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**notyoueither** · February 10, 2005, 02:32

Really? The name Virk mean anything to you?

**St Leo** · February 10, 2005, 02:32

C'mon people, bullying is a rite of passage and an essential part of the toughening up process.

Is it? I can't really think of anything useful I learned while being bullied in grades 7-9.

On the whole, I was rather thankful to be rid of it after my folks moved and I changed high schools.

The youth have forgotten honour and any notion of private affairs between gentlemen.

On the whole, I'd rather chivalry stay as dead and buried as possible. Honour may be fine for Klingons, but I'd rather stick with Vulcan logic.

**notyoueither** · February 10, 2005, 02:34

Actually, chivalry would preclude targetting the weak for personal gratification.

I find the appeal to 'honour' to be laughable at best.

**St Leo** · February 10, 2005, 02:35

Originally posted by notyoueither
Really? The name Virk mean anything to you?

Eh?

Nov. 14, 1997
Reena Virk, 14, is swarmed and beaten under a bridge in Saanich on Vancouver Island by a group of teenagers, mainly girls. Battered and bloodied, she manages to get up and stagger across the bridge toward a bus stop to make her way home. Two of the original attackers drag her back and beat her again and leave her in the waters of Victoria's Gorge waterway. That's where police find her body eight days later. Witnesses later testified that one of the accused bragged that she had one foot on Virk's head and smoked a cigarette as Virk lay in the water.

Oh.

**Ted Striker** · February 10, 2005, 02:48

I would be opposed to this policy because Ted Striker enjoys taking down bullies and defending the weak.

It is a shame SuperCitizen was not a classmate of mine, perhaps we could have roamed the halls and dealt out justice vigilante style beyotch!

**Dinner** · February 10, 2005, 02:54

It depends on the definition of bully. Beating people is wrong but if some hyper protective law maker wants to make name calling bullying then that's just lame. These things should be handled at the lowest possible level because those are the people who best understand the context and circomstances and so are the best informed to make a decision. Draconian rules almost always cause more harm then good by stupidly punishing the not guilty or over punishing the barely guilty.

**Seeker** · February 10, 2005, 02:57

Oerdin tells it like it is

**notyoueither** · February 10, 2005, 03:02

Page not found – OC Weekly

http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/99/37/news-goldstein.php

The ‘******’ Factor
The chickens came home to roost at Columbine High

by Richard Goldstein

Art by Bob Aul

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold opened fire in their high school on April 20, they couldn’t have imagined how many people would benefit. For some of the students who survived, it was a chance to perform in the biggest media circus since Monica. For the news networks, it was an excuse to cut away from the parade of desperate Kosovars that had been turning viewers off in droves. Law-and-order types found a platform for their long-standing plan to turn high schools into military camps, while liberals saw a powerful opening to pound home their demand for regulating guns. The president seized the triangulating moment, calling for stricter gun laws and a Hollywood summit on teen violence. And everyone agreed that violent video games were to blame.

What’s missing from this litany is any sense of how the culture on the ground contributed to the massacre at Columbine High School. It’s easier to crack down on nose rings than to confront a system that assigns status in proportion to gender conformity, relegating boys who can’t meet the standard to the ranks of America’s most despised minority: that legion of failed men known as "******s." That’s what the ruling jocks called members of the Trench Coat Mafia. If they’d been out and proud, no doubt the treatment would have been even more severe; a gay student from a nearby school told one reporter he had been pelted with rocks by his peers. But at Columbine no one dared to be openly gay. So the "***" treatment was reserved for kids like Harris and Klebold who didn’t make the macho grade.

