Mean Boys

December 1, 2014 9:21 AM

A study of Georgia high schools "found that, at every grade level, boys engaged in relationally aggressive behavior more often than girls." Commenting on the study, the lead researcher said,

"We have books, websites and conferences aimed at stopping girls from being aggressive, as well as a lot of qualitative research on why girls are relationally aggressive," Orpinas said. "But oddly enough, we don't have enough research on why boys would be relationally aggressive because people have assumed it's a girl behavior."

posted by clawsoon (45 comments total)

Link to full paper.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:24 AM on December 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

Subconscious bias may cause us to not see things? May cause us to not even ask the right questions? Who would have guessed.
posted by rtha at 9:27 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also, the full-paper link is a pay link, not free.
posted by rtha at 9:28 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Significantly more boys than girls fell into the two higher trajectories for relational aggression perpetration, while more girls than boys fell into the two higher trajectories for victimization.

That would certainly make sense, given the "locker-room talk" stereotype.
posted by jaguar at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Subconscious bias may cause us to not see things? May cause us to not even ask the right questions?

Boys are supposed to be more resilient in regards to that type of behavior. And they probably are-- but only to a point. It's something that we should attempt to mitigate, regardless, so that more people have a chance at making it to adulthood carrying less bitterness, suspicion and resentment.

I just don't know how you do it. We've been focusing on this behavior in girls for a while now and, from what I hear, adolescent girls are still terrible to each other. At our core, we're really just another species of ape brutishly trying to assert our dominance over the rest of our troop. That doesn't mean that we don't try to minimize that behavior, it just means that there aren't easy answers.
posted by Mayor Curley at 9:55 AM on December 1, 2014

> "But oddly enough, we don't have enough research on why boys would be relationally aggressive
> because people have assumed it's a girl behavior."

If the people assuming that are man-type people then thay can't ever have been young.
posted by jfuller at 10:00 AM on December 1, 2014 [7 favorites]

I don't really find this surprising either so I'm glad they did the research to confirm some of my feelings there. Assholes will exploit any area of vulnerability. Schools have clamped down on physical violence but social violence remains, it's not nearly as easy to apply a zero tolerance policy to it. That isn't to say the social violence wasn't always there, people just didn't see it.

I think part of why is that physical violence was more of an option for a boy. I found a few times that throwing a punch solved issues with being socially harassed. I did not have the social skills to figure another way out or to communicate that I needed help from someone. Telling teachers would be frowned upon as being snitchy and my experience was they would not do anything anyway. Closer supervision was pretty much the only thing that would really stop the assholes by not giving them as much of a chance to be two faced about their behavior with their peers.

A "social self-defense" class would have helped me out a lot more than football or karate.
posted by Drinky Die at 10:11 AM on December 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

Mayor Curley: Boys are supposed to be more resilient in regards to that type of behavior. And they probably are--

Based on what? Before we add any more gender-biased assumptions, isn't it minimally humane to admit we really don't know? And, lacking such knowledge, shouldn't we assume any child is harmed by such behavior?
posted by IAmBroom at 10:36 AM on December 1, 2014 [26 favorites]

Just came here to ask, relationally aggressive, what means this?
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:41 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

mental wimp, i think it means, using social means of being aggressive, instead of physical. Like, telling a kid that they can come to the birthday party, but then telling them later that they can't because they are a dork.
posted by rebent at 10:46 AM on December 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

I have written about being bullied before, and I am not the least bit surprised. I was always larger than my tormentors, so their bullying was never physical. It was no less painful for me, and since it was non-physical it was a lot harder to deal with and to report to people that may have been able to help. Unable to deal with the social bullying, my response to the bullies was to physically hurt them, or at least physically intimidate them. I'm not proud of that, but it felt like the only option available.

Based on experiences and talking with my sister and friends, the social violence of girls does differ. My sister was excluded from a group of friends suddenly and without any sort of cause or explanation. Girls in middle school would show a friendly face to someone, be friends with them (besties even), and then turn around and say horrid stuff. With guys, the lines were drawn, you knew where you stood and no one was pretending to be your friend. With girls, the violence was often coming from the people who were supposed to be your friends.

