Anonymous wrote:It depends...is the loser male or female? It’s socially acceptable to push the male losers away, but if it a female losers it’s really hard.
THIS x100. My son had to deal with a girl who would not take no for an answer. They were friends, but she wanted much more. He kept saying no, as nicely as possible. Finally, after she had bothered him for weeks, he very bluntly told her, "We are not dating. That is final." She went off the deep end, started spreading rumors about him, and got all her friends to gang up on him for "being cruel" to her. It was unbelievable. Luckily, he had plenty of friends who understood what a nutcase she was, and he was able to cut her and her outraged, looney friends out of his life.
Imagine if the gender roles here had been reversed - a boy constantly hounding a girl to date him, refusing to take no for an answer. I imagine most parents here would have involved the administration, guidance counselors, and the boy's parents. He would have been shamed, punished, ostracized for his persistence. None of that happens when the girl is the aggressor (which is the case much of the time in middle and high school). No one wants to admit that a
girl could do something so rotten, but it happens. They need to be punished just as a male aggressor would be.