps not all of us have experienced such an extreme situation, but we’ve likely experienced something similar. The era of “agreeing to disagree” is over. Society was not always this way, though. Once, we encouraged healthy debate. And even if we failed to reach common ground with one another, we were still able to maintain a sense of respect, even friendship.
Nowadays, disagreement is far too often likened to bullying and being a “hater.” While disagreement can devolve into bullying if we insult or even threaten our opponents, for the most part, being able to disagree with each other is the natural state of a healthy society.
Why Bullies Bully
It was an unseasonably cold September. Clouds of low-forming mist had settled in the mountain foothills, giving the California countryside a haunted air.I remember hanging back in the kitchen after breakfast and telling my parents how crazy my life had become over the past two months. Political activism was not the simple life I’d anticipated. Day in and day out, I was being bombarded with messages, interview requests and invitations to speak at events. While I didn’t necessarily enjoy receiving such attention—particularly the negative attention—I found enthusiasm and strength in the belief that I was fighting a good fight.
Still wearing my pajamas, a cup of coffee in hand, I returned to my room where I took some time to check my new messages: on Twitter, on Facebook, on YouTube, on Instagram, and lastly, my two separate public emails. (Yeah, I had two public emails; that’s how crazy things got.)
Not all of the messages were positive. You’re a hateful whore, some wrote. You’d better hope I don’t run into you on the street, said others. But these types of messages didn’t bother me in the way they once had. I’d learned to desensitize myself to the attacks of my opponents. Thick skin was a requirement when it came to politics.
What made today different, though, was a cryptic-looking email with the subject line, I’m coming for you. Unsurprisingly, the body of the email was worse.
Think twice about going out alone anymore, you vile bitch. Your family, too. I’m coming to kill you all.
At the bottom of the email, the person had posted my home address.
I’d been doxed.
Somehow, my personal information had been hacked and leaked online, meaning that for the first time, the possibility of a person following through on their threat was real.
I stopped leaving the house alone. I stopped my daily runs around the neighborhood and I stopped going to local cafes to work. I even began sleeping with a loaded gun beside my bed. When I warned my family about the message, they took it seriously, but of course they could only do so for so long—eventually, they had to move on with their lives. I was scared for my sisters every time one of them went out alone.
It took me nearly two months to realize that reacting so drastically to threats wasn’t sustainable. I couldn’t go on the defensive every time my inbox lit up with a hostile message. If so, I would never leave my house. At this point, both my health and productivity were suffering. I had allowed the vague threats of anonymous opponents to box me in. I knew I had to stop living in fear. In a way, this decision forced me to desensitize myself to death. As I became more popular, the likelihood increased that someone would show up at my house or at a public event and attack me.
The threats against my family, on the other hand, were something I was never able to come to terms with. Had one of my siblings ended up hurt, I would’ve felt responsible. Eventually, my family left California and moved to a safer state, which made me feel a lot better, but sometimes I still get the feeling it would be safer for them if I didn’t visit home.
In the long run, I, and many other girls, will never see an end to certain people’s attacks because their hatred isn’t truly of us—it’s a hatred of our beliefs. And since our beliefs aren’t something we’re likely to surrender, the only way for us to live a normal life is to make peace with the fact that hatred and possibly even violence is the price for our principles.
People will choose to bully us for a multitude of other reasons. Some people might bully us because they’re in a position of power; they have a strong urge to constantly wield their power over us so that we never forget who’s in charge. Other people might bully us because they have family issues at home. Maybe they have bad parents who are abusing them, or perhaps they even have a history of social rejection themselves. In this respect, they might consider bullying us as a means to retake power, a way to mitigate their own insecurities. Tormented by a need to feel dominant, they push us down in order to lift themselves up.
Another motivation for bullying is when people feel betrayed. I’ve experienced bullying for this reason, although I’ve never talked about it publicly until now…
Aside from myself, about a dozen or so other female activists exist in our political network. Most of these girls advocate for a return to traditionalism—not in an extreme way of course, just standard traditional values such as strong family units, celebration of motherhood and fatherhood, and so on. Many of the young men in our political network also claim to believe in these values, so for a time, life was drama-free.
Then one day, out of the blue, someone posted private information on the internet concerning one of the girls in my network, claiming that the information proved she had a long history of not living up to the values she preached. Although the information was from the past—meaning the girl might’ve considerably changed since then—it didn’t matter. In the eyes of the young men in our network, she was a liar and a hypocrite. All hell broke loose.
Fueled by their anger, they set out on a mission to uncover similar information relating to all of the girls in our network. They recruited help from thousands of anonymous social media accounts, with the end goal being to prove that none of us were sincere—that all of us were manipulative whores whose grand scheme was to take advantage of our audiences. They fanned the flames by publishing a stream of posts and videos on the internet, accusing us over and over and over of being “liars” and “hoes who just want money.”
Personally, I never understood this criticism. If all of us were soulless, if our primary goal in life were to make money, we would’ve pursued alternative careers. Political activism doesn’t pay as much as some people might think, at least not for most of us. Moreover, almost any other career would be less mentally stressful and more physically safe.
The drama really kicked into overdrive when the mainstream media got involved. Various outlets reached out to us for comments and received no reply. We believed they’d misrepresent the situation and chose not to accept their interview requests. They went on to publish the stories anyway, and sure enough, all were misrepresentative.
To be honest, I don’t know all the details of the drama that unfolded during this time. I chose to log off of social media at the first sign of a storm. However, a few of the girls targeted by the attacks set up a direct message group as a way to encourage one another, which I did participate in for a short time. Most of the girls were taking it a lot harder than me. Crying. Depression. Panic Attacks.
I can’t do this anymore, one girl wrote.
I just want to go get married and have kids, wrote another.
Me too, someone agreed. I hate political activism. The only reason I stick it out is because our cause is one worth fighting for.
I can deal with our opponents’ attacks, but not attacks from our own side, someone else added.
Overall, the attitude was grim. Many of the girls wanted to give up politics altogether.
I briefly considered quitting as well. Not because political activism was too difficult, but because if the standard for advocating for a better world was perfection, then I’d already failed. I’m
not perfect. In fact, I’m far from it. I haven’t always made the moral choice, and I’ve had to face the consequences for it. But on that note, I’ve never once claimed to be unflawed or above others.
Take a moment to think about all the mistakes you’ve made throughout the course of your life. All the let-downs, all the insincerities and all the screw-ups. Now apply your imperfections to everyone else in the entire world. This is a more realistic conception of humanity. The difference between the good people and the bad people is that the good people keep trying.
After about a week of feeling sorry for myself, I finally admitted that, in my state, quitting politics would be an emotional decision rather than a logical one. I put the past behind me and started making videos again. I never spoke publicly about or even acknowledged anything that had happened. Instead, I chose to look at it as another part of the battle.
It was not right—and certainly not kind—that the girls in our network had been treated like that, but despite disagreeing with most of the young men’s accusations, I support their right to have made them. As long as a person doesn’t advocate for or incite violence, I believe they have every right to speak. No matter how unjust their words might be, a world without freedom of speech would be far more unjust.
While there are numerous other motivations for bullying, in my personal experience, when girls bully, most of them do it out of jealousy, or because they consider their target as competition. The moment they’ve determined someone to be a threat, they zero in and attack, thinking that if they neutralize their target, they can more easily acquire their goal.
I attended college in a small Kansas town—so small that I could walk the length of it in about thirty minutes. Since the punishment for bullying at my college was suspension, there were no real instances where this occurred. Unfortunately, the same rules didn’t apply to the public school on the opposite side of town.
What Makes Us Girls Page 3
