Attraction to bullies: C/D

Bullies tend to turn the world into aggressors and victims, and most people, alas, tend to want to identify with the aggressor.

The maintenance of human relationships depends on leaving thoughts unsaid and impulses unacted-upon, but this self-restraint is stressful: we take vicarious release (= pleasure) in the bully's transgression, particularly if we lack the [fill in positive quality here] to appreciate the destructive consequences of their actions -- a failure of both compassion and intelligence, as it were.

We are anxious, and feel weak: bullies project strength, and we want to ally ourselves with them so as to feel protected. This dynamic may be informed by having had a bullying figure for a parent.

HAHAHAHAHA! I had to watch that twice during my pre-college education and analyze it. James Woods has some classic lines in that movie though, "College is just one big fuck farm!"

Yes because there are no bullies, only 'bullying acts'. Hitler was a vegetarian, etc etc.

I had a horrible nightmare last night where I was in love with a bully. This bully, who quite closely resembled someone from the forum (no-one I've met in real life though), we were lying on top of the bed together, and he was talking about his current girlfriend, who was in the other room. "Oh, she's a dumm bitch, don't worry about her." It was true that she was kind of stupid, and he was just using her - she was a poor girl, kind of mute with suffering type. But then he started relating a big story about the other girl he was seeing, a female journalist who got treated like shit because she was female, and how she uncovered all this important news but never got paid much because why should she? There was no way she could get a better job. He was relating this as an amusing narrative. This journalist was sent undercover as a prostitute and, not because she needed the money, but just because she didn't really care, she actually started turning tricks. And that was how he met her, when he picked her up on the street when she was working. So he had these two girlfriends, but he was saying to me in a sneering kind of way, 'But don't worry baby, I'm dumping both of them for you. I don't need them, now that I've got you.' The worst part is that I was really, really drawn to him, like he was my 'true love'.