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Why Geeks Get Bullied (It's Not Necessarily for Being Geeks)

• jacques_chester 13y ago
  I suggest that a simpler hypothesis is that children mature at different rates. Empathy and moral self-control emerge at different times in different children. The overlap between adorable sociopaths who can talk and adorable intellectuals who can feel lasts for quite a while. To make it worse, children are placed together in a deliberately infantilising environment with very few role models who aren't basically wardens as well as educators.
  • Cthulhu_ 13y ago
    And yet, I'd argue that placing people at different stages of development - smart kids & dumb kids, apprentice and senior developers, etc - is a good thing. Putting kids that show increased intellect will give them a skewed perception of reality, i.e. that the average person is smart, instead of realizing diversity in people and dealing with it. Primary lesson there: You are not special.
    • jacques_chester 13y ago
      An Australian longitudinal study was recently linked from HN showing that streaming intelligent kids makes them happier, more successful and better adjusted. Throughout school and afterwards. There is a difference between an apprenticeship and simply being forced to mix with children who literally don't yet have the same neurological architecture as you. edit: here's the link -- http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10489.aspx http://www.davidsongifted.org/db/Articles_id_10489.aspx
• discountgenius 13y ago
  There are many reasons why kids get bullied. There is no unified theory of bullying that explains it all. For years I thought I was picked on because I was smarter than my peers. Looking back, it seems more likely that I was really kind of a brat about getting better scores on things. There were plenty of smart kids at my school who didn't get picked on.
  • James_Duval 13y ago
    I'm pretty sure the people who bullied you were to blame for you being bullied! Continue to be a brat about those better scores, it encourages the rest of us and sometimes it puts a bigger brat in their place.
  • artsrc 13y ago
    If I got set upon by fellow employees on the way home I would not be wondering what personal characteristic led them to choose me. How about: "Kids are frequently bullied because they are placed in an stupid environment which does not adequately protect them."
• jonny_eh 13y ago
  Class and gender roles? Where's the evidence? It's all just conjecture and anecdote. If that's how we're going to do it, I would assume a simpler explanation. Kids, and often adults too, want to show to their peers, or themselves, that they're strong. So they pick on the weak to prove it.
  • calibraxis 13y ago
    Personally, I think class, gender and race are ultimately major factors; there's huge amounts of literature on their effects on society. But it's probably easier to look directly at schools and families; these are the most concrete relevant institutions. Schools generally aren't enlightened places. Many of them, especially for the poor, are particularly clear about their prison-like nature: need for written permission to move ("hall pass"), threat of prison, etc. So you get some prison-like dynamics. But even many above-average ones impose hierarchy, rating individuals and setting them against each another using competition (competition is a well-known way to atomize and control people), obedience to authority figures no matter how ridiculous, etc. In any case, these places generally provide virtually nothing in the way of conflict resolution, like particularly nasty governments. And most families aren't utopian institutions either. Parents often act like owners of their children, and take out their frustrations and psychological problems on them. Child abuse (even for conservative notions of "abuse") is rampant. Even when parents aren't overtly abusive, they may simply not be particularly competent at the skill of nurturing children's minds and bodies.
• TelmoMenezes 13y ago
  My hypothesis on bullying is simple: human beings are animals and like to fight for dominant positions. The low intellectual and/or emotional development of some kids will lead them to try for overt dominance, instead of the more sophisticated and hypocritical adult versions. Geeks are targeted because they are weak -- either in physical strength or in alliances.
  • orangethirty 13y ago
    Or maybe just different. I always had to deal with people who felt insecure around me. School was easy and I got good grades without trying. Meanwhile, others were struggling. That made them hate me. Though the joke was on them when I started practicing martial arts. (:
• dnautics 13y ago
  what about the other way around? Maybe people who get bullied disproportionately wind up becoming geeks.
  • mikecane 13y ago
    Or drug addicts or alcoholics or suicidal. So, no.
• Qantourisc 13y ago
  I blame the parents! The most important thing to teach your kid as soon as possible is self-reflection.
• SiVal 13y ago
  It's extremely common in the animal (incl. human) world to seek dominance. In cultures where physical domination is rewarded, you have violence to establish the dominance. In cultures where intellectual dominance is rewarded, you have more expressions of contempt for "stupid" people. When you have a diverse group, you have the strong beating up the weak and the smart verbally humiliating the dumb. It's not complicated. It's about public status and privately making yourself feel superior. Blaming it on class and gender roles is one of those things that urban intellectuals do to maintain their status among urban intellectuals. Maybe he should analyze it from a Marxist-feminist perspective for good measure.