I have no idea if that's actually supported by evidence, it's just anecdata.
posted by X-Himy at 10:49 AM on December 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

There is, to my knowledge, no biological basis for the cultural stereotype that boys are "emotionally tougher" than girls. For a while, there was a lot of fuss made over the fact that men have a decayed-looking (relative to women) corpus callosum, the region of tissue that connects the two hemispheres of the brain and mediates communication between them. For a while now, it's been speculated that this could lead to difficulties for males when it comes to connecting language use to emotional processes, but no one, to my knowledge, has ever demonstrated any feature of male brain anatomy that would account for males actually having fewer emotions or experiencing them less deeply than women, or whatever the cultural trope is. In fact, if anything, the idea that men may have more difficulty verbally recognizing and describing their emotions (which, by the way, is only conjecture too, though one with a plausible physical mechanism to explain it in the relatively weaker connectivity between hemispheres of the male brain) probably means men are more vulnerable to unrecognized emotional disorders.
posted by saulgoodman at 10:49 AM on December 1, 2014 [9 favorites]

Oh, FFS, Google:

Relational aggression, also known as covert aggression, or covert bullying is a type of aggression in which harm is caused through damage to one’s relationships or social status.
posted by IAmBroom at 10:57 AM on December 1, 2014

> Subconscious bias may cause us to not see things? May cause us to not even ask the right questions?

> Boys are supposed to be more resilient in regards to that type of behavior.

Supposed to be according to whom? Who designed the study or studies that address this resiliency (or lack of it)? What variable did they control for, and how was that decided? Bias is sneaky.
posted by rtha at 10:57 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Thanks, rebent. I guess I should read the article then. I thought it was just a made-up thing to further a research agenda, but now I know exactly what the subject is. And, yes, boys can be pretty deadly in this game. In my youth, I ended up on both sides at one time or another, depending on the era. I once got my ass kicked for playing the aggressor too often with the wrong guy*. I was a real douche bag then.

*As an aside, the guy ended up starting his own early-version tech company and becoming a gazillionaire. I'm sure my feeble insults really sting now.
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:57 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

the idea that 'girls are mean' is one of those cases where I have to continually re-learn what people actually think, because it's so contrary to my own experience of the world. when people complain about girls being "mean", I've usually parsed that to mean "as mean as boys," or that they think women are mean in a different way. I have to keep relearning that people seem to think that women are somehow inherently meaner.
posted by lodurr at 10:59 AM on December 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

Mental Wimp: *As an aside, the guy ended up starting his own early-version tech company and becoming a gazillionaire. I'm sure my feeble insults really sting now.

It's a nicely self-deprecating joke, but: the fact that I make a lot of money and some of my worst childhood tormenters have jail records does little to lessen my therapy bills.

The whole point of this sort of topic is that violence to children matters. A lot. Even if it's from other children. Even if it's not physical. Etc.
posted by IAmBroom at 11:00 AM on December 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

With guys, the lines were drawn, you knew where you stood and no one was pretending to be your friend.

I remember that being the conventional wisdom back when I was in middle/high school, too, and yet, in actual practice, guys talked trash behind each others' backs and used social manipulation at least as much as the girls I knew. There were guys I knew who would get you banished from the morning locker crowd for being too conspicuous about liking a band that they considered "theirs," for instance.

Guys also routinely use cheap little social tricks designed to make competitors for female attention look bad.

We'd need some kind of harder data to know the reality, but I suspect boys aren't really as much less prone to relational aggression or social violence or whatever the terminology is than girls--they just don't think about it as consciously to themselves and do it with less deliberation and forethought.
posted by saulgoodman at 11:00 AM on December 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

the fact that I make a lot of money and some of my worst childhood tormenters have jail records does little to lessen my therapy bills.

out of curiosity, i recently googled a guy who attacked me and beat the crap out of me in junior high, on a bet that he could get me suspended for starting the fight. he's in jail for dealing pot and handling stolen goods. knowing that actually makes it worse, because I know he never stopped being a dangerous asshole.

he did look a good 20 years older than me in his mugshot, though. so there's that.
posted by lodurr at 11:04 AM on December 1, 2014

... There were guys I knew who would get you banished from the morning locker crowd for being too conspicuous about liking a band that they considered "theirs," for instance.

