The problem with political efforts to solve social or racial problems is, you can’t actually legislate your way out of bullying. If you eradicate one kind of distinction it just becomes something else. It’s a blue dot problem. The pattern persists, people just find new tokens. You can’t escape it by fiat, you can’t only learn to live above it.

I got bullied all the way from kindergarten through high school. It was probably worst in middle school, and that seems to be the case for almost everyone. I can see why I got it, I definitely stuck out. Maybe today I would have been bullied less, or maybe I would have become a bully. It’s hard to say. The players change, the rules change, the equipment used, but the game goes on.

You can’t majoritize everything. You can’t make everyone and everything enjoy the benefits of invisibility that come from being part of the majority. And anything that picks you out from the herd makes you a potential target for predators.

You generally solve those problems as you get further in life and become able to self-select your own group. It doesn’t matter that you’re a huge nerd if you self-select in high school into a group of all nerds. That ceases being something that picks you out and instead becomes something that makes you blend in. It’s zebra camouflage. They don’t blend into the savannah, they blend into one another. You might get predated on for something else, by a new internal predator if one exists in your group, but you can’t be predated upon for that item because it can’t be used to pick you out from the group.

Some things are really easy to pick out, like race or height or attractiveness or dress. But if you get rid of the easy to spot things (if that’s even possible), people will just find some other marker.

It’s not like the benevolent leftists who are so against (certain types of) bullying have social groups that are free from it. In fact they’re as rife with it as any group, maybe moreso because there’s more careful and moralistic authoritarian internal policing. Bullying just becomes about something else, different markers. Different camouflage.

Girls are typically less openly confrontational and physical in their bullying, but they are excellent bullies. I’ve been bullied by them, and I have girls myself who bully each other sometimes, and they tell me about what goes on in their social lives at schook. And we’ve all seen what happens on social media. People whose very creed is contrary to what we think of as masculine aggression are some of the worst perpetrators and victims of bullying, entirely within their own group.

In my own experience, if you’re a boy, girls are more likely to just shut you out and ignore you than actively pick on you. Exclusion is a powerful tool, a good defense sends as clear a message as an offensive action. Girls are very good at making it clear that you’re so beneath contempt that you don’t even rise to the level of being worth confronting. Aggressive men at least pay you the compliment of deciding that you’re worth picking on.

I’m not sure which is worse. They’re both bad in different ways. The action of men is more sharp, but it’s more contained. You can put it in a box and walk away and it’s over. What women do doesn’t hit you in the face as much (literally and figuratively), but it lingers, it persists and follows you around, it rankles, it nips at your ankles.

I remember my parents offering me a choice between a spanking or a time-out. My brother would always pick a spanking because it was so short and defined and then it was over and he could move on with his life. My sister always chose a time-out. Our time-outs were pretty benign, so it’s not a fair comparison. It wasn’t a persistent loss of freedom.

I was much more upset in my own life by female exclusion than I was about male aggression. It was just words and violence I got from the guys. I didn’t believe them or agree with them, and they couldn’t make me agree by any means, all they could do was act and talk like idiots. I laughed it off. But being shut out and ignored and despised by girls really did bother me. It hurt because I wanted acceptance.

It was easy for me to blow off the male bullying because I didn’t care about their acceptance. The sort of guys who did it were clearly jerks looking for easy targets, and I didn’t need the approval of jerks. I frequently told them so when we had encounters. And I know from talking to some of them later in life that although it drove some of them to attack me more, it also intimidated some of them. They knew that they wouldn’t escape psychologically unscathed and that, as far as I was concerned, I would. That made them think twice about picking on me.

Ultimately, we have to put some fences around bullying. But it’s not such an easy problem to solve as you might think. We can’t make everyone be good. There are always going to be men and women who will engage in some form of bullying, physical or social. You can’t legislate good character. And you can’t close down all the possible avenues for bullying or majoritize everything. People will just shift their criteria or keep on with the same criteria despite your efforts.

It’s not a shallow or simple problem, it’s a really deep one that emerges out of the basic conditions of humanity. That’s why it’s been an issue everywhere, forever. That’s why it’s even as issue among nonhuman species. A vast amount of the total activity of all biological life on Earth could be classified (with some anthropomorphization) as bullying.

We haven’t developed any better responses than the limits of the law (we can’t necessarily stop you, but we can punish you if you take it to this point of action), and the guidance and restraint of individual morality and character. It’s a problem that has to be continually navigated, not one you can just solve with a mandate or structural change. It’s a true problem. It’s an emergent issue that has to be actively and complexly negotiated as part of the messy business of life.