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Solanas of course, from my vague recall of her SCUM Manifesto, was in many ways quite biologizing of this inversion of the psychodnyamic gender drama, wherein men are incomplete version of an essence of the human, such essence rooted in the biological precession of the female developmental trajectory, and also was in many ways had an assessment of the patriarchy as conspiracy. It is not surprising that the work ends up taking on a genocidal or eugenic tone overall.

However, there is the narrative that Solanas crafts in her work, and then there is how her work encounters the reality principle. While often described as a feminist work, even though it is unclear whether Valerie Solanas would have labeled it as such herself, the thesis of her work takes for granted sets of character judgments that are attached to particular ways of being in the world, to performing, to finding one's place in, and most of all, coping in or with the world, while retaining a possibility of success for those needs--even wants--which start with a rooted desire. Instead of inverting the poles of men and women gender-wise through a swapping or alteration of their situations and circumstances, Solanas abstracts the set of character judgments that themselves permeate the cultural landfill of gender and its self-fulfilling prophecies, and performs the inversion by inverting those character judgments, stereotypes or traits themselves. The swapping of circumstances that proceeds later is only a side-effect, and response to, this initial inversion. In this way, while the genocidal fantasy Solanas writes is pro-women, the narrative's necessary real-world presupposition for it to even be able exist is misogyny. Without misogyny, the dream of the women as the self-enclosed completeness and purity of the human for which all else serves and seeks, would not be able to function. Without the systems of meaning provided by the patriarchy itself, Solanas' narrative would lack intelligibility.

Yet, it seems preposterous to assume Solanas had no level of awareness about this predicament, if she can in such explicit terms acknowledge how patriarchy as such could convince a woman of its own character judgments regarding her and her kind. That observation, is, after all, about misogyny. It seems that Solanas' thinking then is not a result of naivete about the misogyny operative within her work, but rather it shows misogyny to be the horizon or limit of her imaginary. I would claim that this "misogynistic horizon of the imaginary" would likely be seen in feminists that historically have not taken such apparently extreme positions as Solanas as well. It would certainly explain a lot of phenomena that we see up to today, especially in the conflicts within feminism today regarding trans people (though, ironically, Solanas herself, I suspect, would have been more ambivalent on this today compared to a TERF given her "program").

I think this is a good overview of the impacts of bullying, including not only quantitative data about those impacts into adulthood, but also interesting qualitative case studies regarding that impact. It's useful as a starting point for understanding some of the factors that have been found in the research to be relevant to victimization or perpetration in bullying as well as how such experiences affect relationships and social behavior in later life. I left the book interested in a more specific angle on bullying, relevant to myself as well, as some of the qualitative studies involved shifts from homosociality to heterosociality in bullying victims depending on the gendering and gendered experience of the bullying. Given that bullying occurs in childhood, it may coincide with critical periods in the formation of a gendered sense of self and engagement in sexual interest and exploration. It would be interesting to see how the bullying experience interacts with burgeoning psychic forces and drives during this period to influence developmental trajectory in these areas.

The book promotes a construct called Adult Post-Bullying Syndrome. While there does seem to be a cluster of common underlying symptoms for those who survived bullying in childhood, especially if not having exhibited post-traumatic growth, many of those traits overlap with symptomology for other conditions. It is not clear how, for example, abuse and bullying are all that different in their effects.

Perhaps the main difference is that of the notion of environmental control and mastery, such that bullying has an inherent normalizing function for what is to be expected in a social environment as such, rather than what is to be expected in particular types of relationships. For bullied children, social environments in general seem to lack a sense of control. That is, the cognition formed from bullying and that formed from abuse is slightly different, wherein social cognition as a result of the former involves a more global social expectation adjustment and a more context-indifferent undervaluation of agency. It is also the case that bullying has a tendency to be more prolonged than a single instance of relational abuse, and even in equivalent duration may be perceived as more inescapable than, for example, prolonged parental abuse. The prospects of greater freedom from parents in adulthood as opposed to greater freedom from peers or colleagues may make it more likely to sustain hope in one scenario compared to another. If there is a distinction to be made between bullying effects and more general abuse effects, there is nonetheless huge overlap and boundary fuzziness. This is despite definitions of bullying that exclude other kinds of abuse, but based not on their effect or etiology but other features like frequency or perpetrator.

Despite the books' fascinating statistics, it seems to me that not much of a case is made that APBS is enough of a unique or independent condition to deserve separate treatment from other diagnoses. Rather, the utility of something like APBS might be in prognosis or as a way into assessing and understanding other comorbidities, almost treating it as something which mediates those comorbidities due to the explicitness about the nature and shape of the traumatic event. Its utility for prognosis may make it useful in institutional contexts dealing with children, such as schools. At minimum, I can imagine an APBS diagnosis could itself validate and honor the true impact and seriousness of a patients' childhood bullying experience by making it explicit.

The most interesting parts of this book, perhaps simply because they have personal relevance, were the parts about the impact of bullying, especially prolonged bullying, on worldview, the polarities in defense mechanisms among victims of bullying, the impact on social participation and self-initiated formation of social units, the circulation of behavior and attachment from parents to peers to adult authority figures and back, and more specifically the impact of bullying on sexual and gender minorities. One theme that seemed to gently emerge from the text before quickly dissipating again like sand as I was reading was that of changes in homosociality v. heterosociality in the child's trajectory to adulthood impacted by bullying. It seemed also that the bullying of sexual minorities seemed to have some differential determination on the "temporality" of the development of sexual or gender identity. These aspects seemed to me to need more qualitative exploration and research.

