Daily Archives: March 12, 2009

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Equal opportunity bullying on the mean streets of Charlottesville

Yesterday I was jogging past the parking lot of the auto body shop, imagining all the different car accidents responsible for the wreckage, when I was approached by a pair of nine-year-old girls carrying Fiddlesticks. I’m not usually intimidated by nine-year-olds, but these girls decided to pick on me because they perceived me – wrongly! – to be old and daydreamy and significantly out of shape. One of the girls – the ringleader – gave me a nefarious look and started pretending her mini lacrosse stick was an electric guitar. She shouted all the chords at the top of her lungs, bullying me with her stupid, made-up song while we passed on the sidewalk. It’s like she was mocking my musicianship, except I was wearing running shoes and she was carrying sports equipment and I couldn’t ascertain any connection between what the three of us were doing and the way in which I was being taunted. But I felt like I was under attack and I was frightened, so I quickly jogged away. But the two girls took a shortcut across a field and intercepted me on the next block where they resumed aggressively playing their lacrosse stick guitar at me and laughing and I was forced to flee and hide out in a nearby CVS until I was sure they were gone.

But as clearly disturbing as this incident was, I’m sort of proud that young female, and not just male, bullies are now picking on the weak and defenseless in Charlottesville. As a young girl I never would have had the balls to confront an elegant, athletic, mature woman on the street and try to take her down a notch in some inexplicable fashion. I feel like feminism has come a long way in America when delinquent girls can be loud and rude and intrepid and gang up on strangers who have wandered into their neighborhoods in the name of physical fitness and who then go home and cry from fear and confusion after accepting the girls’ weird abuse, when that used to be the exclusive purview of troubled young men.

Keep up the good work, my young sisters! I fully support you in your equal opportunity bullying. My only suggestion would be to develop a more coherent system of attack so you don’t leave your victims feeling like they missed the point. But maybe you’re waging psychological warfare, in which case, wow.