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Key points
- We tend to assume all bullies are gruff and rough men, but many are meek and mild.
- Gentle bullies moralize to get what they want, playing victim, blaming. and shaming.
- A gentle bully dominates their victims by playing victim.
- Look for signs that they act like your errors prove their perfection.
We think of bullies as hulking, loud, brash, aggressive thugs, mostly male. Many are. They’re “yang” in the yin/yang sense: assertive and decisive, in contrast to yin: gentle and receptive.
Male dominance and the patriarchy are real. Women and milder men have had to deal with it for millennia. Still, it would be selling them short to assume that they haven’t put up a fight. Being able to resist has always been a survival priority. Humans may be at our most inventive in generating “noping strategies,” our ways of saying no, setting boundaries, resisting, and insisting. It can be done in any style. There are yin or gentle ways to fight and, yes, even bully. Call it yintimidation, thuggish behavior that presents as kindly, gentle, and receptive.
Since people with more yin characteristics aren’t hulking and loud, their strategies are different. They don’t threaten with loud voices and flexed biceps. Their strategy of choice is pulling moral rank, shaming, and blaming. It can be very effective. Many hulking men grew up trying to please their mothers. Many mothers learned to control their unruly boys with disappointment, shaming, and disapproval. Yintimidation taps into that vulnerability to shaming.
These are challenging times for women. In the past, women could rely on moral institutions like the church to back up their moral shaming. Those institutions are weaker than they once were. Many women let down their guard by admitting to human qualities traditionally associated with men.
Men are softening, too, but, in general, women are competing for men’s roles more than men are competing with women’s. How can gentler souls compete? Not by bulking up but by doubling down on the moralizing.
With the relaxation of moral standards, you might think that moralizing loses its power. It hasn’t. Instead, it has become a moral free-for-all. Anyone can claim they’re owed whatever they want by treating a personal preference as if it’s a moral mandate—translating “I want” into “you owe,” Translating disappointment into shaming and blaming as though you’re not getting what morality dictates is your due.
There are few signs that the meek will inherit the earth. Since yang bullying is so effortless (loud voices, big bodies), women and gentler souls are leaning into yintimidation techniques that rely on moralizing for their bullying power.
A big one is “playing victim,” acting as though, in the give-and-take, push-and-shove of everyday competition, they’re only being pushed and shoved, oppressed, forced to give up everything. Acting like you’re bullied is an effective form of bullying yintimidation.
How can you tell whether someone is yintimidating you? Here are some possible signs that someone is moralizing, playing victim, pulling moral rank on you like you’re a sinner, which proves they’re a saint:
1. “Believe me, I’m nice.” Shaming you works best from a posture of pure, innocent virtue. Yintimidators will try to bully you into taking their word for their virtue. They’ll declare their virtue, which is easy for any of us to do. You are morally obligated to let your guard down; if you don’t, you’re bad. They’ll brand themselves with all sorts of virtues, anything that sounds positive: They’re kind, generous, loving, caring, honest, Christian, open-minded.
2. “Hey, be nice!”: We think of niceness, love, kindness, caring, empathy, and compassion as virtues so pure that we rarely bother to think about what these terms mean. They all boil down to accommodating others. To be nice to someone is to accommodate them, to compromise, bending your will to theirs. Yintimidators are quick to say, “Be nice,” as though it’s your moral duty to accommodate them, giving them whatever they want. If you don’t give in, you’re immoral. Shame on you.
3. “Always be nice to everyone always, so why can’t you just be nice to me too?”: Those positive virtue terms sound cost-free. People say, “Love is the answer. Never be uncaring.” If these virtue terms boil down to accommodating people, we can’t, won’t, and shouldn’t. Compromising to accommodate people costs you. You can’t be kind to everyone. Kindness to some is often unkindness to others. Yintimidators will tend to act like they’ve transcended transactionalism. They virtue signal that everyone should stop tracking who owes what to whom. They haven’t. Rather, they want to convince you to accommodate them by pretending it costs you nothing. As such, they’re like the CEO who tells you their corporation is “one big family” to get you to take a pay cut.
4. “Calm down. Sounds like you’re getting angry. I must have touched a nerve. I’m not attacking you.”: The Yintimidator’s overarching strategy is to pose as purely virtuous, so if there’s a problem, it must be you. They can do this with blanket self-reported self-approval or by shifting the focus to your problems, chiefly your emotional irrationality. By their subjective self-flattering standards, they’re objectively calm, kind, and loving. They’re not yelling so how could they be attacking you? They’re showing you compassion and empathy compassionately with your inability to be nice like they are. If their claim of innocence agitates you, you’re guilty of more emotional instability.
5. “I didn’t say that. Don’t put words in my mouth.”: Like all bullies, yintimidators want to see themselves as perfectly consistent—no self-contradictions. In terms of the yin/yang symbol, they’re pure yin, no yang, beyond a shadow of that yang dot. But if you’re listening carefully and they blame you consistently for mishearing them, chances are they don’t want to admit to their inconsistencies. At the extreme, they’ll nitpick: If you paraphrase what they said, they’ll say, “I didn’t say that word,” to shame you into feeling wrong, bad, and the whole problem, not them.
6. “You’re not seeing the whole picture. But look, I never said I was perfect.”: A yintimidator knows exactly how you would and should behave if you were virtuous like them. They imply they are perfectly consistent and have the grand overview from which to play supreme judge. As such, they are qualified and authorized to psychologize your flaws in detail and with perfect, gentle neutrality. They don’t have any flaws. They don’t even have the flaw of claiming they’re perfect, not that they’re willing to admit to any particular flaws or mistakes.
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