It is interesting to see that pre-existing attachment styles for children affects their peer relationships. It's notable that it is largely peers that mirror insecure attachment styles that engage in mutual, if lop-sided, bullying, rather than those with diametrically contrasting attachment styles. This suggests that, although it may be true that attachment styles may send signals to peers about the prospects of predictable cooperation and collaboration with the group, this is not enforced or sanctioned by those who are already capable of having such cooperative or collaborative relationships due to more secure attachment styles. It would seem, then, that bullying is not so much a process for enforcing cooperation/collaboration, but a process for reinforcing social positioning and status within the group. That is, the group must value the positioning of its members enough to be willing to accept or engage in internal conflict.

Those with insecure attachment may play both roles for the group, as tools for "putting others in their place" in the group and as victims of bullying due to the way their insecure attachment makes it difficult to accurately perceive and assess, therefore manage and negotiate, their social positioning or role in the group. It is important to note that this proxy enforcement of role/status or position backfires by reducing social cohesion and reducing prosocial attitudes long-term for the group as a whole, undermining healthier social strategies for every member. The inability to associate with a different group, especially when a child has been ostracized, only makes this worse. Cases in which parents are aware of what is happening and have move their children to other schools have sometimes lead to improvements for that child.

This is a fascinating finding. It might be important to dig into the details of this study and its methodology. But taking this conclusion for granted, there are a few hypotheses that may be explanatory:

• Relationships with adults exclusively impact intergenerational relationships more generally, such that symptomology is state-based rather than more akin to being trait-based. Consequently, they do not show up as symptoms that globally intrude on a person's social life, such as anxiety, depression, etc. This is why, assuming equal frequency of abuse by adults among the bullied and non-bullied childhood populations, those who are bullied are more likely to experience more mental health issues. Interactions and encounters with authority are often ephemeral, elective and instrumental and nonetheless have less disparity in adulthood, and thus the psychology exclusive to these encounters are less likely to present as debilitating.

• Peer socialization mediates the effects of family or intergenerational relations on mental health, such that adverse early peer relationships present with greater incidence of mental health issues down the line. This would imply that peer socialization simply either augments or contracts the impact of family/intergenerational relations. If those with adverse family/intergenerational relations are found with equal frequency in both bullied and non-bullied childhood populations, under this hypothesis, an observed greater impact of peer relationships on mental health than family/intergenerational relationships would be expected.

• Peer and family/intergenerational relationships function as compensatory social support systems in relation to each other. This would imply that poorer family/intergenerational relationships drive children to attempt to strengthen or enrichen peer relationships, and the same is true in reverse. It is also possible for both arenas to be appropriately rich or poor. Under this hypothesis, assuming equal frequency of adverse familial/intergenerational relations for non-bullied and bullied childhood populations and recognizing the initial non-elective nature of family, the expected outcome based merely on probability distribution would be that peer relationships have greater impact on mental health down the line compared to familial/intergenerational relationships. Children who are bullied, in other words, will be worse off regardless of whether they have adverse family/intergenerational relationships or they don't than those who are not bullied and may or may not have adverse family/intergenerational relationships.

• Peer socialization simply has more importance for social development than family/intergenerational relations. It is obvious how this would explain the study results. This seems the least likely hypothesis--it would seem the two are equally important, and aren't rival systems of social support. It would seem obvious that the starting point of peer socialization is already "rigged," so to speak, by very early family socialization and that both peer and family demands (the latter mirrored in intergenerational disparity in authority) exert equal pressure on the child that the child needs to learn to navigate, negotiate and manage, and that this itself is part of the child's socialization process as a whole that may influence in adulthood their relationship boundaries, the variety of kinds of relationships they have or can have, and their particular process of family formation. Similarly, with adulthood the importance of peer socialization is increased due to increased independence from family, such that it sets the stage for interactions with strangers and maintenance of or formation of relationships under more contingent, variable, or elective circumstances.

This comports with my own experience, as during a span of 4-6 years after the most dense period of bullying I could not imagine myself in any relationships. In fact, the question would not even occur to me and the fuss made about the potential relationships with others, by others, seemed alien enough to me to appear frivolous. That particular avenue of meaning was lost to me. This, I realize, was more a kind of social oblivion that went hand in hand with a reduced self-awareness of emotions that are intrinsically relational. It wasn't that such emotions were absent, but that they were so left unattended that they were set in a perpetual movement of "forgetting" and "forgetfulness" that was defensive. Despite the study here being true to my experience, there are potential confounding factors such as other adverse chilhood experiences that don't qualify as bullying but also correlate with bullying. Or, some of it could be accounted for by the preponderance of LGBT or gender non-conforming bullying victims who would also have problems with those things for independent reasons (though, granted, it seems intuitive that bullying would have its own unique effect nonetheless, while also being tied to and inextricable from the conditions that produce those other "independent reasons"). I could also imagine, on a case by case basis, how causality could be reversed, though I admit I imagine this to happen at the margins, or only when causality is bidirectional, as I think it would rely on pre-existing mental health conditions, a good portion of such conditions still having a biopsychosocial rather than purely psychophysiological or genetic etiology nonetheless.