"Every time I read something about childhood obesity... this Tim Minchin song starts to play in my head. Yes, it's harsh, brutal even, very nearly bullying. But... um... you gotta admit that there's a grain Cinnabun or two of truth to it."
Says Dan Savage — who needs to say more about what he really thinks about the role of bullying in the process of growing up. He writes about bullying a lot and I think his promotion of this song shows he's not too consistent about it. Is it that it's bad to bully gay kids but good to bully fat kids — because it's good to be gay but bad to be fat? Bullying is a mechanism of social control. Is the mechanism itself wrong, or is the wrong limited to using the mechanism for the wrong end?
By the way, it's Cinnabon — "bon" as in "C'est Si Bon" — and you can be a fan of it on Facebook.
ADDED: The awesomeness of that Jane Morgan video made me pick it over a couple of fabulous alternatives. Check out Eartha Kitt and Louis Armstrong.
John McCain is leading the filibuster against the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" "repeal" legislation in the Senate (it's not an actual repeal, but we'll leave that for another time). Today, Cindy McCain joined a number of celebrities in a video about gay youth suicide and bullying. Mrs. McCain's part of the video condemned DADT and then accused our government of sending bullies a message that what they do is okay.
The woman basically accused her husband of sharing the blame for gay kids killing themselves.
I'm astonished. And impressed as hell.
Husband-wife teams work like that sometimes. It's not really evidence of a marital breakdown or even necessarily a real conflict at all. Try this exercise: Begin with the assumption that they are a partnership. Now, explain their behavior. Do you see how it makes sense? I sure do.
Ha! Emily Bazelon and I talk about the election, the gay rights cases, the gender card, what you can say about women, Christian fundamentalism and anti-gay harassment, and all the complexity that doesn't fit into your ideological templates. Feast your eyes and ears on 28 minutes of bullies and whores:
[S]tyle encompasses far more than good looks. In fact, it trumps beauty because it's rooted in deep cultural knowledge and self-confidence. Style is an expression of choices -- a declaration of individuality. And thus, the lack of it is not a matter of poor genetic luck. It is, a particularly judgmental soul could argue, your fault....
[I]t can make others feel terribly old-fashioned and parochial by comparison.... Women -- and men -- use style as a tool of intimidation, self-promotion and belittlement all the time. U.S. Senate candidate Carly Fiorina's off-topic remark about Sen. Barbara Boxer's hair caused quite the explosion when it was captured by a live microphone. Fiorina quipped that Boxer's hair was "so yesterday." Fiorina has said she was quoting a friend, but her tone oozed delight in the observation as she happily repeated it...
Fiorina's words weren't, by any means, vulgar or angry. Indeed, she had the cutting tone of a gossipy girlfriend who knows a thing or two about hair travails. But as she gently fingered her own chic pixie, while relaying an insulting description of Boxer's hair, the polite smile never faded from her face -- until she realized her microphone was on. She bore all the earmarks of a style bully.
Givhan concludes that Fiorina was making an indirect but effective political argument that Boxer is out of step with the times. But let's take a closer look at what was really going on. Rewatch the short clip and think about whether what we are really seeing is a woman "ooz[ing] delight" because she thought her hair was "chic" — a "chic pixie" — and the other woman's hair really was so much worse. Does Fiorina even agree with the friend she quotes? Watch carefully, and keep in mind that Carly Fiorina was only quite recently bald (as a consequence of cancer treatment):
It's a bit hard to tell unless you look for it, but I'm looking after hearing a friend, a cancer survivor who lost her own hair, insist that what we are seeing is a cancer survivor's humorous attitude about hair. I now think that Fiorina stopped in the middle of an anecdote when someone off camera signaled for her to shut up, but that if she had gone on, she would have made a self-effacing/sarcastic wisecrack about her own hair along the lines of: Oh, yes, because my hair is so today, if by "today," you mean not utterly bald.
The gesture she makes at her own hair, just before she clams up, is not, I think, a mean girl's I'm-so-gorgeous primp. It's comic business that would have fit amusingly with the wisecrack that was never cracked. My friend, a woman who, like Fiorina, has recently regrown hair, feels sure she has the ability to recognize a shared dark humor about hair that women who have not gone through the experience don't pick up on. Hair is a big deal to women, and our ears perk up when we hear talk about other women's hair. Givhan explores that with good sensibility, but I think she, like many others, is judging Fiorina without a full understanding of the context.
