Bully

[Slammr]

I went to see the documentary, Bully, today. While it was good, it wasn't as powerful as I would like for it to have been. I would like to have seen more about kids that killed themselves because they were bullied. Although others were mentioned, only two boys, both named Tyler, were highlighted. We see one boy being bullied, but we only hear the others tell how they were bullied.

It definitely happens: I was bullied when in the eighth grade by a group of older boys just because the leader of the group decided he didn't like me. Anytime he saw me, I was going to get my books knocked out of my hands in the hallway at school, or if he saw me on the street, I was going to get punched. Once they cornered me at a friend's house - they happened to be hanging out next door - and he was going to force me to suck his cock. When I refused and walked away, I got punched. I only got away by going into my friend's house. Like most of the kids in the movie, I never told anyone, but I lived in fear of meeting up with him and his gang. He always had three or four guys with him, and they were old enough to drive. He stopped his car once when he saw me walking home from school to confront and punch me.

I won't say I was completely innocent of bullying. A couple of years later there was a fat kid in my P.E. class I used to pick on, but he finally fought back, and although I won the fight, I didn't pick on him again. I generally didn't bully other kids. I spent most of my energy tormenting teachers. That was more fun.

It was outrageous that the MPAA initially gave this movie an R rating. I think Fuck is said in the movie two or three times. It it were said more often, I didn't notice it, and Bitch was about the only other word I heard. It took an online petition to get Bully a PG13 rating. As I saw one person say, "It's ridiculous that they gave Hunger Games, where kids were killing kids, a PG rating while giving Bully an R rating."

Since when is a little noise, the word Fuck, more obscene than kids killing kids?

[Cainanite]

Just look at those TV shows like CSI, Law and Order, Castle, and a thousand other crime dramas. They talk about and show stuff that will make a sane person very sick. I know it does me.(The jury is still out on if I am sane or not.) But show one nipple or say the F word just once, and everyone loses their shit.

The message in our culture is very clear. Ultra violence is A-okay, but swearing and sex is right out.

The simple fact is, kids swear. Kids know more about sex, and things that are supposed to be hidden from them, than makes society comfortable. Society would much rather watch children kill and mutilate one another than stand for a hearing a couple of swear words pass their lips.

I could say about a thousand things on this topic, but I'll stop there. Whenever I hear things like this, all I can hear is Mrs. Lovejoy from The Simpsons crying, "Won't somebody please think of the children!" When we all know all she is thinking about is herself, and her own level of comfort.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh2sWSVRrmo

[fhunter]

Just look at those TV shows like CSI, Law and Order, Castle, and a thousand other crime dramas. They talk about and show stuff that will make a sane person very sick. I know it does me.(The jury is still out on if I am sane or not.) But show one nipple or say the F word just once, and everyone loses their shit.

Just at 02 Apr 2012 at bash.org.ru appeared comic, that said just the thing, you are saying: http://bash.im/comics/20120402
The translation is:

-Strange thing youtube... You can not show tits, as it is erotica, but you can show someone first being shot at, and then hit with batons, cause it's okay.
-You videoed it all?
-Yes
-Lets go upload.

[Uncle Flo]

In order for BULLY to lose the "R" rating it was re-edited to remove almost all of the "F" words and other problem language. The MPAA ratings are made by a panel of parents and ordinary citizens using published industry guidelines. It is almost impossible to get a rating changed, possibly because the panel does not recognize that they can be in error (what, me?; I don't make mistakes!) --FLO--

[Sweetpickle]

You may recall that several years ago someone actually tracked down the
members of MPAA. Knowing that they are not totally immune to the public
may have improved their attitude.

Apparently I was totally oblivious to bullying in school. I think a couple of
kids might have tried and given up when it didn't work. It may partly have
been that I simply never backed down.

[tugon]

I am glad people are trying to educate children about bullying. Bullying has negative long lasting effects on people. Some people have been bullied by one or two people but when you live in a small city and go to a small private school your class or the school join in the bullying.

When you know that every day the boys will be punching you, spitting on you and verbally abusing you it becomes difficult to learn. When you are at home and depressed it is hard to do your homework. Homework reminds you of school and the panic of having to go back there tomorrow overwhelms you. Of course the girls mostly just verbally abuse you since they do not want to be left out of the fun.

