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"As part of the blog tour for Dads, Geeks and Blue Haired Freaks, I am pleased to have Ellie Philipps on the blog talking about bullying and sharing the hairstyle of the day!"
HAIRSTYLE OF THE DAY:
This should be the face-lift pony that Sadie wears when she has a fight with Shonna - it's grabbable and it's mean - as modelled here by Lady Sovereign
Dads Geeks contains quite a bit about bullying. Shonna Matthews, Sadie's ex-best friend is the bully. After all, she ostracises Sadie, she tries to steal her fella and they even have a physical fight at one point. Lots of girls go through this at high school; their best friends turning on them for no particular reason, and I think in Dads Geeks I've tried to show that there is a reason - in this case a very deep, twisted reason why Shonna behaves as she does - but it's understandable and even Sadie is sympathetic to it. The point is that bullies feel vulnerable and that's why they bully. In the book Shonna feels just as vulnerable about her 'dad' as Sadie does but she expresses it in a very different way. She becomes angry and disappointed and she takes it out on the only other person who knows what it's like and who she perceives is more vulnerable - Sadie. Shonna's not likeable - you're not supposed to like her but you are supposed to understand where it's all coming from. There's no point in creating a 1 dimensional bully with no motivation - it's just not going to be believable. Everybody has the capacity to bully and be bullied - extricating yourself from either of these roles is very very hard and girls do often fall into them at high school - it's something about the struggle to survive in a new environment. I remember being 'shed' by girls from my primary when I hit high school and I remember I 'shed' girls too. Both processes were painful, but sometimes there is a bid to begin again and meet new people and there's a jostling for position and where boys might physically fight it out, girls are psychologically unkind as well as physical. I do remember that the toughest people in my comprehensive school - the ones to be feared - were definitely the girls. I'm not sure that's changed.
"Thank you Ellie! "To find out more about Ellie Philipps: "Twitter: @ElliePhilipps50"Tumblr: "http://www.elliephillips.co.uk/
Not every "choice" is Sisterhood-approved:
In a letter Wednesday, Americans United for Life (AUL) urged House members to "stop a real war on women - sex selection abortions" by supporting the legislation from Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.).
A Republican echoed that line on the House floor.
"This is the ultimate war on women, Mr. Speaker," Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle (N.Y.) said of sex-selective abortion.
"There can be no rights for women if we do not allow them the right to life."
An AUL spokeswoman said the message aims to take back rhetorical ground that has been occupied by Democrats and abortion-rights groups.
"What we're trying to do is hold the left accountable for its own rhetoric," Kristi Hamrick told The Hill.
"The 'war-on-women' language begs the question: in a war, who is dying? Sex-selective abortion kills unborn women."
The pro-abortion crowd is losing, and they're losing badly. The rise of sex-selective abortion in immigrant groups across the West has forced the feminists and abortionistas to confront their own irrational beliefs. If abortion is a procedure no different than the removal of a tumor or an in-grown toenail, then it can be done for any reason or no reason at all. The rhetoric that it's a difficult, emotionally-strenuous decision is ludicrous; nobody feels bad when they have cancer cells removed, why would they feel bad about extracting a fetus? (Fetus is Latin for 'offspring'. The term is correct and in no way implies that it's not a child.) Therefore, the issue of sex-selective abortions shouldn't be an issue, and for some self-destructive retards feminists, it isn't:
The idea that sex-selective abortion ought to represent some kind of grave moral dilemna for feminists is, to put it politely, misplaced. To be a feminist is to fight for the rights of women - real living women. It is not the role of feminists to defend a bundle of cells which might potentially turn into a female. For the same reason, the rather coercive manner in which males get laid throughout much of the animal kingdom is not an issue around which feminists tend to campaign. Feminism, I repeat, is about liberating women within the context of human society. Not a general commitment to all things female, or potentially female.