  • afshin 13y ago
    "Blaming it on class and gender roles is one of those things that urban intellectuals do to maintain their status among urban intellectuals. Maybe he should analyze it from a Marxist-feminist perspective for good measure." I don't suppose the irony of this statement escaped you.
    • dasil003 13y ago
      It's escaping me. He said "for good measure". Where is the irony?
      • James_Duval 13y ago
        His comment exhibits anti-intellectual posturing.
        • psutor 13y ago
          It's actually anti-urban-intellectual posturing, suggesting that the comment author is on a higher level intellectually. I had a good laugh at both the joke itself and that the telling of the joke is an act of "verbally humiliating the dumb".
          • brazzy 13y ago
• konstruktor 13y ago
  So after decades of arguing, finally getting close to a consensus that we stop blaming the victims and focus on the perpetrator with the crime of rape, we are now starting the same kind of discussion all over again with yet another kind of abuse? Well done, society.
• kentwistle 13y ago
  Obviously picked on him because he's so smart and brilliant. Some birds aren't meant to be caged, their feathers are just too bright.
  • tehwalrus 13y ago
    this is precisely the point the author is attacking; the problem of deciding that the bullying is the result of the fact that you're special, not part of a routine culture of violence.
    • pekk 13y ago
      But it isn't a routine culture of violence. It is a culture of shaming, violence and impunity against victims with very specific traits. Which actually do include things like intellectual ability, sensitivity or preference to be alone. It actually isn't equally applied to everyone.
      • tehwalrus 13y ago
        I didn't mean it applied equally to everyone; I mean it applies to all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons, nerds and not. victims with very specific traits - You're choosing to ignore a whole load of violence (including harassment) which undoubtedly occurs against members of all minorities (indeed, to all "diversity streams" - since women are in fact the majority.) You're arbitrarily filtering out all sorts of similar violence that happens to people who aren't nerds, which isn't valid (the author argues).
• trustfundbaby 13y ago
  Bullies pick on folks who don't really fit in i.e who other people in a group won't stand up for, and who don't hit back. It really isn't more complicated than that. Thinking it is is giving bullies waaaay too much credit.
  • gadders 13y ago
    I once heard it cruelly expressed as "If you look like food, you're going to get eaten." No-one should be bullied, but if sometimes geeks could rein in their Fotherington-Thomas [1] aspects for their own good, they might have an easier time. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotherington-Thomas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotherington-Thomas
    • mikecane 13y ago
      >>>I once heard it cruelly expressed as "If you look like food, you're going to get eaten." I've never heard that before. That's an eye opener. Now I must think about how not to look like "food."
      • dsmfkdlmgksld 13y ago
        Improve your social skills. Improve your awareness of your own behaviour and other people's reactions. All skills can be trained, you just have to give yourself achievable challenges.
        • mikecane 13y ago
          The key word is "look," not act.
  • icebraining 13y ago
    Suggesting that people's behaviours are shaped by society's class structure is not giving them credit. The author wasn't claiming that the bullies were making a rational decision to beat him up based on the class difference.
• skreech 13y ago
  There are lots of peer reviewed papers that come to a completely different conclusion than this article (for example, that social skills and verbal skills are critical). I recommend reading those instead of this article, which seems based on speculation.
• precisioncoder 13y ago
  I feel like people are missing the point about the "fake geek" meme. If a bunch of football players were strutting around in batman costumes at conventions I feel like the same ire would be directed at them. Geeks are (or were) mostly outcasts. The geek world was their world. Now the popular kids are into geek culture since it's the in thing and they feel like they are losing their world. Being pushed to the perimeter of a world they built as a refuge. I understand the view, and I often feel wistful that if I see someone wearing a batman t-shirt there's a much smaller chance than before that he's friend material.
  • dasil003 13y ago
    The correct response to the trauma that many geeks experienced growing up is to understand the pain and thus avoid inflicting it on others. When we were kids we would have loved for this stuff to be popular (hence why we talked about it to everyone), but now we are so traumatized that we don't want anyone without the same wounding to be allowed access? I refuse to become embittered and grudgeful to the point that I'm lashing out at people for showing merely a passing interest in one of my treasured hobbies (fake geeks on TV is another matter). We're not in high school anymore, most of the jocks grew up and so did most of the geeks. The ones from both camps who are stuck in a mentality formed years before reaching psychological and social maturity are living tragically stunted lives. Our goal should be transcendence; there are many who have suffered far greater abuse than geeks who have achieved it.
