system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
I went to high school in the late 80s and early 90s.  It wasn't as bad as a lot of movies portray, but that culture definitely existed.

The attitude towards bullying was that if your life wasn't directly threatened (for example by a weapon or you got badly beaten), then it was just kids being kids.

Most kids had an okay experience, but there were definitely kids who had really bad times in high school because someone or something made them basically a social outcast.

I was just talking to a friend of mine about this today: what those movies got wrong is that it wasn't the jocks who terrorized kids.  About half the jocks were kids who were just trying to be great students, b/c they were really trying to get a scholarship to college, or they were just that ambitious athlete type.

Some of the jocks were the classic party-jocks from the movies, drink lots of beer on the weekends, get kegs, get shitfaced at parties, go over the top, etc, but they weren't necessarily mean, they were just big idiots.

The kids who terrorized other kids were the ones who went out every weekend and got in fights, on purpose.  The kids who got high or drunk *in school*.  The ones who probably had some fucked up shit going on in their lives, and no academic prospects, and saw high school as basically a jail, and their only goal was to cause trouble and have fun.  Those kids *did not give a fuck*.

I became friends with a few of those kids b/c back then no one knew what ADHD was, so I was always getting detention and shit, and I ended up dating a girl who hung out with some of them, so I was at parties where they were sometimes.  I think some of them were legit sociopaths.  Kids didn't really get help for shit like that back then.  I'm sure a lot of them had to meet with the school social worker, but it was just different.  People just assumed those kids were fuckups, and they were, and no one really tried to do a lot about it.

And then there were the social cliques.  By the time I graduated, most kids were pretty friendly with most other kids in my grade, but back then you couldn't just find other social outlets beyond school.  There was no such thing as having friends online.  You had youth groups and stuff, but probably most of those kids were also in your high school anyway.  So if someone got cut out by their group of friends, it could be just devastating.

I heard that the local elementary school now has a thing called a "friend bench", and when kids are lonely, they can sit there, and other kids will just come over and ask them to play.  I think that's amazing, but part of me, having grown up in the 80s, was just surprised that it actually worked.  

Also, kids, but also just people in general were *way* less tolerant back then.  If you were an openly gay kid in high school in 1990, your life was probably pretty shitty.

So yeah, anyway, those movies exaggerated, but that shit isn't just completely made up.

Hell, my son has gotten bulled and got into a fistfight over it in middle school, and he has a good friend who is NB and the kid gets teased a bit, so maybe things haven't changed all that much - but then again - though I'm not condoning teasing, when I was in middle school, if people knew you were non-cis-het, you'd be fucked with basically every day.
gpt
I was in high school in the mid-2000s and it was kinda nuts how things changed between when I was in middle school and the end of high school. The person above talked about the 2008 depression being a huge change in consumption trends etc and maybe there is some truth to that but there was another, much larger change in culture: social media.

In the early 2000s when I was in middle school we threw around the f-word willy nilly snd called each other gay constantly. EVERYBODY was casually homophobic and didn't think much of it. Even here in Canada where gay marriage was on its way to becoming legalized at the time and gay relationships were somewhat openly accepted. Like we'd call each other gay as an insult, up until someone actually came out as gay and then we wouldn't say it to them.

But with Facebook opening up to everybody when I was in the middle of high school... things changed so much. All of a sudden people were more conscious of what they said and did online, more conscious of how they looked as people got more into taking pictures and putting them online. It was a huge culture shock. All of that is lost on younger people now since social media has just been a part of people's lives for forever - today's high school seniors were just being born when I was first using FB in high school. 

And I never really experienced it much, because I was older and self-confident and a well adjusted teenager, but that was also when bullying started to heavily transition from in person physical bullying to cyber bullying... and it got worse as the years go on, I think, and younger kids got access to social media (since bullying seems to be at its worst for middle schoolers).