Today’s installment has made for some passionate discussions with friends and family this week. It explores suffering from a different angle: why we sometimes like to make other people suffer. Before you read, I want to preface that the focus of this piece isn’t about creating some new criteria between bullying and harassment. (If you disagree with how I delineate the two, cool, I will not debate you.) Rather, I wanted to turn over some rocks on times where I bullied others and why I did so.
Note: As you can I see, I completely missed my self-imposed Saturday deadline, which I think I created just to make myself suffer. (I’m my own target demographic, lol.) I woke up yesterday and decided to spend my day relaxing and writing 3K words on a short story that is just for me. It will never be published, because that’s not its purpose. It was great. (Honestly, try it sometime.) So, this piece just had to wait a little. The recipe for this week is also coming out tomorrow.
When I first started hosting popup dinners with my husband in 2014, we hosted 8 people at a time in our little apartment in NYC. At the beginning, everyone was our friend or a friend-of-a-friend, but after a while, we started receiving strangers. This was a big step-function learning process for us, as the definition of hospitality suddenly shifted from “acceptable enough that my friend isn’t upset they Venmo’ed me $50 for dinner” to “What must we do to prevent 1-star Yelp reviews?” During this (thankfully) short-lived time, there’s one incident that I still remember very vividly. The interaction went like this:
Guest: I would like this cocktail please, but without egg whites.
Husband, the mixologist: I can do that, but it may taste a little strange because it’s a sour, so it’s meant to have egg whites. Alternatively, I can make a different drink for you?
Guest: I don’t care, just make this drink without the egg whites.
Husband: Okay.
Husband: [Comes back with the drink] Here you are, if you don’t like it I’m happy to make you something else without egg whites.
Guest: [Takes one sip, makes a face] Ugh. This is awful. Get this away from me. [Extends their arm, with the drink in hand, as far as possible from their body to indicate severe distaste.]
Husband: …
What struck me the most about this interaction wasn’t so much that it was outrageously horrible (it’s not), but rather the quick look of satisfaction I saw flitter across the guest’s face with the delivery of their final verdict. For a long time, I thought I was just reading too deeply into the situation or “being too sensitive.” (A favorite descriptor for women everywhere.) But after witnessing this type of behavior play out regularly in the restaurants I worked in—from chains to fine dining—I began to understand this exchange as bullying.
In this scenario, there were many ways for the guest to deliver their message (basically: I don’t like it), but doing so in that particular way feels gratifyingly spiteful. Through that lens, I think bullying is built on a particular schadenfreude: the bully has the ability, authority, and power to make themselves the central focus of your world, at least for a short while, and to have you suffer because of it. A critical part of the payoff is that you feel bad. To do so, the bully finds ways to undermine who you are or your abilities, distort reality, or assign you the blame of being in the situation to begin with (basically: gaslighting). Having you believe these warped ideas then gives the bully a certain reassurance that they are in the right, and their actions justified. Put together, the end goal of bullying is not necessarily to achieve some concrete reward, but to make you hate yourself.
Harassment, I posit, flows in the opposite direction. It’s centered around the harasser coercing you to do something you don’t want to do. Harassers also don’t necessarily gain anything from you suffering or questioning yourself, unless that was their main objective to begin with. But I’m not here to create criteria of what is or is not bullying versus harassment (especially since there’s legal ramifications on how the terminology is applied). Rather, I think what’s interesting is to consider why we bully others—because the thing is, we are all bullies.
There are some external conditions that must be right for bullying to happen, and unfortunately, hospitality is rife with them. The class difference (and corresponding power imbalance) between diner and guest informs who we think we can bully. The oppressive “guest is always right” mentality creates a place where we feel empowered to bully, which is further enforced by social norms around how to act in public, especially while dining, that largely frowns upon conflict.
But why do we feel entitled to bully others? If I simply want something from someone, especially one whose job is to take care of me, there are many more amicable ways to acquire it. So, there must be some other motivation, deeply tied with someone else’s suffering. This emotional draw must be quite compelling if it causes us to be nasty to complete strangers, and I think that is the key to seeing it clearly: when we feel small, bullying responds to our fears and insecurities that threaten our identity, by transforming those fears into pain for someone else.
I very much doubt the guest in question came to my apartment with intent to casually bully my husband. In fact, if I remember correctly, they were quite proud to be at this “underground popup” as they were a “bona-fide foodie and cocktail enthusiast.” However, when finding themselves in a scenario where this self-inscribed identity was being called into question (real or imagined), the response was to bully the person who made them feel this way. If they denounce the drink as awful, imply my husband was the incompetent one, and do so in a way that can goad him into responding as if he believes it too, then the guest could walk away with their sense of self intact.
Bullying, then, could be classified as self-soothing at its worst. When we bully others, we are desperately hoping that enforcing suffering in another person means emancipation from our own. Yet bullying is a distraction instead of a resolution: it may give us a momentary feeling of power or triumph, but it doesn’t address our underlying fear.
