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Womens Health Book Store > Womens Health books beginning with P
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Please Stop Laughing At Me...: One Woman's Inspirational Story |
Author: Jodee Blanco
Published: 2003-03-01 |
List price: $12.95
Our price: $10.36
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As of: December 02nd, 2008 02:17:51 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 The sad tell of a pathetic wannabe
Where do I begin. Immediately upon reading the book I am faced with the author, dumping a good friend who is deaf, for the chance to be popular, since her popular friend said her deaf friend is a retard.
I thought, well I'm not reading a book about some person who is willing to bully herself just for a chance at popularity. However, while this book is almost a joke when it comes to detailing the real experience of being bullied. As I see it, someone who is relentlessly teased or tormented, when they have done nothing wrong. Letting yourself be used to be popular, and then wondering why you're always beaten up isn't something to be sympathized with.
I have Asperger's Syndrome, I was bullied simply for who I am. By faculty, and students. I didn't bother becoming popular because I knew that just wasn't the route life had for me. From reading this book I'm glad I hadn't, or I might've turned into a pity-party whiner, asking "Why me?" when she subjects herself time and time again to being the target of bullies.
People who are born disabled, or neurodiverse like me, don't ever have a choice not to be bullied. We're considered the "retards", it's just a given you'll be bullied. There's only 2 choices, rise above it, or let it eat you up inside. Jodee had a choice, that the people she was so quick to dismiss as "retards" never had. She had the choice to be a normal student. Maybe not a popular student, but at least have friends.
Isn't the irony that Jodee turns down a deaf girl who has no friends, for her own selfish desire to be popular amazing. Jodee has no right to complain, a dog gets beaten and it doesn't return to the person who beat them again. Jodee kept saying, "Please beat me, abuse me, use me, I want to be popular" and when they do, it ends up being some sob story.
Now Jodee thinks she knows what it feels like to be bullied, please. She kept putting herself into situations where she was bound to be bullied. You can't call that being a victim, perhaps being a doormat for others maybe. People like Marianne and I and others in Special Ed know that being bullied in school is unavoidable, and that we never had a choice.
I hope someone writes a real book about bullying. I suggest reading Queen Bees and Wannabes, or Odd Girls Speak Out instead of this manipulative self-absorbed "poor little me" of a story.
Those of us who have been bullied know how manipulative popular girls or wannabe popular girls can be. They bully others, and then when they get punished they cry and act as if they were hurt. This is an entire book of one bullies moaning and whining about how she suffered cause she was never popular. She should try living the life of someone who never had a chance to be "normal". See how she likes living a life where bullying doesn't stop after high school.
This was the worst read ever!
Like others have said - I really wanted to like this book and take something away from it. It was horrible! The writing is unbelievable and completly unrealistic as to how teenagers would speak. I found myself rolling my eyes at more then one passage. Very poorly written.
I wanted to slap her, myself!
What a silly disappointment of a book. The writing is akin to an overly long essay submitted for extra credit by a seventh-grade student. Almost everything I read in this book was worthy of a snort of contempt--or, at the very least, an eye roll.
 The Epitome of Integrity
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."
Whoever thought of that saying never had to deal with bullying the way Jodee Blanco did. If you thought you had it rough in school, you'll rethink your own struggles when Blanco shares her literal horror stories of intimidation and harassment in "Please Stop Laughing at Me", a memoir that begins with her struggles in grade school all the way to her senior year in high school.
Jodee's battles with bullies begin at a Catholic grammar school dubbed Holy Ascension. She gets her first taste of stigmatization in fourth grade when she volunteers to help out with the deaf program, telling on two friends who mock the deaf children and braving the ensuing backlash. Then while at Morgan Hills, she blows the whistle on a birthday party involving games of an overtly sexual nature, a moral compromise that has her in the red with several of the attendees and labeled a tattletale. Under the ruse of forgiveness, Jodee is dragged out into a parking lot where her so-called friends call her a "wuss", kick and spit on her, throw her favorite suede shoes in a urine-filled toilet and douse her brand new white angora sweater with cans of Coke. These are mere nuggets of the tribulation Jodee sustains over the next several years.
