I think this is interesting. I was fat as a teen (still am) and bullied quite a lot, but I didn’t really think that it was a result of confidence… but I guess I was a geek at school, maybe that was part of what started it, so maybe being just academically confident was enough. However, I actually think I was teased and bullied more by boys than girls, so I guess that’s a different kettle of fish entirely.

I eventually worked up enough ‘tude to tell the bullies to f-off and weirdly enough, the boys seemed to respect me more when I started to question the size of their appendages and what not. What a strange world we live in.

But I certainly never fought back as much against girl bullies, but thankfully people seemed to chill out once they hit 17-ish… or at least they just got better at backstabbing, so I didn’t have to hear as much of their nonsense.

But some of the girls that confidently fought back against the female bullies did seem to face an even harder time, so this theory seems to fit.

Not that long ago, I was the target of a particularly vicious workplace bully. Being the librarian that I am, I borrowed a whole pile of books on workplace bullying, and one of the real lightbulb moments for me was reading in almost all of the books that the most common targets for bullying are confident, competent, outgoing/extroverted, single females!

The reason for this? A) The bully is threatened by confidence and competency, and feels the need to “bring them down a few pegs. B) Bullies pick extroverts because they can be seen to be changing that person’s behaviour. Introverts internalise and avoid, extroverts express. Bullies gain satisfaction from seeing that pain expressed. C) Bullies choose single females because often these females have nobody at home to positively reinforce them. They’ve not got a partner to talk to about the problem, and to reassure them. So the bully’s tactics are not being undone or diluted.

It’s bloody EVIL, isn’t it?

And I worked in a place once where all the women (mainly <30yrs old) were totally into the fat talk. I (the fattest employee) never engaged in their diet talk/fat talk, but it did make me feel oddly ashamed of myself. Needless to say, I didn't make any good girl friends there.

Do I have to hate myself to fit in? If that’s the only option, then of course I choose not to fit in.

Looking back to when I was at school, I never quite understood fitting-in-as-female rules. I recall countless teenaged social interactions where friends were engaging in the “I’m fat and ugly” ritual – and I simply couldn’t understand why anyone would have so little self-respect to say that aloud – and so I stayed silent.

Of course, the irony here is that in my head I was thought I was the fattest, ugliest, most worthless creature on the face of the planet (Yay, depression!). But I wasn’t going to say that out loud to anyone.

Perhaps I came across as WAY more confident than I was. Of course, at the time, I thought the bullies smelt my weakness like a pack of hunting hyenas (sorry for the florid metaphor). But the research above suggests that the bullies thought I needed to be taken down a peg or two – that I was too confident, too whatever.

If I had understood the social requirement to hate myself and spoken my actual self-hate aloud, would it have made a difference to my teen years? Who knows.