    • precisioncoder 13y ago
      I agree with the spirit of your post, and agree that that should be our aspiration. The reality of it can be far different. There have been cases where geeks are being discriminated against for their appearance and social habits in the community they built. Cosplay is a good example, costume quality will only carry you so far, when less conventionally attractive people no longer have a chance to compete the feel of the society starts to change. When the interests you have are shared by the people who discriminate against you and they're still discriminating against you a backlash is inevitable. I am not say it is right or fair, but I do understand it.
• lucian1900 13y ago
  His anecdote is irrelevant. Plenty of poor children get bullied. This article makes things worse, if anything.
  • James_Duval 13y ago
    His anecdote is irrelevant to bullying, not to the bullying of geeks.
    • lucian1900 13y ago
      To both, because it is an anecdote. Plenty of poor geeks get bullied too.
      • James_Duval 13y ago
        Anecdotes and anecdata can be ignored from a statistical point of view, when determining the truth of a statement about a population, it's true, but people can still illustrate a point with an anecdote - and the anecdote is not central to his post's argument, it's just an illustration. What he is suggesting is that both privilege and a lack of privilege (he mentions homosexuality as an example, poverty might be another example) are more important than "being a geek" to whether you get bullied. When you are called a geek, consider what the aggressor means by that; is it that s/he considers you overly-effeminate? That you can't afford to take part in social activities, making you an outcast? Or perhaps that you have opportunities and a position in the mainstream which they can't have? That is all the author is saying (I think, I may have mis-read or read selectively). They're not saying that poor geeks don't get bullied.
        • pekk 13y ago
          Sure, people are bullied for having qualities that are inherent to being a geek, or very strongly associated. But not for actually being a geek. What? That's a meaningless distinction. Of course bullies do not necessarily use the word 'geek,' that word is a product of people trying to carve out a measure of societal and self-respect by claiming the label (like others have claimed 'queer' - a closely related concept given that all these targets are lumped together as bottoms for the purposes of imposing domination with impunity). It's far from true that nobody is attacked for having qualities encapsulated in the word 'geek'.
• dasil003 13y ago
  I'm all for taking a good hard look at your assumptions and personal narrative to clean up biases, but this guy is generalizing way too much. Take this for instance: > Americans have trouble seeing class, and the intersection between class and intellectualism—or geekishness, if you prefer—can be especially invisible. "Geekishness" is an intersection of class and intellectualism? That's absolutely horseshit. There are no shortage of poor geeks and rich jocks. Being middle class definitely confers some advantages to pursuing those interests, but it has nothing to do with the innate quality of geekiness. Furthermore, geeky interests are not particularly intellectual per se, it's just we like to get involved in the details of them beyond what most people consider normal.
  • kamaal 13y ago
    >>innate quality of geekiness Very well put. The problem is most geek/nerd kids don't realize they are geeks/nerds until some point in their teenage. In my case, I always wondered 'Why I was so different from others?'. It was only until a time in teenage that I realized this was actually a positive quality. Over time I saw geeks/nerds do far better than life than others, especially bullies. Most bullies I know have only gone downwards in their lives, even the rich ones have only gone down with time.
    • Cthulhu_ 13y ago
      > Most bullies I know have only gone downwards in their lives, even the rich ones have only gone down with time. ^ this. I was bullied by some kid, took me years later (and processing an experience at his house) to realize he was probably beat up by his mom. Short straw went to him, imho.
  • psutor 13y ago
    I believe his "—or geekishness, if you prefer—" is referring only to "intellectualism", a way of broadening the scope rather than redefining "geek".
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • 13y ago
• thesz 13y ago
  I read up to "gender roles" where "more into D&D than football" was mentioned. The I stopped, as author linked it to homophobia. This thing is not a gender role difference. This thing is difference in force and fitness. Being fit allows you to both bully and stand for bullying. There nothing related to homophobia there. I was bullied myself until some spring my "friends" found that I can pullup more than them. I wasn't bulied anymore. I was hated, but that's different story. I also should mention that there are almost no gender roles in human society. Especially for males - they should be successful in finding food and a place to stay at night and that's all. Thus I consider author dumb one. He sees things that do not exist.
  • mikecane 13y ago
    >>>I also should mention that there are almost no gender roles in human society. That is just so wrong. You need to have a look around.
    • thesz 13y ago
      Compare humans to pigeons, for example. Human gender differentiation is much less exressed.
