stop the phrase “tattle-tale”. stop indirectly telling kids that if they speak up about someone that’s bothering them, they’re doing something bad. stop contributing to the culture of abuse.
seriously though this NEEDS to stop. my mother. a grownass woman of 59. had to ask me over and over again if I was sure it wasn’t ethically dubious for her to go to her employer and report harassment and terror tactics from a coworker because she didn’t “want to be a tattler.” stop teaching kids not to be “tattle-tales” because they will not grow out of it.
I’ve seen kids at work get told to “stop being a tattle-tale” by the kid they told on. I’m sorry, but I’d really like to know if a kid is continuing to do something I just told them not to do for safety reasons. If a kid locked his friend in the cabinet by putting a lincoln log through the handles when I wasn’t looking, please tell me. That isn’t tattling. If someone is at risk of being harmed, or actually is being harmed, let someone know. If they get mad at you for that, they’re only mad because they got caught and they know they weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing.
When I think “tattle-tale” I think of that whiny voice kids sometimes use to complain about things. Like the kind of really trivial things that aren’t actually harming the receiver and are better off ignored. Such as “she said she’s not my friend anymore (I don’t know what you expect me to do, tell them they have to be your friend or else go to the office?)”, or “he keeps looking at me”, where he’s only doing it because the child keeps responding to it and thus it’s amusing to keep doing it. But in those situations I tell the “tattle-tale” to try ignoring it, the kid will probably stop doing it, and if they don’t stop after a while to tell me/another adult and we’ll take care of it at that point.
With older kids (like, I don’t know, 4th grade and up or so?) it seems the word “tattle-tale” gets applied more to kids who legitimately report something that a child knew they weren’t supposed to be doing. Such as taking something without permission or trying to cheat or something along those lines. Cheating in particular is a big taboo to report, it seems. Most people I know hate cheaters and yet aren’t willing to say anything about them to the teacher, even in private, because if anyone found out they’d be harassed for weeks.
When I was five, and romance didn’t exist, I was a boy, and I was friends with a girl, and it didn’t matter, because why would it? We did everything together a normal couple of friends would do together, until we grew a little more and went on to different schools and didn’t see each other anymore.
So then I was eight. I was still a boy, and I was friends with a different girl now. She was confident and clever and bold, and we played games together during the lunch hour and went to each others houses after school.
“You fancy her,” the other children would say. I’d frown, say of course I didn’t, and why would I? We were friends, and that’s all. So we ignored the comments and carried on as we were, until her mother wouldn’t let me go to her birthday parties, because I’d be the only boy, and that would be “inappropriate”.
We didn’t stay in touch after school. I cried, when she didn’t respond to my letters – because I didn’t understand. Years of friendship: did it mean nothing to her? And then I’d remember her mother, and I’d realise what the problem was. I was a boy, and she was a girl. That was all there was to it.
So then I was twelve, I was friends with boys because I was a boy, and I only wanted someone to spend time with at lunch. But according to them, every girl I spoke to was a friend-with-benefits, and eventually I drifted away from them because I wasn’t interested in talking about sports and sex and risk-taking like they seemed to be. Instead, I talked to girls.
So then I was fifteen, and my friendship group was entirely female. I got called gay, a lad, a player, and all sorts of other things by almost everyone: boys and girls alike – but I ignored them. I liked being friends with girls, so what was the problem? Live and let live, I thought.
So one day I invited a friend over to the fair in town with me, and she came, and we enjoyed the day together without any hassle at all. Going back to school, however, changed that.
“Did you hear they fucked behind the public toilets,” people were saying. “They went on a date together.”
I said that wasn’t true – I didn’t have feelings for her that way.
“But you obviously fancy her,” they replied.
“No,” I told them, truthfully. “I don’t.”
Shortly afterwards, the girls I was friends with all organised a party, which I wasn’t invited to.
“It’s a sleepover,” they said. “Girl stuff.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Girl stuff.”
They used that expression a lot over the next few years. Trips to the cinema – going out together… And eventually I realised that I was an outsider. They didn’t tell me things anymore. I wasn’t let in on their secrets, and if I ever asked, I’d be told I wouldn’t understand – and it was inappropriate I should ask.
So I stopped asking, and my friends drifted further and further away. I never understood why I was an outsider, until I saw a picture of them at the prom I didn’t bother going to, because I knew I would have no one to go with. There were my friends in the pretty dresses I’d helped them choose, with a guy in the centre of the picture, in a smart suit and slicked back hair. That would have been me, if I’d gone. And it always will be.
And then I realised why I could never be as close with them as they are with each other. I’m a guy. And they are girls. It’s as simple as that. Guys never understood me being friends with girls, but that was fine, because the girls were okay with it. But on the day the girls stopped seeing me as just a person they could be friends with, everything changed.
And so here I am. I’m eighteen. I am not gay, actually: nor am I romantically interested in any of my friends. What I do know is, that we’re about to go on a group holiday together, and I’ve been told not to even come into the corridor outside their room whilst they’re getting changed, in case the door swings open and I “see something I shouldn’t” – as if I’d actually care, or be the kind of guy who watched for that sort of thing. And I’ve realised it doesn’t matter how nice I am, no girl is ever going to see me as an equal. I will always be a guy, to them. And they will always be a girl.
And guys and girls can never be “just friends”, right? There always has to be something more. Whether I want it or not, there always has to be that potential.
“Going on holiday with three ladies are you?” the ticket seller asked me. “Fair enough…”
And I said nothing, because I was sick of saying “not in that way”. I was tired of telling people that I wasn’t interested in the girls I was friends with. I was bored of trying to be seen as just a friend in their eyes, too. And if even they couldn’t see me as an equal, how could anyone else ever believe me, when I told them boys and girls could just be friends?
So don’t tell them my gender doesn’t isolate me. Because it does. And don’t complain to me about being in the friend zone. Because I’ve been fighting to get there all my life.
this was really powerful stuff
“And don’t complain to me about being in the friend zone. Because I’ve been fighting to get there all my life.”
Meanwhile, my friend leninmeringuepie gets a pretty indigo and a minty green:
Try it!
Ha! I think we got the same colors.
Close! The two I used as an example are 3632B7 and 34B736
The 1st, 3rd and 5th digits have the strongest effect (think of 10s place vs 1s place for a percentage), so they end up looking very similar- only a couple of shades different.
Interesting. Mine is also a similar blue and green.
PiraticOctopus 