You stop going to school activities because nothing changes at football games and there are adults who laugh along with your classmates. Your phone rings late and a voice you do not recognize threatens you with death. Working at the grocery store after school and a couple of classmates walk in and you about piss yourself over something they might say. Walking around town and boys shouting out of car windows at you. People who did not know you now know more about you than was safe. Oh well what is a few more people abusing you. It was a good time being gay in a small city in the early 70's.

I am going to see Bully. It might be therapeutic. I do not harbor much resentment but I can relate and understand the children who cannot stand the pain any longer.

[humanbean]

in censorship, the different standards applied to sex & violence come from a biased approach to morals and ethics. the censorship panels are dominated by ppl with right-wing outlooks; thus, the emphasis on moral purity. if the panels were staffed largely with ppl with left-wing attitudes, then there would less importance put on morals & more attention applied to ethical standards of behavior. actually, i don't know for a fact that censors are mostly right-wing. maybe, it just seems that way.

[janekane]

As best I now am able to remember, I became aware of bullying well before I learned to talk (in more than baby sounds; by which I mean in word sequences other people could understand), as I observed parents of other children somewhat older than I was, attempting to teach their children the social ways of "right and wrong." What I observed, before my first birthday, seriously troubled me; though I did not then have the words I am here going to use to explain my sense of being troubled back then (more than 72 years ago), my understanding (denotation) of what I observed as an infant has stayed with me ever since because I nave never found a more accurate way of understanding that troublement subsequently.

I observed the parents to be "bullying" their children, over their children's objections, into replacing the children's inborn sense of "right and wrong" with a social sense of "right and wrong" which I have always, without exception, experienced as being profoundly and tragically wrong.

To me, bullying is the use of torment to coerce a person into capitulating to another person (a bully) regarding one's sense of self-respectful validity as a person. Bullying is the overarching term, for me, for "enhanced interrogation," and the parent-child transaction of the infant-child socialization transition is inescapably of a shattering form of bullying if the result of the parent to-child bullying is the formation of psychological defenses which distort reality to protect the person being transitioned from infancy to childhood through the coercive indoctrination of the parent's idealized, traumatized, self- and other-deceptive false imago (or self-image?).

My parents were born during the first decade of the twentieth century of the common era, in frontier towns, before people where they lived had automobiles, and both of my parents, as children, learned to reide horses for distant travel purposes. When I was four, my parents arranged for me to learn the basics of riding horses; I was taught about the differences between neck-reined and bit-reined horses in terms of how to ride them with some plausible safety, and was also taught the difference between horses who were taught to accept human riders by being made ridable by being broken or by being gentled. I much prefer neck-reined, gentled horses for riding. I have sometimes wondered whether my parents thought that oil might run out during my lifetime, and riding horses would become an essential skill again...

Breaking a horse is, to me, comparable to the usual infant-child transition, during which the inborn honesty of little children is broken and replaced by a set of rules which are impossible for anyone to actually understand. My parents never taught me to obey them. They taught me to learn better and better to obey the innermost sense of conscience which I had already well-formed before I was born.

Came kindergarten, and about a third of my classmates set out to bully me into being like them, broken in heart, mind, and conscience. I chose to not be broken.

Came second grade, and my teacher thought I needed to be broken in heart, mind, and conscience, and, when I did not break, sent me off to the principal, who paddled me until I became agitated-catatonic, which the principal apparently thought indicated that i had learned the intended lesson, one I have never learned, only to find, sometimes the same day, that I "needed" another paddling.

It is my conjecture that no amount of bullying, no amount of torment, no amount of physical or mental abuse, will ever break me, or break my inborn conscience.

I understand that bullying is the coercive tormenting of a person deemed weaker than the one doing the bullying, with the objective of the torment being the one doing the tormenting having practical access to some viable variant of the Stockholm Syndrome.

Until one person eludes the infant-child transition, lives a decently socially productive life, and accurately describes said life effectively, so that other people can understand not only that such al life is actually possible, but also can understand that such a life is vastly better than a broken life, every child will be broken by default.

So, I set about the telling of my actual life, one which is without the infant-child transition trauma as lived experience, and is a life which is so vastly better than a broken one as takes all of my available effort to usefully describe.

I wonder whether that may help explain why I decline to enter into the "bashing contests" that I find tend to plague some of the threads on the Archive exchanges. I cannot find fault with any person or any thing. Neither can I find fault with fault-finding, though I allow that there may be merit in finding fault with fault-finding as a way of making a decent human society.