Did they really wear nail polish and hold hands in the halls? No one actually saw it, but rumors that the killers were gay abounded, stoked by America’s favorite ****-raker, Matt Drudge. In the days following the shootings, Drudge put two stories on his Web site based on nothing more definitive than a posting from a self-proclaimed "gay biker," who praised the shooters as "a bunch of our fellow homosexuals [who] decided that they had taken enough." Drudge seized on the black nail polish favored by Goths as further evidence that the killers were part of a pack of murderous poofs. That was proof enough for Jerry Falwell of Tinky Winky fame; he reportedly called Harris and Klebold gay on Geraldo Live. Followers of another anti-gay divine, the Reverend Fred Phelps, picketed Littleton memorials with signs that claimed "Fags Killed Them."

Here is a telling expression of the double bind that maddens most stigmatized groups: they are considered not only defective but also extremely dangerous. Blacks and Jews have suffered from this paradox of perception, as have gays. Now it’s boys who can’t or won’t butch up sufficiently. The same teens abused for being failed men are regarded as repositories of deadly rage. From all over the country last week came reports of young misfits picked up for "showing signs." It’s America Under Siege!—and God help the Goth who whistles a destructo tune.

In a nation enraptured by—yet deeply envious of—its young, the Columbine massacre is the perfect pretext for cracking down on teen culture. Never mind that the kids who shot up their schools weren’t all part of some joystick jihad. Never mind that in at least two cases—Littleton and Paducah, Kentucky—the killers had been labeled "******s." It’s much easier to blame songs and games that tap the violent recesses of the id than to explore the impact of sexual taunting and its meaning in society.

Consider the media’s response to the rumors about Harris and Klebold. Nearly all news accounts hastened to report that there was no proof the killers were gay. "It’s revealing," says Gregory Herek, a research psychologist at UC Davis. "There’s an implicit understanding that it’s a horrible thing to accuse someone of being gay—and that if they are gay, it would be fair to ostracize them."

So deeply held is this belief, even in pedagogic circles, that it’s common for the stigmatizing of certain boys to go unaddressed. "A typical response," says Verna Eggleston, executive director of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, which works with gay and lesbian youths, "is for the guidance counselor to ask, ‘What are you doing to make them think you’re gay?’"

The consequences of this collusion are stark. Gay teens suffer from astonishingly high rates of suicide; one recent study found that 32 percent of gay adolescents had tried to kill themselves. But there has been virtually no research into how straight kids react to being labeled gay. "The actual question of sexuality is probably irrelevant," says Herek. "The important thing is that this is an agreed-upon insult, one that demands an aggressive response, especially from someone who is heterosexual and trying to prove it."

The word "******" has never merely meant homosexual. It has always carried the extrasexual connotation of being unmanly. But these days, the implications of that insult have expanded. To say that a certain behavior is "so gay" can apply to anything stupid, clumsy, or outré. It’s probably the most effective way to call a guy a loser, and in this age of sexual candor, when high school students know that some of their peers may actually be gay, the accusation has an even more fearsome ring. Add the general crisis of masculinity and you’ve got a generation for which identity is a much thornier issue than it used to be.

Can one have a girlfriend and still be a "***"? Absolutely, since it’s men who brand one another with that epithet. Wielding the F-word is a way for some guys to dominate others by convincing them that their masculinity can be lost. Teenagers are especially susceptible to this Big Lie. Take a kid who’s seething with insecurity, bait him on a regular basis, and you’ve given him a good reason to celebrate Hitler’s birthday.

Harris and Klebold responded to their degradation in a typically compensatory way—they assembled their own cult of rogue masculinity. But the jocks who oppressed them didn’t have to go in for Hitler or Marilyn Manson. For these top men, homophobia was a socially sanctioned way to rebel. It made them sexy, proved their power over boys who had to take the burn, and reclaimed the throne of a reviled masculinity. Athletic achievement was only the surface sign of their status; bigotry was what made these jocks local gods.

