This is a guest post from satah. satah, more commonly known as emily swashbuckle, is a canadian cardigan aficionado. her life goals include “be sherlock holmes” and “reference harry potter until people start to visibly cringe at the words ‘well, as dumbledore said in goblet of fire…’”. she tumbls vociferously at eating dictionaries and never prepares tea properly. (I would also note that her Twitter is pretty damn funny.)
Sue is bored of being friends with Will! Which is great, because so am I.
Will Schuester gets sick and substitute teacher Holly Holiday (played by the lovely Gwenyth Paltrow) swoops—er, slides—into New Directions full of taco field trips and references to smoking pot. She Dead Poets Societies it right on up in there, replacing “oh captain, my captain” with “oh chicago, my chicago”. She wins over the glee club by singing Cee-Lo and committing the revolutionary act of actually listening to the students. I see you driving ’round town with Conjunction Junction, and I’m like, “A strong, independent woman? IN MY GLEE?”
But luckily, the status quo is upheld! Ms. Holiday is yet another addition to a long list of women with Emotional Problems who have come to Will “Informed Ability” Schuester for help (seriously, can anyone point to a single moment in the series where Will’s fabled amazing teaching abilities actually show in his behaviour?). She’s spontaneous and fun because once someone punched her in the face and she’s scared of commitment! Oh, woe! How will she ever find a husband whose life she can ruin with her inevitable womanly crazy, like every other lady on this show?!
Which, speaking of womanly crazy, Lindsay Lohan: CRAZY, RIGHT? How many times has she been in rehab?! What a crazy person! I love it when people need serious help, it really cracks me up. I wish that every single female celebrity would have severe emotional trauma and fall into substance abuse, just to have something to talk about in Spanish class.
And Teri’s on medication for depression and anxiety! Which is good, because I really want good things for her. I realize that I’m supposed to hate Teri. Her babying of poor sicky Willfayse crossed the line into creepy, yeah, and he lapped it right up. Perhaps she shouldn’t have been so angry to walk in on him sitting with another woman, but I don’t understand how the way he handled it makes him the good person in the situation. Get out, never come back, how dare you possibly still care for me even though we only divorced a few episodes ago?
Will Schuester is one of the most selfish characters I have ever had the misfortune to shove into my eyes on a weekly basis. “What is that, Teri? You JUST said you still love me, like TWO DAYS ago? Well then YEAH, let’s have sex! There’s no way this could have emotional repercussions… for me.”
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what the point of the nutrition plotline was? It didn’t have any moral at all, good or bad. It was so awkwardly done. I feel that it was supposed to be important enough to warrant mentioning, but… what am I supposed to mention, exactly? Was it supposed to be a parody of “AHH THE OBESE CHILDREN!!”, or an agreement? I have no idea. So. Moving on, I guess.
Normally, I adore Kurt, but this episode. WOWEE. He indulged in some nice casual racism by deciding that Mercedes should totes date this one dude, which—he’s black, so you have all of the things in common, right? Mercifully, Mercedes called him out: “Why him? It has nothing to do with the fact that he’s one of the five black dudes at this school?” And then at the end, she decides Kurt was right and goes for it. SUGGESTED AD CAMPAIGN FOR GLEE: remember that one time you liked what we did? We take it back!
Kurt managed to get in lots of nice jabs to her this week: “You are substituting food for love, Mercedes, and more importantly, you’re substituting me for a boyfriend.” Careful with that food-shaming trope, Kurt, it’s an antique! This is great comment over-all because not only does it posit that one absolutely needs to be in a relationship, it shows that it’s totally unreasonable for Mercedes to be upset that her best friend ditched her twice in one week for Rich Boy In A Uniform (people in this show really have a thing for their uniforms).
For a show that’s been honoured time and time again for its depiction of gayness, I am continually unimpressed. Let’s just do a quick recap on the gay characters: rich, white, fashionable brunette man who is into showtunes and divas (x2); violent, in the closet bully who issues terrifying death threats in the halls (x1); casually bisexual cheerleader girl (x2). We can also take stock of the topics we have seen the two out gay dudes discuss: singing, being gay, being bullied for being gay, gay marriage, vogue magazine. Oh, but one of them likes sports, too! Which one? I don’t know! I’ve been watching this show since the first season premiere and I literally can’t tell these characters apart!
I’m not trying to do what the show did during the dinner scene, which had seriously uncomfortable tones of “You can be gay, BUT NOT TOO GAY!” I adore Kurt, and I am very pleased that he now has a love interest, but I was really looking forward to having another gay character on the show that wasn’t… you know… Kurt, in Harry Potter’s body. Maybe I haven’t given Blaine enough time—maybe this isn’t a Cat in the Hat situation and they aren’t actually just Gay 1 and Gay 2—but as it stands, I’m really disappointed.
