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women, and children who suffered—emotionally, psychologically, and
physically—because of the norms of school culture.
Backed by hard-hitting statistics and haunting personal accounts, THE
BULLY SOCIETY reveals:
• How students feel pressure to conform to rigid gender
expectations and learn to practice gender policing, correcting their
own and one another’s behaviors, attitudes, and dress according to
their perceived expectations of what makes a boy “manly” and a
girl feminine.
• How students get the message, from the media, as well as their
parents and teachers, that status and power are everything—and
then ridicule and attack boys who don’t fit the ideal or appear to
be gay, geeky, nerdy, poor, or different.
• How boys learn from an early age to assert manhood by not only
being popular with girls, but also by wielding power over them—
physically, emotionally, and sexually— perpetuating sexual
harassment and dating violence.
• How girls are increasingly pressured to be “tough,” to use
violence as a means of proving themselves, as well as driven to
conform to superficial and destructive standards of beauty, body
type, and attractiveness to the opposite sex.
• How “gay-bashing,” “slut-bashing,” and other types of
denigration of students by students are aggravated through text
messages and in cyberspace, and
• How teachers often contribute to the bullying problem—and how
adult role models, including parents, inadvertently or explicitly
play out the same conflicts relating to wealth, race, looks, and
sexuality, and bully not only one another, but also children.
What can concerned educators and parents do to stop this deeply
hurtful yet widely accepted pattern of behavior? In THE BULLY
SOCIETY, Klein calls for a radical transformation of the standard school
culture. Going beyond inspiring ideas, she cites actual examples of schoolbased
efforts, where teachers are working to bond with students and to
help students reach across ethnic, economic, social, cultural, and gender