School Daze and the Mobs

Inspired by some talk elsewhere in the blogworld and such about abuse and female abusers ...

I'm not actually going to go into depth on the mommy issues front, though that is obviously a major factor; I want to write about adolescent dynamics.

It has always been easier for me to write about the bullying from the boys; it was so concrete and clear and distinct. I can trace chunks of things to those specific actions, those specific situations. And it's ... acceptable, easy, part of the standard narrative, for a woman to write about trauma inflicted by male entities, to put stories about sexual harassment or violence out in the forefront and talk about them. Talk about this, and one will get the support and the emotional recognition and the sense of community that comes of having the experience recognised and categorised as like the rest of us.

In my early adolescence, there were adults (sex largely irrelevant, generally positively inclined towards me), background people (sex largely irrelevant, generally just Face In Crowd people and irrelevant), individuals (sex depending on the individual; of the individuals who were actually positive presences in my life, the overwhelming majority were male), and The Boy Mobs and The Girl Mobs.

To the Boy Mobs, I was a target: prey, a toy, an isolated female-appearing figure with no support network, an object on which they could vent their explorations of sexuality. I was under no illusions that they were friendly; their hostility and depersonalisation was simple and straightforward enough that it presented a certain amount of protection from them: what I saw was what I got. It just happened that what I saw was negative.

Girl Mobs were ... complicated. For the most part they were content to treat me with a distant, mocking derision, laughing when they did not ignore me. Sometimes they stared, making great goggle-eyes of pointed attentiveness to the space alien; every so often one might detach to approach me and ask a question - pop culture, stylish fashion, that sort of thing - in order to determine that yes, I was completely incompetent at socialising like real people and take that information back to the Girl Mob to titter over.

For some reason, though, I thought the Girl Mobs might be less hostile. I suspect because I had picked up on some of the cultural assumptions that People Of My Sex Are My Natural Allies And Likely To Think Like Me, because there's no damn good reason to think of it otherwise. Perhaps it was also because they were more likely to be content to simply ignore my existence than make a game of me, and that might almost pass for benign. Sometimes, when a member of a Girl Mob would approach me, she would pass herself off as an Individual, someone with whom I might be able to form a relationship, someone who might be a friend ...

... who might invite me to a slumber party at a nonexistent address.

Yeah.

Boy Mobs were more likely to be physically dangerous, but at least they didn't even pretend to treat me like a potential person in order to get my guard down. I didn't trust them, I didn't have any reason to like them, and even though they hurt me badly, I didn't expect anything but hurt from them, so there was no betrayal.

Girl Mobs, when they deigned to notice me, lived for the joy of crushing hope and destroying the dregs of capacity for trust that my mother left me. At least they generally considered me beneath their notice, and besides, setting up a good and proper backstab takes more finesse than trying to cop a feel on the bus.