Although I love to read purely for pleasure's sake, at times I have to read for work, which can also be engaging in a different kind of way. In other words, it's not the kind of reading I relish before going to bed or while reading at the beach. I promise, in this blog, that I will only write about work books that are timely, relevant, or provocative. I decided to write about this particular book, because I had lingering questions that I'm hoping some readers can speculate with me about.
Perhaps not everyone knows, but I have a small reputation as a scholar in the area of the history of sissies. In fact, I was excited to find out that an online forum on mothers raising children who are gender non-conformists actually uses one of my articles on the subject as a source in their discussions. Who knew that moms were reading the Journal of Social History! In that article, I showed how the boy who fails to meet the standards of masculinity has become increasingly stigmatized throughout the course of the twentieth century, in no large part because of the rising fear of homosexuality. Little boys of the 19th and early 20th century were often free from the need to be appropriately masculine. Their dress was not that different from girls [the pink and blue is a 20th century invention], and they were allowed to play with dolls. Nowadays, I overhear fearful men warning their three-year-old boys to stay away from the doll aisle. I wonder what they're afraid of.
Peggy Pascoe's Dude, You're a Fag provides an account of what she would term "heteronormative" [privileging of the heterosexual] and masculine practices at a high school in California. I actually got in trouble with my partner for leaving the book on my coffee table in the living room; she didn't want our daughters to be exposed to such violent language to describe gay kids. Pascoe's book claims that high school is an arena for the most virulent expressions of masculinity, where youth make promiscuous use of the epithet "fag" to scorn and stigmatize boys who fail to conform to normative definitions of masculinity. Calling a boy a "fag" doesn't mean that he is a homosexual; rather that he is failing in some way to live up to the standards of a masculine guy. It can be said in a joking fashion, but there is always some hint of the ostracism that could accompany more serious deviations from the norm. Of course, this doesn't bode well for homosexuals themselves, who really do suffer the opprobrium of being subjected to persecution for being a "fag."
One of my guilty pleasures is watching America's Got Talent with my 11 year-old daughter, and no less than two young men on the show the other night confessed that they had been persecuted in school for being effeminate, as when singer Desmond Meeks said: "I was always the kid who liked pink and purple." My students tell me that it is much easier now than in the past to be gay. That may be true if the way you present your gender is conventionally masculine. Do effeminate boys enjoy the same social privileges as more masculine guys, whether they are gay or straight? And let me just say right now without going into it in detail, but I think that boys pay a much larger price for being like "girls" than vice versa, perhaps because we associate masculinity with power, and femininity with powerlessness. And no one wants to be powerless.
In the high school Pascoe studies there are many reasons to be called a "fag." For instance, a guy who gets too mushy about his girlfriend can be called out on this point. Boys can also be chastised for being like a "girl," another dangerous insult, which displays not only contempt for less than masculine boys but for girls themselves and all that they stand for. The sensibility that Pascoe discusses was demonstrated in a film I viewed recently Gran Torino, where the lead character, played by Clint Eastwood, reserves his contempt for men who don't exemplify the manly virtues and behave like "girls." But the grisly old guy with a contempt for girlish men, who embodies masculine toughness and a dash of chivalry, is a staple of film culture.
In Pascoe's book, the sexism and contempt for girls and gender non-conforming men is omnipresent. Boys crow over their sexual conquests, sexually harass girls in the hallways, and are constantly badgering their friends to tow the masculine line. Most of the male youth who evade this tough masculinity are Christian kids, who occupy their own tables in the lunch room and actually show respect for females [probably not for homosexuals]. Few youth dare to directly challenge the status quo, except for some straight girls and gay men who dare to form a gay-straight alliance. Pascoe looks at a single high school, however, and I can't help but wonder how representative the school is or how skewed her vision of boy culture is. How much of what she sees is regional? And, since the book was published in 1997 and presumably reflects much earlier research, I wonder how much has changed in American high schools? Can it really be as bad as she makes it out to be? Isn't it dangerous to generalize about an entire age-group of high school boys? Or are the pressures to conform to a certain vision of masculinity in high school still that intense? Perhaps my students, family members, and other persons of the younger generation can fill me in on this point.
