Well, Darling Ones,

Last night’s Oscar ceremony was a trip. If you live under a rock you might not know that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock after Rock made a joke about Jada Pinkett Smith’s lack of hair. She has Alopecia. You can watch video of the incident, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s icky to say the least and triggering if you have a history with this kind of violence. Or if you have a history of your appearance being the butt of many jokes. Or if you’re like me, both.

Last night I was reminded again that nuance is a lost art and it does not exist on the internet and in social media specifically. It’s right or wrong, black or white, us or them, #TeamThis or #TeamThat. My intent in typing today was to rail against the inability to see nuance. I was gonna make a case for “it’s complicated,” which is my response to all sorts of situations. Because, life is fucking complicated it doesn’t even take an appreciation of nuance to see that.

Instead, I realized something new and sadder. You can really tell what traumatized people by their reaction to The Slap. I’m sad to report a lot of people have been slapped around quite a bit, mostly as children. It’s horrifying.

Confession time: In the first few seconds after The Slap my reptilian brain was all, “hell yes, slap that fucker. He deserved it.” Which is a shitty thing to think. I have a lot of guilt about it because rationally I know nobody deserves to ever be hit.

I’ve also been bullied and made fun of for my appearance my entire life.

• I don’t particularly like to wear green because I was called the Jolly Green Giant all through elementary school.
• In junior high I was called Go-Go the Gorilla.
• In high school I was called Harley Mama, often accompanied by a pinch on the butt.
• From eighth grade through to junior year, two kids named Justin and Sean, would jump onto my back while telling me how fat and ugly I was.
• As an adult a close friend told me to go on the TV show “The Biggest Loser.”

These are just the greatest hits. I do not have the strength in my fingers or enough tears in my eyes to document every time I was made fun of for being fat or ugly or too tall.

Maybe it’s brain chemistry or sheer quantity, but thinking or writing about the bullying brings me to tears quicker than the physical abuse, which was mostly sporadic but the threat was ever present. At holidays my uncles used to have pissing contests about the draconian ways they would punish their children. Yes, they would brag about who was the best abuser.

And still and still and still. . . it’s the bullying that hurts after all the years. The pain of the hits and slaps faded, but the pain of being made fun of still hurts.

Last night, Will Smith did something I always wanted to do. Slap the shit out of someone for making fun of me. Yes, Will Smith was not the one being made fun of. There is a lot of nuance to this incident I am not qualified to address. I’ll never be Black or famous or married or have to deal with the racist beauty standards imposed on Black women and their hair. All of those things complicate what happened.

So much of the discussion has been focussed on Smith and the slapping, which I understand. Words can also be violent. If you watch the video (and again, I DO NOT RECOMMEND) you can see Jada is not happy about what was said. And Chris Rock defends himself by saying “It was a GI Jane joke.”

“It’s just a joke” and “Can’t you take a joke?” Is often used to defend heinous behavior and words that hurt.

I’m nearly fifty years old and I still don’t know how to respond to people who make fun of my appearance. I never knew how. All I was ever told was to “ignore them and they’ll go away.” So, that’s what I did and guess what? They never went away. Ignoring it never helped at all. Being told to ignore it never addressed the harm.

While I don’t condone Smith’s violence at the same time I can understand it. What are you supposed to do when someone makes fun of your appearance? I know hitting/punching the asshole isn’t right. Even if it would feel so good to go back to 1986 and punch Justin right in the face, I could never do it. I don’t have punching in me.

So, I’m sincerely asking what is the proper response to being made fun of for your appearance, because I don’t know.

Complicatedly yours,
Jodi

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Sixty-five women who went to high school with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh say he was a nice guy. Barf.

The thing with #MeToo is it makes me furious all the time. Every story of some guy being a total dirtbag or some dirtbag making his “comeback” makes me re-live every dirtbaggy thing ever done to me.

This Brett Kavanaugh business is hitting close to the bone and I’m full of rage.

As I’ve mentioned before I was bullied profusely in junior high and high school.