On the other hand, Fiorina's private psychodrama is a bit beside the point when she's running for the Senate. She's got to get these things right and not give her opponents material to use against her. In that light, it doesn't matter what the explanation is, because she's running for office, and she needs to do that competently.
Bloggingheads, with Emily Bazelon, talking about a Supreme Court without a Protestant, why Obama should pick an out-and-proud liberal, the causal connection between bullies and suicide, and those terrible Tea Partiers.
Of course, it's terrible when a young person commits suicide. And a suicide may have chosen self-murder because of the bad relationships in her environment. But if we don't favor arresting people who are very mean to people who don't commit suicide, why would we favor these arrests when someone does commit suicide?
Assume you are a teenager contemplating suicide. If you knew the 9 kids at school who were meanest to you would get criminally prosecuted if you killed yourself, would you be more likely to kill yourself or less? I don't know enough about the psychology of suicide to answer my own question, but my intuitive sense is that self-murderers — or some self-murderers — intend to deal a severe blow to the people they leave behind. And knowing your enemies will be prosecuted might spur you on.
Anyway, here's the article about the Phoebe Prince, who hanged herself, prompting the authorities to arrest 9 of her classmates. See if you can figure out how the shock and sorrow of the young girl's death got processed into criminal charges against 9 teenagers and whether this reaction is helpful or just.
[T]wo boys and four girls, ages 16 to 18, face a different mix of felony charges that include statutory rape, violation of civil rights with bodily injury...
Private citizens can commit civil rights violations?
... harassment, stalking and disturbing a school assembly.
A felony charge of disturbing a school assembly?
Three younger girls have been charged in juvenile court, Elizabeth D. Scheibel, the Northwestern district attorney, said...
... Ms. Scheibel said that Ms. Prince’s suicide came after nearly three months of severe taunting and physical threats by a cluster of fellow students.
“The investigation revealed relentless activities directed toward Phoebe to make it impossible for her to stay at school,” Ms. Scheibel said. The conduct of those charged, she said, “far exceeded the limits of normal teenage relationship-related quarrels.”
It was particularly alarming, the district attorney said, that some teachers, administrators and other staff members at the school were aware of the harassment but did not stop it. “The actions or inactions of some adults at the school were troublesome,” Ms. Scheibel said, but did not violate any laws.
I'm still trying to understand what the crimes were. Everything anyone did in relation to a suicide looks awful in retrospect, but the dead person's act of self-murder should not transform non-crimes into crimes. Prosecuting people who were horribly mean should not be a community's way to deal with the grief and outrage felt after a suicide. To what extent are the adults in the community scapegoating the kids to avoid their own feelings of guilt? If there are no crimes to use against the school officials, maybe that's a reason not to unload the weight of the law against the kids.
Ms. Prince’s family had recently moved to the United States from a small town in Ireland, and she entered South Hadley last fall. The taunting started when she had a brief relationship with a popular senior boy; some students reportedly called her an “Irish slut,” knocked books out of her hands and sent her threatening text messages, day after day....
On Jan. 14, the investigation found, students abused her in the school library, the lunchroom and the hallways and threw a canned drink at her as she walked home....
Some of the students plotted against Ms. Prince on the Internet, using social networking sites, but the main abuse was at school, the prosecutor said.
"Plotted" to do what?
“The actions of these students were primarily conducted on school grounds during school hours and while school was in session,” Ms. Scheibel said.
Ms. Scheibel declined to provide details about the charges of statutory rape against two boys, but experts said those charges could mean that the boys had sex with Ms. Prince when she was under age.
Legal experts said they were not aware of other cases in which students faced serious criminal charges for harassing a fellow student, but added that the circumstances in this case appeared to be extreme and that juvenile charges were usually kept private.
So, teenagers willingly having sex with each other, and prosecutors do nothing about it. But if someone commits suicide — an inflamed heart breaks — then the sex partners of the dead person are rounded up and prosecuted for statutory rape. Is that fair?
And "appeared to be extreme"? Were the "legal experts" told more details than appear in this article? Because knocking books out of someone's hands and throwing a canned drink don't sound extreme. And then there's the story of a teen love affair that ended and left some heated feelings. It can't be that.
I'd say we need to be careful how much power we give to those who contemplate suicide. Do we think it will work out better if such a person thinks her enemies will be prosecuted? It's especially bad if nothing is done about bullying until there's a suicide. There is the suicidal person feeling alone, beleaguered, and helpless. She's considering ending it all, and the prospect of escaping all pain and consequence is vividly enhanced by the hope that her antagonists will suffer the ravages of criminal prosecution.
[The conviction] attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.