In the course of the abuse, Jodee transfers schools twice and is forced by her parents to see a shrink and go on medication for anxiety. She succumbs to depression, her decreased appetite leading to subsequent rapid weight loss and one alarming case of self-mutilation with a kitchen knife that results in a trip to the emergency room. On top of Jodee's struggles to fit in, she deals with a painful deformity of her breasts which doctors are unable to correct until her seventeenth birthday. Her rattled state takes it toll on her parents as well, a restiveness settling atop their house during the school year with only a brief respite from her misery during summer break.
The torture you read about gets overwhelming fairly quickly and about the only thing that will keep you reading is seeing Jodee get the last laugh at her high school reunion 20 years later as a person of prominence, the biggest success story in the room.
I know I am not the first to say it after having read this moving memoir that there were times when I felt as if Blanco were writing my own story. Specific passages brought back thoughts and feelings that still haunt me to this day, either because I choose not to exorcise those demons and hold on to my anger (because I don't know how else to feel) or because the psychological damage is irreversible and the after-effects are beyond my control. Like Jodee, my anger with the individuals who teased me boiled to the point where I had fantasies of hurting people and also like Jodee, my catharsis for this pain was my writing (I still use it to cope with many different situations). It is my own cheap therapy (since I doubt my insurance would cover a real therapist) but I wonder if my own upcoming high school reunion (10 years) will be just the salve I need to remedy all those festering wounds. I also believe I have anger management issues that stem from the bottled-up rage and resentment I still experience from the teasing and taunting I endured. I did not suffer anywhere near the level Jodee did, but I still feel the scars from time to time.
I realize now that people know nothing about individuality during the consequential years of grade school and high school - we are all too busy surrendering to conformity. I am guilty of it myself, due to the fact that I associated with a disreputable crowd just to belong (though I never really did - those people gave me hell too), as well as poking fun at other people to take the focus of the teasing off of me. As Jodee states, "Making fun of people, even if you didn't want to, was the new price of social acceptance by the group. The rules were simple. It was either shun or be shunned." (pg. 38)
My mother offered the same advice that Jodee's did: Ignore them and they'll stop bothering you. While this is true for most people, this did not detract Jodee's torturers. Her silent indifference to their mockery only fueled their fire. To retort only gave them the reaction they wanted all along, another excuse to inflict physical damage as well as emotional. Because bullies (active and erstwhile alike) refuse to stop and think about the aftermath, they create monsters in the form of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. Who knows whether psychiatric intervention could've saved those boys (as well as the people they killed), but it does give one pause to make people think about the possible end result of what they deem to be innocent and "normal" derision for people their age. When does one grow up and realize the consequences of their actions? It's only when the damage has been done do we bother to take responsibility for the lives that we have affected with our own selfish behavior.
Bottom Line: Simply put, "Please Stop Laughing At Me" is an eye-opening, inspiring (albeit depressing) memoir of Blanco's inner strength and her ability to heal and forgive despite all the physical and emotional wounds inflicted upon her (I imagine the process of writing this was purgative for her as well). I look forward to reading the sequel to this memoir ("Please Stop Laughing At Us...One Survivor's Extraordinary Quest to Prevent School Bullying) as I am an advocate for relieving the toll that bullying takes both on a minute and a grand scale. If we do not take a serious and active position on this issue, then sadly, school shootings will be in the headlines for many years to come.
 Not entirely believable
I found the author's accounts of bullying to be interesting and dramatic enough to keep me reading but I struggled with the believability of her experiences. Being held down and punched and kicked, suffocated and thrown into traffic exceeds bullying and ventures into the realm of assault. Perhaps in her time the bullying experiences were more severe. Kids don't get away with doing things like that twice in this day and age. I also think she may be exercising a slight bias toward herself being the complete victim without any provoking or invitation on her part. It's interesting how at each new school she started in she HAD a circle of friends almost immediately and those friends were part of the popular crowd. She also had multiple instances of boys taking interest in her. This tells me that it wasn't her looks or style that caused these friends to turn on her. She did come off as having a holier-than-thou attitude and even now in the writing style you can tell she is a bit of a braggart who demands attention. Kids in junior high and high school can pick up on this pretty easily. It's fine to have good morals but some of the occurances in the book made me roll my eyes a bit. If she would have with-held a couple of things from her mother (who in turn always went right to the teachers and other parents) she may have survived a little longer at these schools. The boy/girl party scene comes to mind first. All in all, I found it interesting but not really helpful or believable.
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