Bullying

      A key premise of this book is that love-shy males learn early in life
to perceive peer interaction as painful. If this is indeed the case, socially
avoidant behavior along with self-imposed social isolation becomes more
easily understandable. Again, most people associate informal peer inter-
action with feelings of pleasure. How and why did the love-shy come
to associate such interaction with pain? Let us begin our analysis with
a look at the widespread social phenomenon of bullying.
      The male peer group among elementary school aged boys can be
extremely cruel. The reasons as to why this is the case have been accorded
far too little attention by research investigators. There are scores of soci-
eties all over the world wherein violence, cruelty and bullying (including
psychological hazing) are totally absent phenomena as far as children's
peer groups are concerned. In America these painful phenomena are
far from absent.
      I asked each of my respondents to react to the statement: "When
I was a child I was often bullied by other children of my own age." It
is important to note that nobody among the 200 non-shys indicated that
this had been true for them. In stark contrast, fully 94 percent of the
older love-shys together with 81 percent of the younger love-shys indi-
cated that it had been true for them. In essence, better than four-fifths
of even the younger (university sample) shy men had been frequently
bullied while growing up. For the older love-shys almost all had been
frequently bullied.
      At the risk of redundancy, I would assert that the significance of
this finding for understanding the development of love-shyness cannot
be too greatly overemphasized. In chapter two I documented how
love-shy men differ substantially from non-shys in terms of inborn,
biologically and physiologically based temperament. Doubtless the
physical and psychoemotional hazing interacted with these "weaker"
biologically based inborn temperaments in a synergistic kind of way.
The net result of this was undoubtedly to enhance social avoidance
tendencies. Because of low inborn anxiety and emotional sensitivity
thresholds, the love-shy men studied for this book probably suffered
far more psychoemotional pain and scars than a non-shy person would
have suffered even if such a non-shy person had been the recipient of
the same quantity of bullying and psychoemotional hazing.
     A further point is that the social stimulus value of running away and
not defending oneself "like a man" is doubtless very negative in most
American all-male peer groups of elementary and junior high school
age. Simply put, if children are going to bully someone, they are far
more likely to select a victim whose displeasure and suffering is con-
spicuous and clearly evident for all to see. It is endemic in the perversion
of bullying for the perpetrators to single out those who clearly suffer
most, and who are unwilling and unable to defend themselves. This is
why the social stimulus value concept is so important in understanding
bullying and in understanding the evolution of love-shyness and of
socially avoidant, self-isolation tendencies.
     In a similar question I asked each of my 500 respondents to react
to the statement: "When I was a child I never fought back when I was
punched." And here again, fully 94 percent of the older love-shy men
agreed that this had indeed been the case for them. And among the
younger love-shy men 77 percent indicated that it had been the case.
In contrast, only 18 percent of the non-shy men indicated that they had
never fought back. And several of these men added that it had never
been necessary for them to do so because no one had ever punched
them in the first place!
     Even at the senior high school level the love-shy men studied for this
book had received an incredibly large amount of bullying and psycho-
emotional harassment. For example, 62 percent of the older love-shys
together with 48 percent of the younger ones had received quite a bit
of bullying even in the 10th, 11th, and 12th grades. This had been true
for none of the 200 non-shy men whom I interviewed.