Free Everything I Needed to Know About Being a Girl I Learned from Judy Blume by Jennifer OConnell Page B

comes to understand that by tolerating the bullying of others, she did something wrong, this is portrayed subtly, so subtly that the careless—or youthful—reader might miss it entirely.
    Still, even if in the fourth grade I’d known there was such a thing as pretty female bullies, I was hardly the victim type. Like Blubber ’s heroine, Jill, I was as average as a kid could be—not too smart but not too dumb; not too fat but not too skinny; not too short but not too tall. I was completely normal…a little shy, maybe, but I got along with all my peers and had a tight group of friends, some of whom I am still in touch with today, thirty years later.
    Sure, my family wasn’t the most well off, and my mom made a lot of my clothes. But I attended a school populated by children of academics—college professors who valued books over designer jeans and had successfully shielded their children from the knowledge that they might be missing out on current trends, as the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, and the only channels any of us got were the three major networks and PBS (and Cowboy Bob on local station 4).
    There was nothing physically to set me apart from my peers—just as Judy Blume is careful to point out there is nothing physical that sets her bully’s victim, Linda, apart from the other children in her class. Linda is slightly overweight. But there are other children in the class who are larger—who could even be classified as fat—and Wendy, the book’s antagonist, doesn’t pick on them. Perhaps because of the title, I’ve often seen Blubber categorized as a book about a fat girl who gets tormented by her peers. But the discerning reader soon realizes that the reason Linda is picked on has nothing to do with her weight (although her weight is the subject about which Linda is most sensitive and therefore the subject on which Wendy chooses to focus the majority of her taunts) and that the term blubber doesn’t have as much to do with Linda’s size as it does her personality—or lack thereof.
    No, Linda is picked on by Wendy for the same reason that my bully, Shoshona, picked on me.
    We, the victims, allow it to happen.
    Oh, yes. I went there. I, like Judy Blume, am putting the blame—well, part of it, anyway—on the victim herself. In today’s society—thirty years post- Blubber and Shoshona—it may be considered politically incorrect to say these girls asked for it. But Jill’s mother’s suggestion—that her daughter “laugh off” the taunts that are making her life so hellish—is still the best advice a parent can give to a child in such a situation (although obviously a call to the teacher who has allowed such bullying to go on under her very nose is also recommended). Judy Blume herself, when describing Blubber on her Web site, writes:
    A person who can laugh at herself will be respected, right?
    But Linda doesn’t laugh. And maybe that’s the problem. There’s something about her that makes Jill and a lot of kids in her fifth-grade class want to see how far they can go.
    Bullying is about power. And those who wield power can quickly turn on others, even those who once considered them friends—especially those who lack the inner resources to laugh at or stand up for themselves. I considered Shoshona a friend, although truthfully we had nothing in common. At ten years old, I still considered playing with Barbies the height of amusement, a pastime Shoshona looked down upon, although she didn’t seem to have any better suggestions as to what else we might do while playing together. Drawing, reading, and board games were all “dumb” to her. One memorable playdate included Shoshona asking me to sit in a desk chair that spun, then twirling me around and around in it until I begged her to stop (true to form, when I asked her to stop, she wouldn’t…until I threw up, that is.