masculinity in high schools
I just ran across this article about masculinity in high schools. The author did an interesting investigation into the usage of the word “fag” amongst teenage boys, and found that it was not just used in homophobic taunts, but was more generally used to enforce masculinity.
In a culture of hostility where certain acts and tendencies are called “masculine”, boys learn to gain power by tapping into that culture. This is one of the ways boys learn to use the generalized threat of male violence to increase their own personal power, whether or not they themselves intend to enact the violence. As long as there’s some small number of demonstrations of violence or serious threats, the rest of the boys can use that to their advantage by also threatening, sometimes not even needing to verbalize the threat.
In this way, the boys are also prepared for their power relations with women, while girls are also exposed to the potential for violence that men will use to enforce the patriarchal order. Later on, men will merely have to perform certain subtle physical or verbal cues to tell women that there’s a threat of violence. Each particular man can even convince himself that he would never enact such violence, but he’s learned to tap into the societal violence that is omnipresent.
n this way, men can many times get what they want from a situation without having to think of themselves as particularly “patriarchal” because they never consciously threatened violence, but merely performed some small acts that they’ve habitually done since high school because they know the acts help them get what they want, or the acts help protect them from harm from other men. They could interrupt people, talk over them, talk louder, use rhetorical questions in a threatening or mocking tone, all sorts of things that are small assertions of superiority. Each of these things, when coming from a man, can be seen as implicit threats of violence, and much of this stems back to training from high school where there is very little protection from violence and the threats are widespread.
I’d like to read the book that was written by the article author, entitled “Dude, you’re a fag: masculinity and sexuality in high school”. It sounds like quite an interesting read, judging by the content of the article, and i’m curious about how she accomplished her research in the school. I imagine it’s quite difficult to observe a lot of the behaviours she’d want to study. I’d also like to see if she has any suggestions about how to counter these sorts of threats. Perhaps we can make a dent in male violence by working against it in the high school training grounds.
Ride hard, ride free