Our nasty need to bully

Bullying was rife when I was younger. In the schoolyard it wasn’t just the other students; the teachers were bullies. At work it wasn’t just workmates; the boss was king bully. And at home everybody bullied everybody else due to the karma generated by all the bullying they suffered out in the real world. Now – thank god – things have changed.

We, the enlightened ones, have decreed that bullying is bad. Rightly so, I might add.

This isn’t some diatribe waxing nostalgic about the good ol’ days when men were men and women – well, I don’t know what they were because hardly any men thought to record women’s history. But I wonder if there might be something in-built in us that needs to bully? Chimpanzees seem to me like terrible bullies. And I wonder what would happen if you told a group of silverbacks to be nice to the guy with a grey back?

Bullying is ancient. It’s how nature works. This need used to be satisfied by hating on Neanderthals, who I’m led to believe were dimwitted, lazy, sloped of forehead and certainly not the type of genus you’d want your daughter to bring home.

Later, after we’d butchered and said all the mean things we could about Neanderthals and neighbouring tribes, we – the apex species – headed out around the world to find new targets for bullying.

Now, in this post-bully world, what could satisfy our nasty needs?

Luckily, in the early 2000s a new grouping of hominid was discovered right here, living with the rest of us norms: the hipster. We had a group to be nasty about.

No-one identifies themselves as a hipster, yet they must exist. Hipster hating isn’t new, it just went away for a while. I believe scholars will tell you it goes back to when people were being nasty about Jesus’ beard and sourdough.

I’m sure you know the old saying: ‘‘Trust a Neanderthal over a camel and a snake over a Neanderthal, but never, ever trust a hipster.’’

And so we see story after story in the news letting us know that people with beards are dirty, smelly and biologically inferior.

Those damn hipsters and their god-damn smashed avocado are so easy to hate.

And like any group the majority is looking to break down, we’re told the hipster is unhygienic. So we see news headlines on Stuff trumpeting that your dog is cleaner than a hipster’s beard because saying ‘‘dirtier than a dog’’ is vintage bullying.

But it’s not just hipster hygiene being questioned. Somehow in a world where the whiff of toxic masculinity will set Twitter aflutter, it’s OK to write entire stories about hipsters having small balls.

We had this headline from The New Zealand Herald a few weeks ago: ‘‘Study finds correlation between bearded men and size of testicles’’. It was a story that was widely reported internationally, based on a study by University of Western Australia primatologist Dr Cyril Grueter. I quote: ‘‘This finding clearly shows that you can be well-adorned or wellendowed, but it’s hard to be both.’’

The inference here is that hipsters have small testicles, which apparently suggests a lack of manliness. Or I suppose less manly than all the clean-shaven, well-endowed men.

I know we’re at peak beard, but it’ll be over before you can say ‘‘1980s revival’’.

So next time you’re about to bash a hipster, remember, some of your friends and family might be one. Hell, you might even be one yourself. How will you know? Don’t worry, a bully will tell you.