What a world (Bad Art Friend discourse post)

[yvannairie]

I can't look away from the bad art friend saga.

Initially I thought it must just be the sympathetic cringe -- I have been in Dorland's shoes so often, I am kind of notorious for messy parasocial relationships with people who truly have nothing against me but also absolutely nothing to say to me, and the visceral mockery appealed to the part of me that recognizes that while I didn't deserve to be bullied as a kid, I did bring it on myself for having a truly epic amounts of cringe weirdo energy. It's cathartic in a painful way to see that I probably won't ever be able to convince the people who find my bluntness and earnestness off putting to feel differently about me -- that no matter how obvious the pain I am in is to outsiders it'll never be enough. The more I hear about how Dorland is a spectacle out of her free will rather than obliviously, the more cathartic it feels. It's almost like an out-of-body experience.

But on the one, far more self-congratulatory hand, I'm also currently wrapping up a parasocial conflict of my one -- one where I've done the bare minimum arguing for myself from my perspective and one where I actively felt hounded and harassed over someone taking personally something and never clarifying what, how, and where they had gotten the idea that I would be interested in triggering a personal conflict with them. Seeing all that's coming out in the private chats makes me understand, far more immediately than I have before, that paranoia over people talking behind your back isn't just me being a mess, it's making me confront how I never quite believed it when people told me that was what someone did, no matter how many things it explained.

And yet more, I recognize that I don't actually care about this. Even my sympathetic cringe towards Dorland is not because I'm invested in her as a person as much as I'm interested in the developing narrative about how easy it is to victimize the socially unacceptable ie. the source of the recognition and subsequent out-of-body experience. All of these people are writers and yet there's such a blindness to narrative all around. The one person who seems to be selective in their wording and conduct is the one painted as utterly unselfaware and the ones most furious in their rhetoric don't seem to realize that by their nature as writers that reveals as much about their attitudes as their actions.

This is such a horror show and I wouldn't wish this on anyone. This should not be public, this should not be a spectacle. I can't believe that the dismissal of this as "everyone sucks here" misses the point so hard.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

I know only the bare outlines of the actual news event, but I couldn't read this post without saying that I do not believe you in any way brought the bullying that happened to you on yourself!

Just because bullying behavior is widespread doesn't make it acceptable. Just because everyone gossips does not mean we shouldn't do some soul searching about how or if our behavior might harm others.

You did not bring the bullying on yourself. I don't know you very well but I hope you have a Team You nowadays, as Captain Awkward says.

[palominocorn]

This is basically what I wanted to say as well! "Bringing bullying down on yourself" is not a thing, because bullying isn't a natural consequence of your behavior - it's an artificial one, an unfair "punishment" by people who want to hurt others.

[yvannairie]

Right, right, it's definitely the bullies who are doing something antisocial here!! Being a shitty person, let alone kind of just an irritating acquired taste or someone with low social skills and too much earnestness, is not a cause or a defense for bullying. People are allowed to suck, and that still doesn't give anyone the right to abuse them.

Also thank you :) I honestly didn't expect people to catch that bit of self-deprecation, but you both honed in on it to give me what for for the moping.

[yvannairie]

Thank you, I really appreciate you taking a hard stance on this because, yeah! I agree, I don't ever think bullying/abuse is something someone can cause for themselves. I couldn't figure out how to phrase it better, but I was thinking about it more from the perspective of... trying to understand wanton cruelty, and trying to understand how bullies/abusers pick their marks, y'know? There has to be a reason why so many bullying victims who people don't consider victims resemble each other, why we all are (in the most loving terms possible) so goddamn annoying. I fully understand that there are people who find me offputting every day and only a handful of them have ever escalated it to bullying, and that knowledge genuinely makes me feel better, because it once again turns the lens back towards the bullies. Someone can find me intensely annoying, and still be entirely capable of treating me with dignity and humanity.

This drama, if nothing else, demonstrates to me that bullies dehumanise their victims very efficiently in their heads. It's about their personal feelings, their feeding of the toxic cycle of obsession with someone who sucks and gives them bad vibes. Their behaviour is wrong, without ever needing to argue that maybe the victim didn't suck and have bad vibes. I can never make that argument for myself, I know I objectively sucked and had bad vibes all throughout the period of my most intense bullying and it feels very disingenious and disrespectful to the people I harmed with my toxicity, but the people who bullied me were still in the wrong.

[palominocorn]

The way I explain it to myself, as a fellow recovering Very Irritating Person who was bullied, is basically that two wrongs don't make a right.

I can genuinely be very obnoxious, and that can warrant a lot of things for people to *get away from or otherwise try to stop the behavior*: people not being my friends, people setting boundaries and walking away when I cross them, people telling the teachers that I'm being a jerk again, people asking to be placed in a different table/class to get away from me, and, from the teacher side, sending me to the counselor to hopefully talk some sense to me (they tried, it didn't work, yes I was a mess).

It does NOT warrant: calling me names, stealing or wrecking my stuff, hitting me or otherwise causing me deliberate pain, spreading rumors (as opposed to accurately warning people that I might growl at them like a rabid dog for no apparent reason), or using my disability/race/queerness/gender against me. These things are NOT defense mechanisms against a toxic person or natural avoidance tactics, but people going out of their way to hurt someone whom they perceive as an acceptable target. I mean... to do any of these things, people have to deliberately spend MORE time around me!

I do have some knowledge and thoughts on how bullies pick their targets, which I can share if you're interested, but that has to wait until I am typing on a computer.

[yvannairie]

I would be really interested. My insight into abuse from the abuser's perspective is limited and I've always been a little afraid it means I haven't fully processed how the way I hurt people actually played out.

[princessofgeeks]

I don't know you in real life, and I don't know you at the age you are discussing, but I think you are being very hard on yourself.

Whether the victims of bullying have a "type" I do not know, because my experience is quite limited. I was bullied by mean girls in the fifth grade--only verbally. My son was bullied by mean boys in the second grade and it extended to physical assault.

I clearly remember some horrific bullying of developmentally disabled children in my elementary school -- a totally different category.

My son and I were totally different personality types at those ages, so I have very little data here.

But victims of bullies never bring it on themselves. Never. I don't care how annoying and "bad vibe-y" they are. Bullying is a choice made by the bullies. How hard would it be to just ignore or leave alone the kids you don't like? Not hard at all.

[yvannairie]

Fair, but I think I'm hard on myself for a reason. Like, me being bullied did actively turn me into an abuser for a hot minute there, and I don't like shying away from it. Yes, it was me, I was fucking awful, I don't get to talk around that even now when I've improved as a person. The harm I did isn't mine to handwave away, especially not because I haven't talked to my victims in years and don't know how they're coping.

But it's important for me to see that what I became was, on some level, my failure. It wasn't because I had an easily victimisable set of traits, because other people with similar easily victimisable traits hadn't turned out fucked-up like I did, and didn't deserve their bullying and abuse despite those easily victimisable traits.

[princessofgeeks]

Yeah, we've all done things we regret and made mistakes. And hurt people in some way.

Good for you for being willing to own up to them.