It's 'cause he likes you

One thing that became clear in reviewing these things is that we tell children really stupid stuff.

Telling kids that if someone is picking on them they should just ignore it? That's worse than stupid.

Yeah, some bullies might get tired and move on, but a lot of them will get much worse. When their motivation is attention, withholding attention might just make them try harder. For me, they just got bolder until I lashed out.

Worse than that is the impact on the one doing the ignoring. The times when I ignored abuse are the same times that I internalized it. When I stood up for myself, I felt much better, like maybe I was worth defending. Maybe I was worth something. What I ignored, I carried around for years.

Another really wrong-headed thing we tell girls (and sometimes boys too) is that if someone is picking on you it's because he likes you.

It took me a long time to be able to talk about what happened that day. The first time I told someone, it was a counselor and I was crying. I lied to her that I understood now that it didn't really mean I couldn't be loved, because I still could not accept it, and if I told her that she would have kept going.

The second time I had trouble breathing, but I could keep from crying as long as I didn't make eye contact. Most recently, I talked about it with one of the friends who had been there.

She told me that in the summer after that, she had been hanging out with another girl and some guys, including Steve, and he propositioned her. "You know what they say about when guys pick on you..."

That seems like a terrible response. In her defense, we were talking about how impossible it is for me to feel attractive because of that, and she was pointing out that it could have happened because I was attractive.

It still doesn't make me feel attractive because it was abusive.

I have thought of that, since we talked. Maybe "What do you think?" was not a dismissal, but an opening. Then it all just seems horribly twisted.

That can fit into a larger discussion of competition and hierarchy and the need to put other people down, and it is worthwhile to have that discussion, but that's not where I'm going now.

It feels important to spend some time on that rather broad definition of "likes". The word itself has positive connotations, but we're not using it that way if we're associating it with abuse.

In that context "likes" can mean...

• feels attracted to you but resents that attraction because you are not the type that he believes he should be attracted to.
• feels attracted to you but doesn't believe he can get you, so he resents that.
• feels attracted to you but has a twisted view of male/female relationship where "liking" does not provide any reason to treat with kindness or respect.
• wants to have sex with you, or grope you, or at least get to see your breasts, with or without your cooperation and definitely without any worries about the emotional impact on you.

But it's a compliment. Then I think about teenage girls who romanticize jealousy because it shows how passionate he is about you, as opposed to possibly being a better sign of him thinking he can and should be able to control you.

I have friends who have been beaten by men who loved them, and lied to and raped and all sorts of horrible things by men who wanted them. Some of those men were bad people, and some could have been better people with some better role models for how to treat people, and in a society that doesn't regard women as property, so yes, there is a lot of room for improvement there.

There is room for improvement in our understanding of how to win fights. Those times when I stood up for myself, I did so by being really mean. With two people who made fun of me for being fat, one I shamed for failing fifth grade, and one I told "I wouldn't talk with that face". And it was good in that these incidents didn't haunt me, but still not a great way to relate to people. The one kid was really hurt, and the other one might have been hurt underneath wanting to kill me.

I would like to have better strategies to offer. Sometimes I think maybe I should have just kept asking people "Why?", like an annoying child. It certainly wears parents down. (Why do you want me to go out with you? Why would I want to? I don't know.)

Until we get there, let's not pretend that harassment is a compliment or that abuse is cute or that the best strategy is silence. When we know that society sucks and don't know how to fix it, the answer is not to lie.