Feminism is a biological dead-end. Natural selection weeds out people who are unfit both physically and mentally, and feminism comes equipped with a built-in version of that. The irrationality of it is such that they would rather defend universal abortion "rights", even if it means there are millions of fewer women who will grow up to be good little feminists. They have failed to understand the first rule of population growth: you don't kill your offspring. The only way feminism can spread now is through the corrosive influence of a public school education. In the United States, abortion is declining along with public support of it. In Asia, abortion is flourishing, along with feminism. Population growth has plummeted all across that vast continent, most notably in China. In India, tens of millions of Indian girls have been purposefully aborted because they were girls. That will cause massive societal instability thanks to tens of millions of men not having any chance for marriage in their homelands. Does this idea of sex-selective abortion sound like a net positive to "anyone"? Are the minds of feminists so addled that they can't see that abortion was always going to lead to this?
Most of the world is still backwards and crudely "patriarchal" in nature, so they're naturally going to prefer male children to female children. And in China where they can only have one child, they will almost always go for a boy rather than a girl. The off-balancing between the sexes is dangerous and a recipe for disaster. Abortion was always a grievous mistake to allow, but now that it's being used to purposefully create a youth shortage "and" a girl shortage, its horrendous effects are being felt across the entire world. The "war on women" is not when abortion is outlawed, it's when it's taken to it's logical end-point: the mass murder of tens of millions of girls by primitive cultures. The Republicans hate women? Don't make me laugh, not when there are cultures out there actively taking out there anti-girl beliefs on unborn children.
Source: pualib.blogspot.com
What happens when schools treat bullying as a minor inconvenience--mainly because of the victim, who insists on complaining about it--and fail to punish bullies in any significant way?
We, as a culture, send the message to our kids that bullying is perfectly acceptable. And we ensure that bullies, instead of learning from their erroneous behavior and striving to correct it as they mature, will just grow up to be...older bullies.
Take this sad story, which I won't excerpt here because I know some of my readers are moms with early-reader children who might be disturbed by some of the words in the story. The story involves a college-aged young man who was engaging in certain behavior with another young man in his dorm room; unknown to him, his roommate found the situation hilarious, set up a camera, and streamed the video of this young man's behavior with the other young man out onto the web. On two separate occasions. With the alleged help and collusion of a young woman who apparently also found this secret videotaping screamingly funny.
And the young man found out. And took his own life.
Readers of this blog know that when it comes to sex outside of marriage, I agree with my Church that all of it is gravely morally evil. But the evil of driving a man to suicide is beyond reprehensible, regardless of the morality of the actions of that man. And it isn't as though the two bullies in this story were concerned about this young man's actions from any sort of moral standpoint (which wouldn't have made it moral for them to videotape him anyway); they just wanted to embarrass and ridicule him. I have a feeling they would have wanted to do the same thing if the young man were found to be with a young woman, or even engaging in certain immoral behaviors alone. The point was to hurt and humiliate this fellow human being, to dehumanize and depersonalize him, which is what all bullies do to their victims. From the standpoint of these two bullies, their actions were wildly successful--because nothing says, "Yes, you have hurt me in the worst possible way," like throwing yourself off of a bridge to drown in the depths below.
It is to be hoped that the bullies will be held accountable, though given our legal system that's far from a foregone conclusion. But the big question is: why were they never held accountable before now? Or, if this really was their first foray into big-league bullying, why did they grow up surrounded by messages that said that bullying was fine, that it was nothing but harmless pranks and part of life or part of growing up, that it really wasn't any worse than a practical joke, that the victims of bullying are just pathetic little dweebs who deserve it in the first place?
Because, like it or not, that's what our society teaches bullies. So instead of maturing away from their thuggish habits, bullies just get older, cleverer, and more cruel. And every time we shrug at bullying and say things like "Boys will be boys," or "He doesn't mean any harm," or "She's going through a rough time at home," or "The so-called victim is just an oversensitive mommy's boy" or "The so-called victim needs to stop being such a drama queen and stick up for herself..." and so on, we enable this.
And it needs to stop. We need to stop it.