I didn't really become aware of that until college. The crowd I ran with was very into music, and the condemnation of this band or that was often fierce and immediate. One guy felt it necessary to apologize for being a Ramones fan.

By contrast most of the women I knew in college were pretty accepting.

I knew there were petty female cliques. My housemate got burned badly by one such clique. Pissed me right the hell off, but there wasn't much we could do to help except be there for her.

With the guys I knew, I think it was generally less destructive in a total sense, but more pervasive. That would make sense in terms of a model where aggression was suppressed most of teh time and then made its way out (women) vs. one where it's expressed frequently (men); OTOH, that's probably way, way too simplistic. Increasingly I think that more violence just breeds more violence, on the average. No simple equations, but just a broad mathematical truth.
posted by lodurr at 11:10 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

saulgoodman, you're probably right about boys talking trash behind backs. I can only speak to my experiences, and those of people I've talked to. I'm sure friends bitched about me (I was as insufferable back then as I am now). But it was nowhere near the coordinated campaign of bullying that made my life miserable in middle school. Friends didn't set me up to fail, they didn't laugh when others did, they didn't participate in the name calling.

As far as jockeying for social position with the opposite sex, it was middle school and while I was an early bloomer, there was no way I had the confidence to even consider asking a girl out. I barely do now. I think I shyly asked a single girl out in middle school, was rejected (not unkindly), and never tried again. The bullying I experienced was really a masculine thing. I was never bullied by women (as far as I can remember), nor was I really bullied in front of them or humiliated in front of them. Nor was the nature of the bullying really sexual. Sure, I was called homophobic slurs, but I was also called religious slurs. And a whole lot of insults about my weight, looks, etc. It was a toxic stew.
posted by X-Himy at 11:11 AM on December 1, 2014

This reminds me of those studies of chimps that revealed how much the females were up to, how much scheming and aggression went on (and sexual cheating); it had always been going on, but everyone was focused on the males and their aggressions and assuming that the females weren't really doing much besides having babies. Despite both genders having the same ingenious chimp brain.

We are still so handicapped by our biases about what "males do" and what "females do" as though there was no overlap.

A whole lot of male aggression towards girls has always been trash-talking and verbal. It's not really surprising that guys who spread rumors that a girl is a slut would also be able to spread rumors that a guy was gay (or whatever). We just have this 19th-century belief that boys are somehow more noble, you see, that they settle their differences with honest, manly fisticuffs or sports triumphs or what have you. As though men did not become politicians, or PR reps, or those assholes on TMZ.
posted by emjaybee at 11:12 AM on December 1, 2014 [34 favorites]

The popular correlation of relational aggression as being the sole domain of women has led to a lifelong stereotype of us as "catty," "crazy," and "bitchy," while the physical aggression stereotypically favored by men tends to merit little more than a shrug and a pithy quip along the lines of "boys will be boys!"

Another facet of these stereotypes is the idea that relational aggression is less of a big deal than physical aggression, and thus that it can be more easily swept under the rug by institutions as well as individuals, because the acts of girls and women are seen as inherently weak and ineffectual no matter what we do. Even unvarnished physical violence is treated as somehow less threatening or worrisome as long as the people involved can be readily identified as female; I believe this practice may be due to the presumably congenitally power-sapping effect of 'femininity,' which goes hand in hand with the fact that "you hit/throw/run/act like a girl" is seen as such a grave insult by dudes of all ages.

Women: Is there anything we can't make worse?
posted by divined by radio at 11:15 AM on December 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

In case anyone is wondering, here is the actual criteria for "relational aggression" used in the study:

how often during the 30 days prior to completing the survey participants did the following: 1) did not let another student be in the group, 2) told students you would not like them unless they did what you want, 3) tried to keep others from liking another student by saying mean things about the kid, 4) spread a false rumor about someone, 5) left a student out of an activity on purpose, and 6) said things about another student to make other students laugh

posted by Panjandrum at 11:15 AM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I blame the public schools. They seem designed to encourage this sort of behavior by warehousing kids by age group with minimal adult supervision and allowing them no escape.
posted by starbreaker at 11:17 AM on December 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

As a private school kid. Hah!
posted by Drinky Die at 11:23 AM on December 1, 2014 [8 favorites]

Another facet of these stereotypes is the idea that relational aggression is less of a big deal than physical aggression, and thus that it can be more easily swept under the rug by institutions as well as individuals, because the acts of girls and women are seen as inherently weak and ineffectual no matter what we do.