  • pekk 13y ago
    Sorry, but you are completely wrong about this and you are justifying bullying. No, bullies are not physically fit, many of them are obese children and a lot of the time the attacks are by a mob of kids and not just one strong, fit one. This and homophobia are actually well related, as bullied victims are often shamed as "fags" and accused - by people like you - of meriting the treatment due to their weakness or effeminacy. And it is also of one piece with blaming rape victims for the way they dressed. It is all one role, that of the passive-receptive 'bottom' which society despises.
    • thesz 13y ago
      Obese people are stronger than non-obese. I didn't mean fit, just more strong. I am not justifying bullying, I was bullied in school. I am failing to see how you read my comment to infer this. Gay people call themselves fags when swearing. Are they homophobic too? It seems to me that you (and author of original article) infer something big from small thing.
• cromwellian 13y ago
  Did this author not watch _Revenge of the Nerds_? Were Booger, Gilbert, or Lewis of economically higher class than the Jocks? I was bullied, I grew up poor. Neither of my parents were college educated. Mother raised 3 kids as a single parent while doing menial jobs. Living in a crime ridden neighborhood in Baltimore City where other kids were getting killed for their Nikes, books and computers were my only refuge, fantasy words of SciFi, even distopian ones, a better place to live than where I started. (BTW, when I got into a better school finally in the suburbs, I was made fun of by kids because my family was poor, not because of privilege) My theory of why geeks are bullied is the same as why goths are bullied, or why fat people are bullied. When lions hunt buffalo on the plains, they look for those they get separated from the pack. Simply put, attacking an individual that is part of a smaller, less powerful, group is more likely to succeed without anyone coming to their defense. If geeks, even as a small population, worked like the Crips, bullies wouldn't dare, knowing that an attack on one would invite tit-for-tat counter attacks. If a bully goes after someone who has lots of friends in the main group, they put themselves at bigger risk. The more interesting question is why geeks don't have a mutual defense or strength in numbers, the answer there probably lurks in perhaps connections between seeking out things because you implicitly like them, and seeking out things because they are likely to strengthen the bonds within your social group ("fitting in", "bowing to peer pressure"). Most of the non-fake-geeks I know just can't stomach being in-authentic, of pretending to like stuff just to fit in, and so there may just be some core personality or emotional intelligence traits that are different in people end up at the fringes like this. If you subscribe to Meyers-Briggs, then it's people who are in categories like INTP.
  • lnanek2 13y ago
    Yeah, I'd take any of the comments on this post, save a few, over his thesis. It just doesn't work for many situations.
  • __--__ 13y ago
    > When lions hunt buffalo on the plains, they look for those they get separated from the pack. Simply put, attacking an individual that is part of a smaller, less powerful, group is more likely to succeed without anyone coming to their defense. This was exactly my experience in school. I wasn't bullied in high school, I was bullied throughout elementary instead. I'm INTP, introverted, extremely geeky, but none of that was why I was bullied. I was bullied because I was fat and I didn't know how to fight back. I was an easy target, basically. I had friends, but none who were capable of physically standing up for me, so we all suffered the consequences. The bullying stopped in 7th grade (13 years old) when I stabbed one of my bullies with a pen and was suspended. I also started weight lifting and made a name for myself on the JV football team. The bullying stopped, even though I had become no less the geek and didn't stop hanging out with my geek friends. > The more interesting question is why geeks don't have a mutual defense or strength in numbers In my experience, fear. In a typical school pecking order, if you're not capable of physically dominating others, then you live in constant fear of being physically dominated yourself. I certainly was.
• jasonwocky 13y ago
  Geeks get ostracized because other kids are more or less forced to compete with them for grades in school, and resent the fact that they come up short. This is as opposed to, e.g. jocks who mostly compete with other folks who've voluntarily chosen the same arena of competition. Geeks get bullied because it's easy for people who are prone to bullying to bully ostracized kids.
