The Rising Epidemic of Bullying
We live in enlightened, feminist, non-racist, non-sexist times – or so we are told. So we are taught to believe. Girls can do anything: so the slogan ran when I was a girl. And so the picture of Keisha Castle-Hughes riding on the back of a water-bound mammal would have us believe.
I grew up in a kind, caring, loving household. There were boundaries, of course, but they weren’t too draconian. I was raised to believe that I could achieve my goals: I could put a marker-post down in the future, head towards it with conviction and vigour and, all things being equal, I could reach my goal. I could compete with the men – and with other women. I could be a go-getter, an achiever, a winner. If not Numero Uno, then perhaps Numero Novantanove. My parents tried to teach me strategies that I could use to protect myself. When I was bullied while cleaning a fish factory – ‘you’ve missed a fish scale’; ‘look me in the eye when I’m trying to bully you’ – my parents told me to complain to the manager. The bully promptly pulled her head in and I was given a glowing reference stating that I had great ‘strength of character’.
I progressed to university, a nice middle-class girl doing a B.A./LLB – inoffensive enough, and yet people seemed determined to treat me as somehow other; different.
When I was taken home to meet the parents of my first boyfriend the quizzing began.
“So what kind of contraception are you on?” asked his father.
“Um, I’m sort of on the pill,” I tentatively replied.
“Sort of? Are you or aren’t you?,” he shot back.
“I am.”
“Good. Because the next thing you know I won’t be supporting just you and Richard, I’ll be supporting thirty-three kids as well.”
At the age I am now, thirty-eight, with no children at all, I find myself wondering what I did to deserve such treatment. Perhaps being born female was enough. Born this way, as Lady Gaga would say. How could I have understood, when I came sliding forth from my mother’s womb, that my gender would prove to be so constricting? My parents created a safe place, a shelter. I was protected from many of the world’s evils. I was taught to play nice. I wasn’t warned about all the people rolling crooked dice. The wolves and the jackals. Little did I realize how riddled the world is with corruption and vice; with envy, with spite, with foul play.
When my first novel came out I hadn’t expected such a furore. Sure, I was only young, but did people really have to get so up in arms about it? I found myself in the middle of a bizarre process of simultaneous deification and vilification. This wasn’t what I had wanted. I had wanted to publish under a pseudonym, but it had been written into my contract that I had to use my own name. I had to put up with public humiliation, pack hatred, people sneering at me in the street.
“Why don’t I tell you to just fuck off then!” yelled an announcer at Radio New Zealand after I baulked at reading a passage from my novel aloud.
“Suicide’s good for sales”, said my editor’s husband.
“What makes you think anybody wants to know what’s going on in your head?” asked my father.
“Today’s news, tomorrow’s fish and chips”, chimed in my friend’s Dad.
Still, it could have been worse. Some writers get death threats. I seemed to attract a sort of morbid curiosity, like a weird lab specimen that somebody had captured to keep in a jar for public display. People seemed more interested in me than the book. I came to realize that (O, how Plath-like) there would have to be two of me; the public self and the private one. The more that other people are trying to invade your privacy, the thicker must be the wall that keeps them out. I, for one, had no desire to end up as tabloid fodder, a literary Middleton, preyed on by paparazzi.
There were role models but they were few and far between. There were examples of people who had won despite, or perhaps because of, obstacles. There was Kristen Hersh, who started up her band in her early teens when some form of mental illness started making its shock waves felt. My schoolmate Cindy Mosey lost her entire family in a plane crash of which she was the sole survivor, and yet she went on to become three-times world kite surf champion. She was a good example of somebody who had lost everything and then gone on to win. All I can tell you about being female is this: Any time I was good at something I got harassed. So, why bother? Surely it’s better just to lie low and sit around the house, smoking pot and watching Dogs With Jobs on the telly all day. Maybe I really am an obsessive over-achiever. More likely, I’m of the personality type that has to have something to do. Also, once I learn how to do something, I am quickly bored by it. For me, the fun is in the learning.
When I moved to London in 1998, I felt as if I was engaged in a complicated game of chess. All I had to my name were my two novels, my honours degree in English Literature and two thousand pounds that I had saved while fruit picking. I wondered what would become of me. My anxieties and doubts circled my head like tortured flies. How would I find the time to pen my tomes? How would I support myself? How would I survive? How would I find my way in the world? I was playing straight, but everyone around me was crooked. I felt as if somebody had set me down at a chessboard and told me to play my game, while all around me other people were performing their own very complicated manoeuvres. Or maybe it was the other way round. Maybe I was crooked and they were straight. The city was a jungle. Games were being played. And what sort of chess piece was I? A queen, a pawn, or something mid-range, a rook or knight perhaps? The female sales executives in the fund management firm where I worked seemed pathologically competitive with each other. One would even delete the other’s emails from the boss’s inbox, so that he wouldn’t be able to credit her with the work she’d done. What was to stop me from becoming like the people around me? What was to stop me from becoming an exploiter, a bully, a crook? Conscience, I think. Morals – if I still had any. But why should I be nice? Why should I be good? Maybe being a bitch would get me further. Maybe I could turn into a bully to deter other people from bullying me. Maybe I should just ditch whatever morals I had and turn into a complete crim. Start dealing coke and whizz, stealing cars, maybe turning tricks in a brothel.
So, what do you know about Fund Management? I was asked by an older gentleman at the interview for a P.A position.
Not a lot, but maybe you could tell me something about it, I responded.
Oh, I hate people who throw the question back at you, was the reply.
