Growing up, Brennon Harris was often the new kid in school. It was hard to make friends, and he was bullied for his weight and his performance in his classes.
This summer, he noticed a raft of videos on social media from people arguing that today’s teenagers could use a bit of toughening up. Despite his experience, he thought they had a point. “I honestly think we need to bring back bullying,” Mr. Harris, now 20, said in a TikTok video.
In a phone interview, he was quick to clarify that it was never OK to turn to physical violence or pick on people based on their race, religion or disabilities. But he maintains that bullying — at least some form of it — is not as bad as it is made out to be.
“If I’d never got bullied, I don’t think I’d be where I am today,” said Mr. Harris, who has since deleted his TikTok video. “I don’t think I would have the motivation to prove people wrong.”
A chorus of people online has been arguing, with varying levels of sincerity, that today’s young people could stand a dose of adolescent viciousness. Plenty of these posts read as outrage bait; still, they have alarmed mental health professionals who say that bullying is far too serious a problem to be laughed off or recast as a character-building exercise. News reports of teenagers’ suicides following intense bullying are published with regularity.
Yet the videos are just one manifestation of a cultural pendulum swing away from gentleness and accommodation and toward provocation and hostility. Online and at the highest levels of politics, sensitivity has given way to name-calling; wokeness is out and strongmen are in.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told military officers at Marine Corps Base Quantico that his department would review its definitions of “bullying,” “hazing” and “toxic leadership” to make sure that the terms were not “weaponized” to weaken the military.
“The era of politically correct, overly sensitive, don’t-hurt-anyone’s-feelings leadership ends right now,” he said during an address in which he also railed against “fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon.”
The new defenders of bullying seem to be reflecting a national mood that rewards toughness, said Joanna Schroeder, a media critic and author of “Talk to Your Boys.” “There is a sense of: Our children are so weak because we’ve protected them too much, and our society is falling apart because of cancel culture,” she said.
She disagrees, but she is not surprised the attitude is surfacing. A decade ago, anti-bullying campaigns were about the closest thing you could find to a universal cause. That makes them an obvious target for any TikTok creator or politician hungry for provocation, Ms. Schroeder said.
But the word “bullying” often stands in for plain old bigotry or discrimination, she added, pointing to the resurgence of a slur for people with intellectual disabilities. “We have pushed back so hard against cancel culture and political correctness that now we’re enthusiastically mocking disabled children,” Ms. Schroeder said. “It’s wild.”
Some TikTok creators have tried to reframe bullying as a form of radical honesty, or a counterweight to a culture of political correctness. Others go for the jugular.
“American teenagers have gotten so soft these days,” a young woman says to the camera in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than two million times. While completing her skin care routine, she describes herself as a former high school “mean girl” who does not feel any remorse. Hand-wringing about bullying in the United States has gotten way out of hand, she says: “Bruh, it’s really not that bad.”
The post has more than a hundred comments, many of them harsh enough to be considered, well, bullying. (Its creator did not respond to a request for comment.)
Larkin Mainwaring, 18, does not see the bullying she endured in high school as a character-building exercise. She said she was mocked relentlessly for having Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, by classmates who once threw her crutches over a railing and told her to go get them.
It might have made her tougher, but she would not wish the experience on anyone. “You don’t need somebody else to torment you,” said Ms. Mainwaring, now a college student in Westerville, Ohio, and a member of the National Bullying Prevention Center’s Youth Advisory Board.
To be sure, members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha experience a form of bullying different from what you might see in 1980s movies — digital harassment, rather than stuffing freshmen into lockers. And while some data has suggested that bullying is on the decline, there is no doubt that it still exists and can bring about serious mental health consequences.
About one-third of teenagers reported being bullied within the past year in a study published last October by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with girls, L.G.B.T.Q. students and teenagers with developmental disabilities reporting bullying at higher rates.
“I am talking to children about bullying every single day in my office — it has not gone anywhere,” said Willough Jenkins, a child psychiatrist and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.
Dr. Jenkins said she was concerned when she began to see “bring back bullying” pop up in social media replies this summer. Even though some people view the phrase as a joke, she worries it will function as a kind of permission slip for online cruelty. The internet allows modern bullying to take place at any hour of the day, from any location.
“It felt to me like people are really not understanding, in the current day and age, what bullying looks like,” Dr. Jenkins said.
The depersonalization of the internet makes people feel like they can hurl vicious insults at individuals they’ve never met, said Pebble Swanson, 19, a college student in Oregon, who routinely receives such messages online.
Swanson, who uses the pronoun they, has been seeing “bring back bullying” comments online for at least a few years now. They think that people toss off the phrase because it’s easier than trying to understand why another person’s beliefs or presentation makes them uncomfortable.
If “bring back bullying” is meant as a joke, Swanson added, it is not a particularly good one. “I think that we make a lot of jokes in our generation, but some of them are taken too far.”
Callie Holtermann reports on style and pop culture for The Times.
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