It certainly wouldn't surprise me if that's happening today, but I do remember that the big push to recognize relational aggression was an effort to legitimize it, to point out that it was just as harmful as physical bullying. It was a way of combatting the idea that girls were harmless.
posted by jaguar at 11:24 AM on December 1, 2014 [6 favorites]

One of the more interesting things about the study, and that the UGA piece downplays with its talk of "96%" of the students engaging in some form of relational aggression, is that the worst offenders (and most victimized) were actually quite a minority (<10%). That's not really surprising, I guess, but the remarkable thing is that, from 6th grade to 12th, those groups experienced major declines in their aggression/victimization. The paper even terms these groups "high declining."

All 3 groups declined in their rates of aggression/victimization, but the low and moderate groups had (relatively) tiny declines. By grade 11/12, though, the high group is essentially experiencing the same level of victimization as the moderate group. Similarly, the high aggressor group is just a titch higher than the moderate aggressor group.

So at least one corollary finding of the study is that middle school really is hell on earth.
posted by Panjandrum at 11:45 AM on December 1, 2014 [13 favorites]

the idea that 'girls are mean' is one of those cases where I have to continually re-learn what people actually think, because it's so contrary to my own experience of the world.

Seriously. I'm grateful for a study that corresponds, for once, to my experience of the world. All through school, from Montessori to senior year, I found it was the boys who were cruelest, in every way -- mentally, physically and sexually abusive. I knew my share of nasty girls and decent boys, to be sure, but the boys could turn on a dime for mysterious reasons they themselves didn't seem to understand.

I try not to think of the subsequent careers of my childhood bullies. Only one was really satisfying to me, in terms of a horrible arrest, and even that has lost its power to console, now that I realize what an awful family she must have had.

One of the cleverest bullies I knew in high school was a boy, and he was not a fighter. He not only set out to torment the developmentally disabled server at the cafeteria, but did it by coding a video game in which you threw wads of food at him. He's got a posh international career now. I met him at reunion and was, just as before, strangely drawn to like him, despite everything. I expect to see him in politics any day.
posted by Countess Elena at 11:46 AM on December 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Anecdata: As a kid, I was hit almost as often by girls as by boys (ended up with hospitalizations from both), and verbally assaulted by both. Private junior high was lovely - only 3 dozen kids and the school encouraged social justice and social bonding.

I didn't have any friends in public high school, so I have no idea what the girls were saying by then. It's hard to further exclude someone all ready totally socially isolated. In private high school we were all fairly united against the faculty, who regularly publicly shamed everyone not a cis-gendered heterosexual athlete.

As an adult, MOST of the verbal attacks have been from other AFABs (assigned female at birth), but I have been hit by people across the gender range. The only hospitalizations were after assaults by AFABs within my own social group, although I was physically attacked/attempted rape by male coworkers in both blue- and white-collar jobs.

In other words, being genderqueer, one gets the worst of all gendered violence.
posted by Dreidl at 11:54 AM on December 1, 2014 [3 favorites]

Panjandrum: ...the remarkable thing is that, from 6th grade to 12th, those groups experienced major declines in their aggression/victimization.

The highest rates of physical violence, for sheer number of aggressive physical interactions, occur among toddlers. The rates start dropping after that, and keep dropping all the way until old age. So a drop from 6th to 12th grade isn't too surprising.
posted by clawsoon at 11:56 AM on December 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

I grew up in a world where girls were nice and boys were the problem. Those 50's stereotypes hung on a lot longer in certain corners of the midwest. So when the 'mean girls' trope came out it was something we all talked about - it was liberating to admit that girls could be just as mean as boys.

I agree now that the 'mean girls' stereotype has become something ugly and poisonous, especially in teen movies. Somehow, in a short period of time, it has become 'standard knowledge' that girls are actually meaner than boys. It was a fast swing of the pendulum.