• yourapostasy 13y ago
  I tend to agree with the comments that this is probably way over-thinking the issue from a certain perspective, but the author makes a subtle point that I generally agree with. The general premise that bullies don't particularly single out geeks leads to some interesting implications that I think has not been commented upon very much. She acknowledges that: > On the contrary, I think people get bullied for lots of reasons. Which leads to the implication she touches upon near the end of the essay: > ...violence is not special, but routine—and if you can't understand the violence directed against you, how can you stop it? She's pointing out that geeks shouldn't necessarily think that they were bullied because they were smarter than the others, but because bullying is a common feature upon the dystopic educational landscape. And not recognizing this leads to a situation where bullying of victims who are not somehow especially outstanding in some way (smart being only one attribute of specialness), is not recognized as bullying. She cites that this sometimes emerges from previous victims of bullying themselves by mentioning how male geeks sometimes bully female geeks for not being "real geeks". All this is well and good, but it unfortunately doesn't materially help the folks on the ground waking up today and dreading their daily bullying gauntlet. This perspective is where I think the article is possibly over-thinking the issue, by not providing actionable information. To be fair, I don't think that was her intent, but judging from the comments, there is a sub-group of people who seem to desire that kind of information with these articles that explore bullying. At the risk of generalizing, and supplying actionable information that may be out of date, in my personal anecdotal experience bullies select victims that somehow respond in a manner that rewards the bullying. Thus the commonly-dispensed advice to "ignore them". But I think that advice often doesn't come with a helping of how to ignore them, and really should be dispensed as advice on using ignoring as a way to stand up for yourself. Ignoring taunts while showing on your face that the taunting shatters your confidence and self-worth tends to incite further bullying. Ignoring in a manner (which will not be easy to pull off) that fizzles out the "fun" of the bullying is a means of standing up for oneself. This may sometimes mean actually interacting with the bully, but not in a manner that they expect; the "ignoring" refers to ignoring the intended effect of the bullying, and figuring out what action takes the fun out of the bullying. I wish someone had told me this when I was first going through my daily gauntlet. For males, and increasingly for females, physical bullying is sometimes the form. I was very fortunate that I grew up in a part of the world and time where just fighting back was sufficient to stop physical bullying. I got the snot beaten out of me sometimes, but the ringleaders I was up against uniformly did not like to get their hands dirty, so using the element of surprise to land in a hit that draws blood (visible bruising counts) helped me dissuade them from further bullying. These days, there are more nasty places where you can get murdered fighting back. Be safe, play it smart, and don't get yourself killed if you are stuck in that kind of situation; if you're in such a dangerous situation and the adults around you aren't helping, some anonymous forums can sometimes provide ideas from sympathetic adults who have been-there-done-that. YMMV, and all that.
• tehwalrus 13y ago
  Lots of people seem to be cross at a few of his incidental points (the article is not saying that social class is the root of all bullying) so I'll just emphasise the conclusion: The problem is that this can lead you to a place where suffering, or persecution, only matters when, or because, the victim is special. This, in turn, can make it hard to see the ways in which violence is not special, but routine — and if you can't understand the violence directed against you, how can you stop it? The point he's making is that anti-nerd violence is not unique, but part of the wider culture of violence for all sorts of reasons (and in all sorts of directions - up and down the social 'ladders'). I encourage you to read the disqus comments on the article itself, where the author responds to many of the objections raised here.
• RyanMcGreal 13y ago
  A social hierarchy based on insecurity will persecute anyone who is different: by socioeconomic status, by interests, by gender normativeness, by sexuality, and so on. We don't need to subsume one in another to make sense of the system.
• chatmasta 13y ago
  Honestly, all you need to do to avoid bullying is have the balls to fire back at anyone who makes fun of you. If you just sit back and take it, you make yourself a target. By if you immediately fire back with a response, effectively "bullying the bully," he'll eventually stop targeting you. This is such a basic male social concept that I would expect "geeks" (btw, why even self label yourself? Seems to set yourself up for failure) of all people to understand it. I think a lot of what people see as "bullying" is actually a just half of this male social pattern of "giving each other shit." It's just what guys do. If you can handle it and fire back, you don't call it bullying. It's only when you refuse to participate that it becomes bullying. Obviously, that line of logic has some inherent victim blaming, and I am not defending bullying at all. I think it's despicable. But at some point you just need to accept the status quo and learn to defend yourself instead of lamenting about it. And if you're truly smarter than the person bullying you, it should be no problem to come up with a quick witted response. Come on people. Get some confidence.
• Crake 13y ago
  TFA says: "I wasn't being bullied because I was sensitive, in other words. I was being bullied because I was privileged" and that his refusal to accept this was "but simply an excuse to perpetuate" the "system of power." What the fuck, man. I guess all those ~privileged~ gay kids who killed themselves deserved it for not checking their privilege. Ridiculous. As a GLBT, and in addition to that, a smart and geeky one, I got bullied a lot in high school. There were some occasions where I couldn't (and still can't) understand the reasons why, but there were at least a few times where it was pretty clear whether I was being targeted for being GLBT or being targeted for being smart. This author is full of shit.