Every single day in 10th & 11th grade, Mike LaRoche would come up behind me, pinch my butt, shout “Oh yeah, Harley mama,” and then make vroom vroom noises as he walked away. He was always surrounded by people laughing at his hilarity. When I was in 8th grade he would follow me down the hall calling me Go-Go Gorilla.

I bet you could find 65 people who could look back and say, “Oh yeah, Mike was totally a good guy.”

He was not. It’s been 28 years since I graduated high school, and when I think about what he did to me my cheeks burn with shame and tears come to my eyes. Still. Twenty-eight years.

The post Day 52 of 200: The Guy Who Harassed Me All Through High School Had Friends Too appeared first on I Will Dare.

Late last week I tripped into a musical hole called 1986 (which actually included music from about 1984-1986, and would probably be more accurately called a Junior High Musical Hole) and I’ve had a really hard time getting out of it. And lest you think otherwise, I will tell you right now my version of 1986 didn’t include anything by The Smiths or R.E.M. or The Replacements. While I know, now, that they all existed in 1986 they didn’t matter a single fig to me. The only band that mattered, really, was Glass Tiger, and occasionally Mr. Mister.

Originally I was going to talk about how “How Will I Know?” is Whitney Houston’s best song and if you don’t agree you have the taste-level of a not very smart Smurf like Jokey or maybe Hefty, but then I found a better story about being able to reclaim “Wake Me Up Before You Go Go.”

(what is up with that Choose Life shirt George is wearing in the video? It feels like anti-choice propaganda looking at it now in twenty-thirteen)

I hadn’t realized it last week when I was getting lost in all the jitterbugging and the putting of the ‘boom boom into my heart’ that I could finally listen to that song without suffering from any sort of sadness. In fact, I didn’t realize I had been listening to the song for the better part of three days without ever thinking of that asshole Mike LaRoche until I sat down to write about Whitney Houston and 1986.

Damn! It’s been like twenty-six years since the song was ruined. That’s a long damn time, and it shows how deep the scars of the bullied go.

I loved the song from the get-go (go) back in the early 80s. I loved it so much that I had a shirt that said GO GO on it kind of like they did in the video. Only mine was some sort of shitty Target (back in the mid-80s Target was shitty) or Kmart knockoff and, I believe, featured Snoopy lying on top of the words GO GO. Which seems a little antithetical, now that I think about it.

It doesn’t really matter, because I only got to wear the shirt a few times before I had to dismiss it from my meager wardrobe (in case you forgot: tall, fat, poor girl = very limited clothing options). I had to take the shirt out of rotation because every time I’d wear it Mike LaRoche, a rat bastard a year older than I was, would follow me down the halls of Roosevelt Junior High chanting “Go Go Gorilla.”

Obviously the shirt had to go. Back in my day teachers didn’t do anything about bullies. Not even in High School when Mike LaRoche upped his bullying ante by referring to me as ‘Harley Mama’ for reasons I never understood but had something to do with my butt, because whenever he called me Harley Mama, which happened every day he was in school after history class, he’d grab my ass.

In my memory I punched or elbowed that moutherfucker sometime sophomore or junior year. However, I’m not sure if that’s just wishful thinking or not. I was a pretty meek 6’3″ sixteen year old. When you’re the biggest kid in class you learn early on that any injury that might come from some sort of childhood violence will be blamed on you. Apparently, we big brutes can’t control or violent tempers? I don’t know. I blame it on fairytales poisoning the minds of people against giants for for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Speaking of giants and the dumping of the GO GO shirt, I had to stop wearing green in elementary school after those fuckers started calling me the Jolly Green Giant whenever I would wear it. I still don’t wear green very often.

The post Reclaiming ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go Go’ after 26 years appeared first on I Will Dare.

I’m a large FORTY!-year-old 6’5″ woman. The word intimidating has been used to be describe me on about 381 kajillion occasions. The people who use that word have said I’m both physically and intellectually intimidating. If you don’t know me, it can be a scar package.