But I'm really confused by the paper's premise that male relationally aggressive behavior is somehow understudied or not noticed. Perhaps if they googled "bullying" they'd find a bit more data.
posted by kanewai at 12:10 PM on December 1, 2014 [4 favorites]

panjandrum: By grade 11/12, though, the high group is essentially experiencing the same level of victimization as the moderate group. Similarly, the high aggressor group is just a titch higher than the moderate aggressor group.

This correlates really strongly with my experience in passing from Jr. High through High School. I knew some guys in Jr. High who were just mean, snotty SOBs. In fact, the principle "cool" guy I hung out with was that way. I barely saw any of those guys in High School, for various reasons -- moving up to a new building with a new structure broke up a lot of social groups. One day as a Jr. I ran into one of them in the bathroom, and he greeted me just like I was a normal person, and we exchanged pleasantries, and I walked away thinking something like "wow, is that what it feels like to be an adult?"

Deeply weird. It was a very jarring experience, realizing that he was probably stuck in his group, and that given the chance he was probably an OK guy. This gives me the chance to see that it might also just be the normal course of things: Maybe some people need to grow into the confidence to not be cruel.
posted by lodurr at 12:18 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I was the wimpiest kid in my HS class (of 1963). Last chosen for every team, physically equivalent to kids three years younger, I was picked on and bullied, and my only comfort was that I consistently tested in the top 1% on the standardized tests.

After HS I grew five more inches, served in the Army, and became a bicycle racer, while the football players and the like who tormented me got fat and old before their time. I've been overcompensating ever since HS and it served me well.
posted by Repack Rider at 12:40 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

This discussion brings back lots of memories of social aggression, a few of which were directed at me, many of which I witnessed being directed at others. In elementary school I remember girls excluding each other and starting rumors about each other, but it seemed like that largely subsided by middle school, and most of us were pretty nice to each other after that. I do remember a middle school art class where the very cute guy who sat next to me tormented a girl in our class repeatedly for weeks, until she ended up moving to another city (for unrelated reasons, I assume). I'm still ashamed to this day that I never said anything to him about it because I was worried he would then start picking on me.
posted by odayoday at 12:49 PM on December 1, 2014

My own experiences of this is that male relational aggression is codified into sports and other competitive domains where they hierarchy gets pretty much sorted and is relatively stable due to the persistence over time of the physical advantages that underlie early male hierarchy. This breaks down a bit in early adulthood when those advantages are less relevant and also not as great as everyone has completed puberty and their is much more parity. Then it shifts to be much more like the relational aggression of women where the rules are less clear and competition is more subtle.
posted by srboisvert at 12:57 PM on December 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

It's a nicely self-deprecating joke, but: the fact that I make a lot of money and some of my worst childhood tormenters have jail records does little to lessen my therapy bills.

My tormenters were mostly rich kids from posh backgrounds - one of them got a Mercedes Benz for his 16th birthday, which I know because he used to park it in front of my house and walk the remaining blocks to school even though there was street parking much closer so that I would be sure to know that I was poor and he was rich. I'm sure that they've all gone on to become bankers and so on. It would be nice to believe that they'd all met bad ends, but I think most of them are busy getting rich off the financial crisis.

That's the thing - people always tell all these consoling stories about how bullies are really unhappy and end up either sorry or in jail or failing in some obvious way, but plenty of bullies just bully because it's fun and helps them bond with their peers. I had a couple of bullies who were working class and obviously messed up, and I don't blame them especially anymore, but the vast majority of the kids were the children of wealthy Chicago-area eighties yuppy types, with big houses and lots of pocket money.

Violence against children does matter precisely because there isn't some kind of karmic system which brings down the mighty - to those that have shall be given, as we see every day, and it's not grace they're talking about either.
posted by Frowner at 1:22 PM on December 1, 2014 [15 favorites]

I know I've been in discussions, here on the blue, where people have earnestly told me that 'boys get it out and are fine, girls are the worst for bullying' because they genuinely believe that boys don't do relational aggression.