I remember the last time I distinctly know I bullied a restaurant worker. I was dining with a close friend, whom I colloquially call my little sister (as we grew up together and she’s younger than me), before she started college. We had been living together for a few months, and I was feeling anxious if our relationship would stay as strong after she left, and if she would still look up to me and think I was “cool.” I was also feeling very insecure about my abilities as a “chef,” then having graduated culinary school a year ago but without any food industry experience. I can’t remember what the server said that upset me, but I do remember being a complete asshole to the guy for the rest of the night, undermining him at every turn by demanding “clarification” on multiple dishes, cruelly contributing to the growing panic in his eyes by repeatedly sending things back to the kitchen.
I think to be a bully is a state of existence, not just a series of repeated actions, which sometimes makes the relationship between the actual trigger and the final recipient extremely illogical. Put another way, the bully is the person that lives in fear. And hospitality not only makes for easy outlets of relief, but is set up in a way—with so many knowledge asymmetries, especially when it comes to fine-dining institutions—that has great potential of crossing wires on whatever underlying thing we are already feeling nervous about.
I know that I existed in fear for years, and still live in fear often. I know because the last time I bullied someone is not some distant memory like this restaurant incident; it was last year, when an ex-staff member’s (objectively not very good) execution of an event prompted a deep-seated fear of being exposed as a giant fraud, of my own credentials as a professional being catastrophically undermined. I didn’t want to feel insecure or worthless, yet there they were curling in my stomach, and I desperately wanted someone else to feel the same ugly way that I did.
We bully those whom we feel a sense of entitlement over their feelings, and I think that’s the hardest part to bear witness to within hospitality. When such a key part of bullying is gaslighting, the narrative of the “low-skill” worker that is flipping pancakes, cleaning tables, or making coffee not “deserving” a living wage already does much of the bully’s work. In that way, I think ‘bullied’ is a state as well—of constant doubt, of being told you’re subservient or lesser-than, so frequent it becomes white noise. (How our media narratives contribute to this state of being also finds many parallels in how we write, talk, critique women and their interests, which I’ll be writing about next week.)
And so, the cycle goes: hurt people hurt other people. Not so much because bullying actually even feels good, but because there’s a twisted gratitude that someone else feels bad, like me. But: we literally cannot bully our way into loving and accepting ourselves more, and this, I think, is what’s really at the heart of why I wanted to write this post. Instead of attempting to squish away this guilt of bullying others, can I dig into this pain and understand what I was so afraid of? Of who I didn’t want to be seen as?
If we can all begin to see bullying as an inability to love ourselves, perhaps we have a better chance to address (and prevent it) in our workplaces & communities. Because while it’s unlikely I’ll never bully anyone again — not when I have so many insecurities — at the very least, I can decide I no longer want to hate myself. What might society look like if that was the response we received when we did bully? That others would look at us straight in the eye and illuminate the scarred parts of us that were desperately, even pathetically, seeking a path toward healing?
For me, I hope the next time I want someone to feel bad, perhaps I’ll be able to see my own actions more clearly, identify what exactly is so threatening to my sense of self, and decide to respond differently.
Weekly Meme Roundup
Personal Things From This Week
Listening to: Creamy on Spotify
Watching: Wind from Luoyang (still—it’s 39 episodes ok!); also watching Big Scary S Word
Reading: Debating if I want to start Motherhood by Sheila Heti; just finished Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao (I have a lot of thoughts, which I will try to stuff in some other newsletter. If you also have thoughts, let’s DM about it!)
Eating: Walnut and pomegranate molasses marinated spare ribs, based off a recipe in Bottom of the Pot; also went to Felix Trattoria for the first time with my sister
Drinking: Curious Elixirs #1, probably my favorite from their lineup
Nice thing I did for myself this week: Did not do “that one last thing” for work after 7pm. (This resulted in crushing anxiety when I woke up, so I’m still working on that.)
When bullying feels good
Thanks for such a thought provoking post. I think there is an additional layer to bullying behavior as well—trauma and past stressors.
I haven’t worked in the service industry for a long time, but vividly remember being on the receiving end of bullying behavior from a school mate. While it was true the power dynamic (patron v server, $$ v not even having a pizza to my name) played a role, I quickly realized the behavior was modeled/inherited from his douchebag of a father. The family attempted to make me feel small, threatened my job. Would have been a horrible experience if not for the bong hit before work.
Years later, after this schoolmate and i went to the same college, became friends, and are now constantly in each other’s lives, we discussed his grotesque behavior in his youth. Home life was bad and that was the only way he knew how to deal with people at that stage. It lead to a warped understanding of the world—one where a nonsensical (and nonexistent) power struggle existed.
He’s a good person now and fosters too many puppies.
Upon first glance at this on IG, I was thinking of bullying as it pertains to the BOH hierarchy. But I suppose the patrons themselves are those with the ultimate authority. What can be done to equalize the power balance between the server and the one being served? In the hospitality industry building tips into the salary, taking away the authority of the patron to determine how much they think the server deserves.
Bullying is an inevitable part of human nature, and thrives in systems that favor power imbalance and hierarchy. We built these systems to fight the tendency towards chaos and disorder, and without them, society would indeed be chaos. I think within every being is an internal angst, a need to control something. My god, we had no control over our own birth. We didn't elect to live, to suffer, to die. So we control what is within our power to control. None of us elected our own destiny. Making others miserable is a way to deal with our own misery, the true powerlessness of being.