That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘bullyproof’

BBC Radio 1 has been taking a detour from playing mediocre music and has begun another round of tedious social engineering on the youth of Britain. Gone are the days when the BBC used its power to inspire a generation of engineers, programmers and maths geeks; today it’s all about raising self esteem in kids who have no reason to have high self esteem. Now I know that someone is going to post about how I am a bully myself, which is cute, but high self esteem should be earned, you don’t get to feel good about what you’ve done unless you’ve done something worth being proud of and heaping praise on the losers just devalues those who decided to man the fuck up and do something worthwhile.

At this point I could get side tracked into how we have become an anti-competitive society, something probably led by the losers who were not good enough to make it in private enterprise and ended up as pen pushers in the public sector; teachers who, by the very nature of their profession, are failures in life are unlikely to encourage kids to succeed at the expense of the thick kids that make up an average of 50% of the class.

No, I shall not get sidetracked because the purpose of the rant is to point out a stunning bit of advice given by Chris Moyles’ tea boy, Aled Haydn Jones. This extremely qualified life coach summed up his advice for making yourself ‘bullyproof’* by telling people to “just be themselves” and of course to “believe in themselves”.

What the former bullying victim turned adviser on practically everything, despite not being even remotely able to do so in any meaningful manner, is telling kids to do is to stand out from the crowd and to be their own unique special self. Now far be it for me to contradict Mr Jones in his extremely well researched position, but I’m going to anyway.

Do you remember the kid who was an individual at school? The one that got the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis? If you don’t then that’s probably because that kid was you. Do you remember all the names and faces of all the kids that weren’t bullied? Of course you don’t, they blended in because they conformed to the expected social norms of that school. Remind me again, which one got bullied?

Now I’m not saying that we should all be clones but kids are like herd pack animals that pick on the one that is different, which makes logical sense really because if they picked on kids because of common characteristics then they would struggle to find support. While the one eyed man may be king of the land of the blind, in the school of the blind he would have the shit kicked out of him and be called Cyclops until he cried. Kids don’t pick on specific characteristics, they pick on uncommon ones. Normal targets when I was a lad were the thickies, the gingers, the asthmatics and those who were not good at rugby. In modern schools my 14 year old informant tells me that the bullied are the boffins, anyone who doesn’t care about football, and those with two parents and a shared surname. I once observed two schools where the peer pressure towards smoking differed dramatically: in one there were no smokers and new kids to the school who smoked were teased until they stopped; and in the other practically all the kids smoked and those who were teased were the minority of non smokers.

That’s not the half of it though: Dr Joe Allen has done quite a bit of research on peer pressure; he’s followed a bunch of kids from age 13 for the last decade and seen that those who felt more peer pressure as teens went on to be more socially capable in later life, while those who were able to ‘be themselves’ were far more likely in later life to be less able to form long term relationships. Kids who are prone to peer pressure and the sometimes negative influence of their peers in school are far more capable of the ‘give and take’ needed in long term adult relationships and are also more likely to behave within the social norms of adult life (getting a job and a partner rather than spending all the time on World of Warcraft masturbating furiously over pictures of Felicia Day).

So here’s the thing, well here’s two things:

1. Aled, shut the fuck up. No wonder you were bullied at school. Twat.
2. If you love your kids then don’t doom them to a life as a social outcast. Teach them to accept peer pressure and conform to the group norm as that way they will blend in under the radar of the bullies who will find some other kid to steal lunch money from. When your kid is a faceless corporate whore earning a shitload of money with a lovely family they will thank you for not teaching them to be a pierced but unemployed social clusterfuck.

* The bullyproof campaign is a corker in its cynical insistence on being ‘down with the kids’ and using social media. Kids have been encouraged to put a ‘bullyproof’ brand on their twatter, shitspace and facerape profile pictures to show that they are bullyproof, thereby marking themselves out for a good honest shitkicking by any bully with any dignity. Of course, no matter how many E list celebs they persuade to put a banner on their profile, the kids aren’t going to do the e-bullying equivalent of dramatically and camply dropping the soap in front of the big guy with a tattoo of a spider web on his face.