If you do know me, you know that I’m kind of a shy, wimpy sort who avoids conflict as much as possible. When you grow up in a home filled with random bursts of domestic violence you learn quickly that conflict can have dire consequences and you work your ass off to dissipate or avoid causing any sort of tension.

Because I’ve always been the freakishly tall fat kid who avoids conflict, I’ve spent most of my life the target of bullies. They can smell us wimpy, damaged types and once they have us in their sites, life becomes hell.

I don’t think I ever, in my whole entire life, stood up to a bully. Until today, sort of.

The neighborhood where my sisters live is filled with kids. There are gobs and gobs of kids of varying ages, sizes, races, and religions. It’s a diverse and impressive little crew, and for the most part pretty peaceful. That is, until, Mean Maddy comes around. She’s called Mean Maddy because, well, she’s mean and to differentiate her from BFK’s daughter, who is also named Maddy but is decidedly not mean (and who is a sometimes crush-interest to my nephew, Liam).

A few weeks ago Cade and Nolan had a run-in with Mean Maddy and her little brother who called them losers and retards (a word most reviled because of Cade’s learning disabilities), stole Cade’s bike, and then hit him, repeatedly, with his own bike helmet. See? Mean.

Sister #3 had a talk with Mean Maddy about being a bully, but the kid just sassed back.

So today when Nolan informed me that Mean Maddy was out on the corner selling lemonade, I knew things would not end well. Despite my “just ignore her” advice, The Tibbles and their posse (last time it was just Cade and Nolan vs. Mean Maddy & Kid Brother) got into it with Mean Maddy.

Since Nolan was told after the last incident to go get an adult when Mean Maddy starts in, he ran and got my niece Jaycie (who lives two doors closer to the face-off spot) who then texted me to say she didn’t know what to do.

I slid on my shoes and headed down to the corner, all sweaty palms and fluttery stomach. See? These are the long-lasting effects of bullying. Like I said, I’m a 6’5″ FORTY-year-old woman but in this situation I turned right back into a meek, terrified teenager who learned early on that because of her size she would often be blamed for any kind of childish violence.

My mom loves to tell the story of how when Dr. Sister #2 and I were little kids maybe three and five, one of the neighborhood moms came over to chew her out.

“Your daughter beat up my son,” the other mother said.
“Which one?” my mom asked.
“The big one,” the mom said, incredulous.
“No, it was the dark-haried one,” the son, who was my age, said.

My mom called both of us to the door — big, tall blond me, and teeny, dark-haired Sister #2.

“This one?” my mom said pointing at Sister #2.
“Yeah,” he said. “She hit me with a hose.”

It eventually came out that the kid got the hose because he was calling me names. To this day, Dr. Sister #2, who recently earned her PhD by successfully defending her dissertation about social supports and the effect they have on domestic violence, is still a defender of those who cannot defend themselves.

So there I was nervous and walking toward a showdown with a bully. I stopped in the middle of The Tibble posse which immediately erupted into a list of her crimes. “She started it,” Nolan said. “She was being mean,” Liam said. “She did start it,” Joseph, a friend of Tibble said. “She threw water at me,” Joseph’s little sister said, and showed me her dripping princess t-shirt.

Meanwhile, Mean Maddy & Little Brother started packing up their stuff. “Let me hear what she has to say,” I said, and tried to step through the mob of eight or nine kids.

“She told me to fuck a tree,” Joseph’s little sister said.
“That’s mean,” I said. “You should not hang out with mean people.”
“You’re right,” she said. “We should just stay away from her.”

By this time Mean Maddy & Little Brother had loaded up their wagon, and were heading home. “THANKS A LOT,” she shouted. “NOW WE DON’T HAVE ANYMORE LEMONADE AND MY MOM CAN’T AFFORD TO BUY ANYMORE.”

“Whose fault is that?” I asked, but she was long gone.

So, I almost stood up to a bully today and I totally would have if the sight of me hadn’t scared the shit out of her.

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