Half the conversations at school seemd to about who was a dick. What you never had that? nothing about pencils, nothing as nice as that.

//Most adults would respond by trying to understand where the other is coming from

In a slight diversion, apparently you are unable to empathise or see others' viewpoints until the age of 7, or thereabouts.

Is there a difference between understanding characteristics of someone else, though, and actually having an affected emotional state because you understand the complex 'feeling' processes that the other person is going through?

: ) the bullies steal sports almanacs and travel through time, most of them generally get their just desserts

They generally start breeding as soon as they leave school (if not before) and start making little bully kids...

//In school if you didn't like someone, or they didn't like you, that was it, no pretence, not neccessarily any insults, just stay away.

Perhaps in primary school. Relational aggression is well present in high school, although I guess boys are a bit slower to pick it up...

It's a bit of a myth, that women are bitchier than men, I have to say. Men can be as catty as hell, when they want. The only time I feel like being the slightest bit catty is when a usually young woman has used her "feminine wiles" in order to get something she wants. Batting the eyelashes, flirty wee smiles - insidious, and just poison, and completely unnecessary. Not to mention.........what century are we in? Hate it, hate it, hate it.

I'm not sure that it's a myth, per se. Men definitely do use it, but I think the evidence suggests that overall women use it slightly more often. Annoyingly, I don't have electronic access to the following review paper, and the abstract is a little coy about making a one sentence conclusion (which I'd guess suggests the evidence is mixed, making a one-liner difficult).

Title: An integrated review of indirect, relational, and social aggression
Author(s): Archer J, Coyne SM
Source: PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW 9 (3): 212-230 2005

Over the last decade, researchers have found that girls may be just as aggressive as boys when manipulative forms of aggression, such as gossiping and spreading rumors, are included. These forms of aggression are known by 3 different names: indirect aggression, relational aggression, and social aggression. This review examines their commonalities and differences, and concludes that they are essentially the same form of aggression. We show that analogous forms are not found in other species. We offer a functional account: indirect aggression is an alternative strategy to direct aggression, enacted when the costs of direct aggression are high, and whose aim is to socially exclude, or harm the social status of a victim. In this light, we consider sex differences and developmental trends and the impact of this aggression on victims. We conclude that indirect, relational, and social aggression are much more similar than they are different, and we suggest ways in which future research can be facilitated by integrating the three areas under an adaptive framework.

//whether by making fun of someone, or just saying stuff in a casual matter of fact way.

Ummm, that's basically what they mean by 'aggression'.

//You can dislike someone without feeling aggression.

I'm intrigued at how this sits with your "can't feel love without lust" position...

//You can dislike someone without feeling aggression.

But publically announcing your dislike can be perceived as a (very minor) act of agression, which could escalate, depending on what the other person chooses to do about it.

//And some people are confident enough to let this be known, cause they view the object of their dislike as so unimportant that it wouldn't matter what they thought or said back.

=contempt, and contempt is definitely aggressive.

aaaaaargg repost

dan, say yoiu or I tried to start a conversation like this at my school (or on almost any topic here), the reply would have been.

"fuck off dick, fucking dickhead"

starting to understand? this is the way even friends talked to each other. One guys dad died and one of his 'mates' said "well at least he won't be talking about his dad now".

To show interest in anything made you a dick, to show any weakness made you a dick. Every conversation was about downing something or someone, ussually in a really casual matter of fact sarcastic way.

Maybe you went to a care bear secondary school where people were either geeky or too stupid to be like this

Quite surprised really when I got to uni and people were mostly geniune, it kind of repulsed me actually cause you've come to associate that with vulnerability. Gee I sound like a total wanker, again.

//would have been laughed at. People simply didn't talk like that.

is that because they felt they couldn't talk like that? this so reminds me of my friends who went to male-only school - anyone who showed any sort of difference or individuality was slain verbally, put down, beaten up - a real pecking-order through the whole school. and you'd laugh at your friends, when they stood out/done good/done bad so that you yourself didn't stand out from the norm.

so maybe it's Not Always about people feeling free to say what they want/be honest. in my mates' experiences it was about peer pressure and the pecking order.

doesn't happen at every school, though. mine was a very cool school. fringe-dwelling freaks were encouraged and celebrated. yea, even in a small rural town.

//what I meant was the kind of conversations people have here on thess forums, or as adult to adult, would have been laughed at. People simply didn't talk like that.

Actually my peers and I managed to engage in intelligent converstion fairly often, whether it be about who the all black selectors have picked for the up comming test or how GW Bush is a fuck wit or how you just got dumped by a girl you truly loved and then how she starts screwing one of your mates and how youd like to bash the shit out of him for it.

Maybe we were at different schools, in a differnet galaxy far far away.
We often showed interest in different things at school and that by no means made us dicks, I played guitar a few of my mates did but not to the same degree and interest that I did and still do and they dont show as much interest as I do but i still talk to them about it and likewise with my mates who are builders and sparkys and all that kinda shit.

At the end of the day it comes down to who you hang with, if your mates arent interested in anything you do then maybe you should find some mates who share the same interests...and also question whether they are really your mates at all I mean friends usually have something in common right?

The only thing that annoys me is when people try to sound too grown up while having conversations, schools yard convos are just that, its basically bollocks and stories about who was more wasted on saturday nights house party and who hooked up with who.

Fuck it man you got your whole life to be a grown up, why waste precious bullshit talking hours while your young talking about grown up stuff?

//Maybe we were at different schools, in a differnet galaxy far far away.

Sage, man. I just choked on my rice.

nope co-ed. If you expressed yourself there and then like you are now you would have been laughed at. But I said that.

hey rdor -sounds like you definitely went to an all-boy school - that was a phase I remember going through in the kind of miserable puberty era, around 14-16 or so.
It was kind of like a lazy rite of passage. You had to learn to take the lumps verbally/emotionally as well as physically.
A a couple of years or so before that was the punch-out phase, when you actually just had a fight or whatever.

Not me! When I was doing a little research a few years ago into students' risk-taking behaviours and collaborating with a developmentalist we were discussing exactly this thing. There is some evidence that "teenagers" are a social construction (that is, in the past and still in some societies, much younger people have shouldered far greater responsiblity, and not had a life period corresponding to our idea of teenagerdom). There is also good evidence that the brain is still maturing at 18, somewhat at 20, and not completely finished until around 25. However, we decided that the social side of being a teenager is extending to match the biological just about. It's not exactly the same as the 13-18 bracket, but "adult responsibility" continues to increase slowly from 19-25. Heh. Maybe this is why everybody jokes about the QC Club/Quarter-life crisis...
I'm not sure that this delayed onset of adulthood is necessarily a bad thing. I'm sure I heard somewhere some history academics suggesting that 18-20 year olds don't really have the intellectual firepower to really understand history. Which is not to say they can't study history and learn from it, but that a 25 year old studying the same thing will gain a deeper understanding.

Sounds like it was a miserable place to go to school then.

Bummer for you!~