Bullying?

Yesterday when I was doing the morning drive drop-off, I got to hear a little Drew and Mike in the Morning in between snippets of a song coming from Sweet Pea, my 4 year old, in the back seat. Sweet Pea was singing something about how her daddy likes to eat bagels in the bathroom (he doesn’t) and Drew and Mike were reviewing audio of a kid from a Milford, MI high school. The kid was talking about how his days are filled with relentless bullying. (The Justin Bieber t-shirt he insists on wearing probably isn’t doing him any favors.)

When I got home, I grabbed the mail from day before and although I was short on time, I somehow found myself flipping through the latest issue of People, Style Watch magazine. I landed on Tim Gunn’s Who Got It Right? segment. It was then that I realized that bullying doesn’t necessarily only happen face to face and it doesn’t necessarily end when we become adults. It seems to me that there is a “Bully Spectrum” and it ranges from “Horrible” to “Acceptable.”

In the magazine, Tim Gunn complimented Keri Hilson’s outfit (whoever the hell she is) while shredding Vanessa Hudgens’s. He said that Hudgens’s printed dress and jacket were “fighting with each other.” Admittedly, he was right–and even I sighed while looking at Hudgens’s outfit— but I’m not putting it in print for thousands of people to see. I was thinking it to myself and then yes, I may have mentioned something to my younger daughter, Lovey, about how Hudgens might want to invest in a full length mirror, but that doesn’t really count because Lovey is 23 months old and she doesn’t even know what day it is.

I felt bad for Hudgens. I’m sure she thought she looked really cute before Tim Gunn gunned her down. I imagine her feelings were hurt when she opened the magazine to see herself next to Hilson with a comment about how Hilson’s outfit worked and hers didn’t.

Just because Gunn’s hurtful (albeit truthful) comments are placed within the pages of a magazine, does that mean that it‘s not actually bullying? Or is it a form of bullying, just a more “acceptable“ form?

What if he had done it like this instead? What if he had put up a picture of two people wearing tiaras and let the reader decide who got it right while leaving his own comments out?

WHO GOT IT RIGHT?

Is that a better idea? I truly don’t know. I just know that bullying is everywhere and if we can’t figure out where it starts, I don’t know how we’re going to make it stop.

*****************************

Thanks for being here!

Facebook : DimSumandDoughnuts

Twitter: RobynCoden

Instagram: dimsumanddoughnuts