Aaand, finally… for twelve years, I lived with a parent who has bipolar disorder. You BET I was chortling when Ms. Holiday asked her students to practice their “bipolar rants”! HA! Bipolar people, AM I RIGHT? They so wacky! The suicide rate of bipolar people is said to be thirty times higher than average! THE LAUGHS: will they ever stop? You decide!
Sue suggested that Will sell himself on Craigslist in order to pay for repairs to her car, and I would like to place an ad as well. MISSED CONNECTION: you were a fun, campy, musical romp of highschool tv shows, full of stereotypes and lampshade hangings; I was the girl screaming “I HATE YOU, WILL SCHUESTER!” at my laptop. I looked away for a few episodes and by the time I looked back, the only thing in your chair was a clusterfuck of rage-inducing, autotuned fail. I dunno if you left, or if you just started taking yourself too seriously, but either way… I kinda miss you.
A Brief History of Schoolyard Bullies
When I was in middle school, I was bullied rather relentlessly. People mocked me for how I dressed, how I did my hair, how I smelled, for being ‘smart,’ for what I did, for where I lived, for who I was. My middle school life was a period of endless torment, scurrying between halls, taking refuge in the library. I know that people saw it; I know teachers saw it, I know administrators did, but no one did anything. I was spat on and had my hair pulled and people ‘accidentally’ spilled hot drinks on me and no one did anything.
Eventually, the middle school counselor intervened, and I ended up spending the bulk of my time in the counselor’s office. I basically had a free pass to go there whenever I wanted, which meant that, essentially, I showed up at school, went to the counselor’s office, and stayed there all day. I got bladder infections because I was too afraid to use the bathroom, and then I got sick because I got dehydrated from not drinking any water so I could avoid the bladder infections.
The counselor thought about the possibility of seeing if I could skip two grades and enter the alternative high school. The middle school supported it, the high school didn’t, and that’s when I basically just stopped going to school. For the remainder of my sixth grade year, and most of seventh and eighth grade, I wasn’t in school. I showed up intermittently to take tests and hand in work.
The weird thing about all this was that everyone seemed completely ok with it. The truant officer was never called, to my knowledge no one called my father. I drifted in, took some tests and handed out a flurry of papers, and then left again. For two and a half years. Sometimes I showed up just to visit my girlfriend and she and I would sit in the counselor’s office for a while, and then I would leave again.
This was the school’s response to my bullying; first to sequester me in the counseling office, and then, effectively, to let me voluntarily withdraw from school. People, I stopped going to school. It’s not like I went to school and then hid, or took refuge in classrooms during breaks, I just. Stopped. Going. And somehow managed to get good marks nonetheless. It was like a quiet conspiracy to make as little fuss as possible about the fact that a student felt so unsafe and so unhappy that not going to school became the only choice.
Dealing with bullying in school is a complicated issue. It’s not simple. There is no prescription I can write to say ‘this is how we should deal with bullying.’ But I do know that the way it was dealt with in my case was not appropriate. It was wrong, even. The school did not take the right approach and I suffered for it. As, in turn, did my classmates. Being confronted about their behaviour and being forced to deal with me in a school setting might have changed things not just for me, but for them, too.
Because those same people who bullied me, they grew into abusive people in high school, and some of them became abusive adults. I see them in the police log, the court report now and then; domestic violence. Drunk driving. Any number of other things. Many of them grew up in households with patterns of violence and abuse, they took that to school, and they carried that through the rest of their lives because the school let them do it.
It’s hard for me to take a position of complete empathy for people who are bullies in school, as someone who was bullied, but it’s also hard for me to pretend that there aren’t a lot of factors going on here. Bullying and abuse are cycles and they are hard to break out of. When students in school are bullying, teasing, mocking, abusing other students, that doesn’t mean they are inherently bad people, and it doesn’t mean they are irreparably damaged or innately evil. Often, it means that they need help. Not always. Some people come from perfectly fine young lives and decide to be bullies anyway, and that’s a great shame and a travesty.
Thinking back on why the school didn’t do anything about my bullying, about my decision to leave school, I can’t help but wonder if a small part of that wasn’t rooted in a desire to not confront whatever was going on with the bullies. If the school thought that by pretending that it was isolated to one person, that it was all my fault, that I attracted the abuse, if they thought that thinking that way would give them a pass on not addressing the obviously serious issues in the home lives of the people who were bullying me.
There was a tendency, in Mendo, and there still is, to pretend like this is a supernice community where nothing bad ever happens and people are never mean and everything is just beautiful and fine and dandy. Often, that results in complete erasure of people who are experiencing abuse, because to admit that we exist is to admit that there is a problem, and to admit that the people who are abusing us are also victims of abuse is to admit that there is a systemic issue, that these are not isolated cases.
My school district failed me, but it also failed those kids, and that’s a crying shame.