Growing up, Brennon Harris was often the new kid at school. It was difficult to make friends, and he was the victim of intimidation for his weight and his performance in his classes.
This summer, he noticed a series of videos on the social networks of people arguing that today’s adolescents could use a little hardening. Despite his experience, he thought they had one point. “I honestly think that we have to bring back intimidation,” said Harris, now 20, in a Tiktok video.
In a telephone interview, it was not long in clarifying that it was never acceptable to turn to physical violence or to choose people according to their race, their religion or their handicap. But he maintains that intimidation – at least one form of it – is not as bad as it is made.
“If I had never been intimidated, I don’t think I would be where I am today,” said Harris, who has since removed his video Tiktok. “I don’t think I would have the motivation to prove that people are wrong.”
An online choir of people has argued, with different levels of sincerity, that young people today could have a dose of teenage wickedness. Many of these messages are read as outrageous bait; However, they have alarmed mental health professionals who say that intimidation is a problem far too serious to be laughed or rebuilt as a character creation exercise. Adolescent suicide reports after intense intimidation are published regularly.
However, videos are only a manifestation of a cultural pendulum which moves away from sweetness and accommodation and towards provocation and hostility. Online and at the highest level of Policy, sensitivity has given way to names; The terminal is out and strong men are inside.
Last week, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, told the military officers of the basis of the Marine Corps Quantico that his department would examine his definitions of “intimidation”, “hazing” and “toxic leadership” to ensure that the terms were not “armed” to weaken the military.
“The era of politically correct leadership, too sensitive, not to be eaten, ends at the moment,” he said in an address in which he also kept “big generals and admirals in the corridors of the Pentagon”.
The new defenders of intimidation seem to reflect a national mood which rewards tenacity, said Joanna Schroeder, critic of the media and author of “Talk to Your Boys”. “There is a meaning: our children are so weak because we have protected them too much, and our society collapses because of the cancellation of culture,” she said.
She does not agree, but she is not surprised that the attitude will come back. Ten years ago, anti-intimidation campaigns were almost the closest thing you could find from a universal cause. This makes it an obvious target for any creator or politician of Tiktok, hungry for provocation, said Ms. Schroeder.
But the word “intimidation” often represents an old fanaticism or discrimination, she added, pointing to the resurgence of an insult for people with intellectual disability. “We have rejected so much to cancel the culture and the politically correct that we are now making fun of the disabled children with enthusiasm,” said Schroeder. “It’s wild.”
Some Tiktok creators have tried to crop intimidation as a form of radical honesty, or a counterweight to a culture of political correction. Others opt for the jugular.
“American adolescents have become so soft these days,” said a young woman on the camera in a Tiktok video that has been seen more than two million times. While finishing her skin care routine, she describes herself as a former “nasty girl” in high school who does not feel any remorse. Aculy by hand on intimidation in the United States have become uncontrollable, she says: “Bruh, it’s really not so bad.”
The message has more than a hundred comments, many of them severe enough to be considered, finally, intimidation. (Its creator did not respond to a request for comments.)
Larkin Mainwaring, 18, does not see the intimidation that she endured in high school as a character creation exercise. She said she was relentlessly mocked to have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder, by classmates who threw her crutches on a balustrade and told her to go and get them.
It could have made it more difficult, but she would only like experience on anyone. “You don’t need someone else to torment yourself,” said Ms. Mainwaring, now a student in Westerville, Ohio, and a member of the Youth Advisory Council of the National Bullying Prevention Center.
Admittedly, Gen Z and Gen Alpha members experience a different form of intimidation from what you might see in the films of the 1980s – digital harassment, rather than stuffing first -year students. And although some data suggested that intimidation is declining, there is no doubt that there is still and can cause serious consequences on mental health.
About a third of adolescents said they had been intimidated in the past year in a study published last October by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with girls, LGBTQ students and adolescents with developmental deficiencies reporting intimidation at higher rates.
“I speak to children about intimidation every day of my office – he did not go nowhere,” said Willough Jenkins, child psychiatrist and associate professor of psychiatry at the University of California in San Diego.
Dr. Jenkins said she was worried when she started to “bring back intimidation” appear in social media responses this summer. Even if some people consider the sentence as a joke, she worries, it will work as a kind of sliding authorization for online cruelty. The Internet allows modern intimidation to take place at any time of the day, from any place.
“I felt like people really did not understand today today, what is banging like,” said Dr. Jenkins.
Internet depersonalization gives people the impression of being able to launch vicious insults to the individuals they have never met, said Pebble Swanson, 19, an Oregon student, who regularly receives such online messages.
Swanson, who uses the pronoun they have seen comments “bringing intimidation” online for at least a few years now. They think that people throw the sentence because it is easier than trying to understand why beliefs or the presentation of another person make them uncomfortable.
If “bringing intimidation” is conceived as a joke, added Swanson, it is not particularly good. “I think we are doing a lot of jokes in our generation, but some of them are taken too far.”
