There is a lot of bullying in bouncing.
I hate it, I have always hated it and it’s very hard to combat.
I don’t tend to get bullied – I do get picked on here and there. I’m okay with a little good natured ribbing – you have to be able to take shit and dish it back out, but there is a point where ribbing becomes bullying, and that’s not okay.
Bouncing is a job most people do not do for very long. It tends to be a job guys pick up as a second job to supplement their income, or a job they do between better-paying, better-houred sort of employment. In my nearly two-years as a bouncer, I’ve watched the team turn over at least eight times.
Maybe more.
The thing is – it doesn’t matter who is on the team or who is running the team, the guys will always, always, always pick a fellow team member and single him out for bullying and henpeck him until he quits.
And the team has lost a number of nice guys and good bouncers do to this trend.
A lot of it is played off as “jokes” and kidding. And, maybe one or two of the remarks on their own could be a joke – or just a little bit of ribbing, as I said earlier – but it always escalates, in my opinion, way past good humor and right down into bullying.
The thing about bouncing is that is a very masculine job, very male dominated and you know what the worst thing a man can be?
A girl, of course.
haha.
So, somehow, in the middle of bullying, I always get brought out as the measuring stick.
In variations of, “Even Jieve can do that.” Or “Even Jieve doesn’t do that.”
That somehow my existence as the female bouncer puts me on the bottom rung and how dare a man on the team act like me or be unable to do something I can do.
How dare he have the audacity to not be as masculine as the rest of the dudes.
I don’t even know what to do.
There’s more to it too.
I like the guys on the team, but I’m going to be blunt – very few of them are “catches.”
And they have these insane standards for what women should look/act/be like in order to date. I know this is a problem with men and masculinity at large (and not to say that women aren’t guilty of it at times too), but it is raised to the nth degree on the bouncing team.
It’s fucking exhausting to be around, because every time some guy who is typically a stand up guy (team bulling aside, most of my bouncers are great guys) won’t date a decent girl for her weight or her makeup or something else inane, and I have to hear him bitch –
He might as well just say, “Jieve, I don’t consider you a person because you have a fat body.”
I know they don’t think of me as woman – they don’t, I’m not one of the guys, but I am also not one of the girls – and they forget that anytime they diss a girl for her weight in front of me, they are insulting me too.
I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sick of seeing good guys bullied for stupid shit, I’m sick of “girl” being the default insult for a man and I’m so fucking tired of being the measuring stick against which the guys can brace their bullying.
It’s nonsense – and these men are better than this.