I read some long livejournal comment discussions (hundreds of comments, and sorry, I can’t place it more accurately than that it was probably more than four years ago and might have been in theferrett’s journal) about bullying by girls in school, and there was a lot of it. Almost all of it was social rather than physical.
One of the classics was pretending to be someone’s friend, and then laughing at them for believing it. That can apparently cause longterm (possibly permanent) damage to the victim’s ability to trust people.
The only incident from the threads that I remember in detail was from someone in a school where a particular pin was the thing the popular girls wore. She begged her parents for the pin, and eventually got one. When the other girls saw her wearing it, they took off their pins and threw them on the floor.
I suppose adults (around 20 years and onward) are the most productively discussable age group, as by then the mind has completed most of its development.
I can only think sadism the reason for why one would pretend to be someone’s friend, unless affirming the “absurdity” of the concept itself reinforces a status divide.
The pin incident points to in-groups using exclusionary measures to define themselves from everyone out-group.
Just conceived theory: In school settings, groups of girls that signal unavailability and attract the majority of their class’s opposite sex maintain these two measures of status through exclusively signalling themselves as what ‘high-status’ means. These signals often express themselves as psychological games. The theory would extrapolate to post-school settings by essentially repeating the process; have others signal one as high-status by treating one as such, then represent oneself as the epitome of high-status by using similar games to signal others as lower status.
The theory operates on the premise that the games are all about status, which I think would be sad if true. So specious.
What age group are we talking about?
I read some long livejournal comment discussions (hundreds of comments, and sorry, I can’t place it more accurately than that it was probably more than four years ago and might have been in theferrett’s journal) about bullying by girls in school, and there was a lot of it. Almost all of it was social rather than physical.
One of the classics was pretending to be someone’s friend, and then laughing at them for believing it. That can apparently cause longterm (possibly permanent) damage to the victim’s ability to trust people.
The only incident from the threads that I remember in detail was from someone in a school where a particular pin was the thing the popular girls wore. She begged her parents for the pin, and eventually got one. When the other girls saw her wearing it, they took off their pins and threw them on the floor.
I suppose adults (around 20 years and onward) are the most productively discussable age group, as by then the mind has completed most of its development.
I can only think sadism the reason for why one would pretend to be someone’s friend, unless affirming the “absurdity” of the concept itself reinforces a status divide.
The pin incident points to in-groups using exclusionary measures to define themselves from everyone out-group.
Just conceived theory:
In school settings, groups of girls that signal unavailability and attract the majority of their class’s opposite sex maintain these two measures of status through exclusively signalling themselves as what ‘high-status’ means. These signals often express themselves as psychological games.
The theory would extrapolate to post-school settings by essentially repeating the process; have others signal one as high-status by treating one as such, then represent oneself as the epitome of high-status by using similar games to signal others as lower status.
The theory operates on the premise that the games are all about status, which I think would be sad if true. So specious.