So far, no one has suggested that the administration at Columbine High is responsible for the homophobia that blew up in their faces. Better to blame the killers’ parents, exempting the rest of the community. After all, boys will be boys—especially in Colorado. This is the state where voters passed a law in 1992 forbidding any local jurisdiction from enacting a gay-rights bill. (The Supreme Court later threw out the ordinance on the grounds that it excluded homosexuals from the political process.) Colorado is also where Matthew Shepard was taken to die after he had been strung up on a fence and beaten senseless in nearby Wyoming. In the town where he expired, a float in the homecoming parade featured an effigy of Shepard with the words "I’m gay" affixed.

When John F. Kennedy was murdered in 1963, Malcolm X had a shocking reaction. "The chickens have come home to roost," he said. It’s possible to see the massacre at Columbine High in the same unsparing terms. But it’s much more satisfying to round up the usual suspects. After all, they’re "******s."

**Shi Huangdi** · February 10, 2005, 03:08

"What, are we supposed to hide the fact that the world is brutal place full of *******s? It's a learning experience. "

Except it's not a learning experience. All the research done on it shows it to be an extremely detrimental experience leading to long term mental problems as adults. Being the victim of abusive behaviors during the formative years has been shown to develop depression and the like.

"The youth have forgotten honour and any notion of private affairs between gentlemen."

Bullies are the least honorable of anybody at a school. They people they choose for abuse are the ones least able to defend themselves. They (particularly the case when a female is bullied) will use lying and false rumors as a means of bullying. When challenged back, they rely on a group of friends rather then facing them one on one.

"I was both bullied and a bully, so I can see that it's really just one of those 'flaring passions of youth' that rise and vanish. "

Which one were you first? If you were bullied first, then you rose through the ranks I suppose and became one of them yourself, which I guess would cause you pride. But rather then being unaffected by the bullying or toughened up, it seems turned you into one of them, it made you a low cretin, someone who cruel to others for their own personal pleasure.

"It was pretty much a form of stress relief"

So for your own pleasure, you beat up, and harassed him, and most likely gave them fear every day then we he got to school he would get humiliated and beat up. Splendid.

"I'm sure that in his future life he was greatly trained and toughened to deal with lifes many adversities. "

Again, for people who research it, it tends not to do that. In some cases bullying even leads to suicide. But hey, that makes a tougher youth, huh?

"Currently a hot topic item in Ontario (Canada), with schools and 'zero-tolerance' nonsense."

So this comes up with the news, and you are challenged with the new topic coming up being one where you are the bad guy. But I guess fragile ego isn't strong enough to admit you did wrong, and so you come up with these justifications for your obviously immoral behavior.

Pathetic.

**Shi Huangdi** · February 10, 2005, 03:11

For those of you who are interested in learning more about this or gaining another perspective, I reccomend going to www.ravendays.org as a start.

**Ben Kenobi** · February 10, 2005, 03:15

Couldn't have said it better, Shi.

I hated bullies growing up, but in this at least, it was good to have an Irish temperment. They soon learned that looks can be rather decieving.

**notyoueither** · February 10, 2005, 03:19

I was always bigger than anyone else in my grade until high school when I met one or two people who were larger. Except, I had a visible physical abnormality (a wandering eye). This was quite the situation, and more than one person had to pick themselves up after I punched his lights out after making unflatering comments in my direction. Bullies had a hard time with me.

Still, there was once or twice that there was someone lower than me in the pecking order and I took advantage of it. I remember provoking one young man into a fight when he had never done anything to me. I still remember that with a great amount of regret, and I hope that he is alive and leading a happy life now. I couldn''t take it if I found out he topped himself and I had done anything to make his life more miserable.

**Ben Kenobi** · February 10, 2005, 03:23

That's too bad.

I'm sure if you bumped into that fellow now, you'd have a beer together.

**notyoueither** · February 10, 2005, 03:46

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi
That's too bad.

I'm sure if you bumped into that fellow now, you'd have a beer together.

I'd buy him a keg, but that wouldn't make it any easier.

It's funny the things that stick with you throughout life. I am firmly convinced we summon our own demons.

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