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Post by Miss Night Owl on May 20, 2010 22:00:54 GMT -5
It's true that girls can be unspeakably cruel to each other. Or should I say "speakably" cruel because it's usually done verbally. Now it seems that there is more violence being inflicted by female bullies. That was quite rare when I was growing up.
One of the best films about this subject, in my opinion, is the horror film Carrie. Most people only think of the final scene - about Carrie's powers - but the film is mostly very psychological and about the cruelty of some teenage girls and the hard-to-cope with aspects of puberty that often get targeted by female bullies. Very well done. Eerie as hell of course.
I too am glad that I don't the expense of children. I live fairly frugally compared to many people, but I follow a Paleo type diet because it has been better for me healthwise, so my food costs can be a bit higher as a result. I'm in Canada, so health care is covered for the most part, but of course there are LOTS of additional expenses with kids that you can't anticipate.
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Post by happy2bchildfree on May 20, 2010 22:18:46 GMT -5
One of the best films about this subject, in my opinion, is the horror film Carrie. Most people only think of the final scene - about Carrie's powers - but the film is mostly very psychological and about the cruelty of some teenage girls and the hard-to-cope with aspects of puberty that often get targeted by female bullies. Very well done. Eerie as hell of course. I saw the original movie with Sissy Spacek playing Carrie. Good movie, but really intense and was hard for me to watch, having been similarly victimized. I haven't seen the more recent version.
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Post by cnu5000 on May 21, 2010 6:41:00 GMT -5
I have read they have catching more female bullying violence because there are more videos but I think also think that female bullying violence is on the rise.
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Post by preraph on May 21, 2010 8:24:23 GMT -5
I think because of cellphone cameras, we're just seeing more of it. I think it exists in every junior high and high school in the US and has for at least 50 years.
Carrie (the original) is one of my favorite movies. It was a good depiction of real bullying, at least the part about what type of girl they picked on: someone who was already a victim of sorts, kind of pretty, a slight threat to the prettier and more popular. I love Stephen King because he always plays out the fantasy of victims being able to seek out revenge. I loved Firestarter as well, because the little girl is full of this anger and frustration and finally is able to reach out and destroy with her firestarting powers. I can actually really relate. I love the quote from the movie, "If I pulled it back into myself....I guess I'd burn up."
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Post by Miss Night Owl on May 21, 2010 21:31:12 GMT -5
Yes, it's the original Carrie with Sissy Spacek that I was referring to. I haven't seen the more recent version. I didn't even know there was one until now! Interesting.
I love how Stephen King explores revenge too.
This kind of thing is particularly interesting to me because when I was a teenager, two sisters of a friend of mine were being spooked by some odd occurrences in their house - things moving on their own that couldn't do that. I was skeptical, and never saw anything move, but it was very very strange - one of the sister's bedrooms felt VERY weird. The air, for lack of a better description, hummed. Not audibly, but I felt it vibrate when I went in there with my friend (the sisters stayed out as we checked this). It didn't vibrate like that in other rooms and there was no explanation we could find at all. It was so odd that I didn't want to be in there! Very unpleasant. I went in there kind of mentally dismissing everything and left with a very different feeling.
What I do know is that my friend's sisters were troubled. Not insane, but very angry inside. Not long before that one of them had refused to eat, not in the classic more hidden anorexic way, in a very angry and blatent 'f-you' to her parents.
There are definitely some very powerful feelings and energies in adolescence and on the heels of it. No way yet to know for sure if people can actually move things around with those energies to any great degree, because it always fails with testing, but I can relate to what Stephen King depicts about it being anger that is behind the power that Carrie and the girl in Firestarter have.
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Post by happy2bchildfree on May 22, 2010 13:45:36 GMT -5
This kind of thing is particularly interesting to me because when I was a teenager, two sisters of a friend of mine were being spooked by some odd occurrences in their house - things moving on their own that couldn't do that. When I was married to my ex husband, something similar was happening in the house where we lived. Things moved without us moving them, the windows shook when there was no wind outside, weird things like that. And there was a persistant "knocking" sound from underneath the house for which we could find no reason. The strangest event was one day when I heard something fall in the kitchen. I went to see what it was. I had a rack of large cooking utensils--serving spoon, spatula, meat fork, etc.--on the wall. The utensils were on hooks so there was no physical way they could fall by themselves. When I went to check I found one of these utensils on the floor on the other side of the kitchen... My mother, who believed in supernatural stuff told me the happenings were due to the bad energy caused by the constant discord in the house. Not sure I believe this, but there was no logical explanation for what was happening. No one believes me when I tell this story. They look at me like I have mental-health issues or something.
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Post by Miss Night Owl on May 22, 2010 19:58:19 GMT -5
That's really interesting happy2bchildfree. Spooky.
Yes, I've seen some weird things in my time, yet I was very rational minded and not a believer by default.
There are definitely different ideas about why that kind of thing might happen: ghosts, bad energy of people past or present, hallucinations to some degree, sometimes from foods or other substances, out and out insanity. I can't say what is actually happening, of course. I have known people who are troubled who see things that likely aren't there (schizophrenics for example, to use the psychiatric classification). Sometimes people theorize that schizophrenics are acually seeing other dimensions, but again, no way to prove that.
I used to have a lot of admiration for Dean Radin's work. He's one of the few researchers who seems to have carefully looked at psi and paranormal claims and tested adequately. He found evidence that these things can exist to some degree, but it's very subtle. He seemed more careful than most about the research. But recently a friend of mine (not an out-and-out skeptic, just very careful himself) politely took Dean to task about a few of the things that Dean reported on. Sadly, it turns out that Dean's idealistic side may have skewed much of his research, plus Dean was behind more of the research that supposedly found evidence than we originally thought, which became suspect. That was disappointing.
It's a tricky thing to figure out, that's for sure! Very interesting.
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