It was the three year old boy cousin who brought home the 'you can't be my friend anymore' nonsense, not my five year old with a bajillion girl friends. It's her male BFF who has issues being excluded by other boys (since he always has to be the 'monster' everyone runs away from), not her. Sure, there are cliques of girls in her class who are astonishingly violent and cruel with each other - same with boys. It's just with boys the violence is 'developmentally appropriate' and 'testosterone' while the girls are 'catty little bitches'.

The delineation and gendering of violence starts early.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:22 PM on December 1, 2014 [5 favorites]

The canonical "mean girl" stereotype involves a machiavellian duplicitousness beneath a sugar and spice persona. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with that, but rather says that boys tend to be even more malicious little bastards than girls, which result has been previously explicated in, e.g., articles in the journal of No Shit Sherlock.
posted by batfish at 3:03 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

I knew some guys in Jr. High who were just mean, snotty SOBs.

12 year olds are sociopaths; I have the study that proves it.
posted by Panjandrum at 3:42 PM on December 1, 2014

As far as I can tell, you have to pay to read this article. Correct me if I'm wrong.

But if I'm right, it seems a bit problematic for a discussion topic (beyond its being a launching point for for personal testimony). I mean, I sure as hell am not paying to read a study about six districts in one state in which I do not live and whose schools my daughter does not attend. I'm also a bit skeptical of any study that relies on truth telling on the part of school students. But that's just me.

My experience, back in day - guys threw punches, girls talked smack. Simpler days. Good times.

(Curious to know if there's a racial breakdown in the study. It being Georgia and all.)
posted by IndigoJones at 4:37 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Social aggression was as prevalent with the boys as it was with girls during my formative years: it is the way to manipulate someone's behaviour to get them to see you as the inferior one, trick you into giving up something you had that made them jealous, or deflect your attention so you don't see how deficient they really are.

For the official record, I never fell for any of it. Not that boys and girls didn't try, but I would have to have respect for their opinion and they never did a thing to earn it.

Like, telling a kid that they can come to the birthday party, but then telling them later that they can't because they are a dork.

Then they can come over to my house to play as I am a big fan and supporter of dorks...they make me swoon as they give me superpowers...
posted by Alexandra Kitty at 4:55 PM on December 1, 2014

It seems worth breaking out different types of physical and social violence by class and region. Where I grew up, for instance, in high school upper class boys might administer formal beat-downs to inferiors but only working class boys fought, ie two people actually having some kind of contest where the outcome was in doubt; upper class girls might conceivably have slapped (but I never heard of such a thing) and working class girls might fight but I never heard of the sort of formalized "you are a loser so we will beat you down for fun" (and I surely would have been on the receiving end). This might appear racialized, but in reality it was classed due to racism - with very minor exception, the only kids of color in school were working class, many Italian and some Latino (and where I grew up outside Chicago, Italian identity was racialized - I think everyone would have said that the Italian kids were white, but they were less white.) Also, there were intra class beat-downs but not intra-class fighting - ie, a poor white kid I knew was beat down by the rich white kids for being a nerd, but I never heard of a rich kid and a poor kid having a fist fight, and the only fights between girls were between working class girls.

So, for instance, the working class girls I knew engaged in way more physical violence than the upper middle class boys, but had lower social status and would not have been able to perpetuate violence on someone of higher social standing.

Sexualized intra-gender violence seemed to operate such that boys could perpetrate violence horizontally or downward but not upward.

All very much as you might expect, sadly.
posted by Frowner at 5:07 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

It certainly wouldn't surprise me if that's happening today, but I do remember that the big push to recognize relational aggression was an effort to legitimize it, to point out that it was just as harmful as physical bullying. It was a way of combatting the idea that girls were harmless.

I was close friends with someone who did research on girl-girl aggression back in the 1990s, and her work was routinely dismissed as unimportant, fictitious, or otherwise just plain not as real as boy-boy bullying. I'm glad that it seems to be a much more accepted thing now, but that was definitely not always the case.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:00 PM on December 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Ha! I was Dr. Orpinas' research assistant from 2005-2007, when I was getting my MPH. That's really all I have to say.
posted by staggering termagant at 4:25 PM on December 2, 2014 [2 favorites]