"he's mean because he just likes you!"
did your middle school teachers tell you this when you were being bullied too?
‘oh, honey, he just likes you’
Thank you, all my middle school and elementary school teachers. That was a lie. I really don’t think the boys who walked into class every day of 6th grade and said “You know you’re fat right?” liked me. I don’t think the boy who rated me 0 on the ‘hot list’ in 4th grade, and then called me ‘hairy pittsburgh’ because I had armpit hair at 9 just ‘liked me.’ Sorry, not buying it. I feel like this mindset that attraction is expressed through harmful unkind words held me back from understanding myself, attraction and sexuality because all of it was steeped in fear.
I’m 26, when I was in middle school this was all too common. Teachers brushed off very deeply offensive and hurtful things boys would say to girls with the idea that they had a crush on you. Which was a nightmare. It ruined my self esteem and confidence, and made me feel like I had to see awfu,l horrible things boys would say as positive, like they expected me to really treat what they said to me as compliments. I spent all of middle school doing this. I let an awful boy send me emails telling me to ‘kill myself’ in 8th grade while just being absolutely enamored with him because, that meant he liked me, right? Right? That boy did actually like me, and when I blocked him he sent me increasingly creepy emails because he could no longer text me. By that point I realized he was creepy, and I didn’t care if he had a crush on me, I didn’t want him to contact me. In the last email he sent me, he found something I had reblogged on my tumblr that was as quoted in his words:
:
He was a real winner, wasn’t he? But that was the kind of attention I had come to expect, or had been at least told by my teachers that I should view positively. Which is wild, ridiculous and really unfair to tell young people that they should take this information and be like “omg isn’t he cute!’ The other emails he sent me included asking me to ‘nude model’ and another calling me out for blocking his phone number. He stopped after this kleenex email.
By the time I received that email, I had gone into high school in a different school from everyone I’d known for 8 years. Because of the bullying in middle school I truly thought I was ugly, unlikable and that it would be completely impossible for anyone to have a crush on me. Due to this kind of communication from this boy in combination with the bullying, I felt like no one would do anything to stop it and that I had to tolerate it quietly to make it go away. It hurt my self esteem. The first day at my high school a girl (who turned out to be a very kind person throughout high school) told me that I was “really pretty”, and I didn’t even know that was possible. I did not know people could be nice for no reason.
I didn’t realize I was bisexual yet while I was having all of these feelings, and once I realized that fear and attraction were not the same thing, I began to understand that the reason I had ever even liked any of these mean boys, was because I had confused the two. I realized I never really liked the boy who had sent me that email, I was afraid of him, and he was bullying me, but my teachers had said that was what people do when they’re attracted to you. I came out pretty soon after receiving that email, not necessarily because of it, I just had begun to realize that attraction and fear were not the same and the email reinforced that all he had ever made me feel was afraid.
Why did our teachers tell us this was how attraction was expressed? Did they realize how much they would fuck us up later down the line? Making harmful behavior a trait of attraction was a fucked up thing, that I hope no teacher is ever allowed to say that again. Though I know it will probably peripherally continue on. And I feel deeply saddened that some other child just like me may grow up thinking that attraction is rooted in fear.