I’m taking a day away from writing about Jerry Falwell. I will post my own reflection, including “the good, the bad, the ugly” tomorrow.
On a blessedly different subject than anything I’ve been writing about lately, I’ve just finished a wonderful new book that I’m considering for use in my “men and masculinity” course next year. Dude, You’re A Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School is from C.J. Pascoe, a Cal grad and a sociology professor at Puget Sound up in Washington state. It’s a remarkable, challenging, provocative and at times depressing study of the obsession with “proving masculinity” and the “fear of faggotry” among contemporary American high school students.
I picked the book up on Saturday afternoon, and read it all by Sunday night. Though like many social science texts, it’s jargon-laden (and the APA style of citation drives me bats), Pascoe’s work is fresh and exciting. While in grad school at Berkeley, Pascoe spent a year among students at the pseudonymous “River High School” in Riverton, California. (She’s very careful not to name the real school or real town, though from little references she drops, it sounds suspiciously like somewhere near Stockton.) She didn’t pull the Cameron Crowe trick of pretending to be a high school student; Pascoe made it quite clear to the administration, the teachers, and the students that she was there as a researcher writing a book about boys and masculinity.
Pascoe writes of what she calls the fag discourse. The discourse manifests itself in the almost incorrigible way in which young men label each other “fags” while seeking to avoid having that label applied to them. According to this discourse, fear of being called out publicly as a “fag” is the primary driving force behind what Pascoe cleverly calls the display of “compulsive heterosexulity.” Playing on Adrienne Rich’s classic notion that contemporary society functions with a discourse of compulsory heterosexuality, Pascoe notes that among young men desperate to establish their masculine bona fides with their peers, what we see in American high schools amounts to compulsive, almost frantic efforts by young men to prove their manhood.
Anyone who has worked with adolescent boys knows how much anxiety many of them feel about their own masculinity. It’s not news to say that our sons, like their fathers before them, often have to endure or participate in physical or at least verbal violence that we tragically and falsely believe is necessary to transition into manhood. It’s not news that boys torment each other with the “fag” epithet. And it’s not news that the real stigma in being labelled a “fag” doesn’t lie in the association with homosexuality, but with being seen as feminine. Pascoe correctly points out what has been clear for years — that what we often see as homophobia is really thinly disguised misogyny.
Pascoe’s most original insights are her most troubling. After a year of observing the kids at “Riverton”, she found that boys chronically used their access to girls’ bodies as a way of establishing masculine credentials and escaping the “fag” label. Pascoe describes what I’ve seen all too often (and what I always try and break up as quickly as I can when I’m with high schoolers): the tendency of many young men to touch and “playfully” harass young women as a way of proving their own manhood. Pascoe describes incident after incident, in cafeterias and gyms, in breezeways and even, sadly, in classrooms. Pascoe:
… other ‘touching’ episodes has a more explicitly violent tone. In this type of touching the boy and the girl ‘hurt’ each other by punching or slapping or pulling each other’s hair until in the end the girl lost with a squeal or a scream. Shane and Cathy spent a large part of each morning in government class beating up on each other in this sequence of domination. While it was certainly not unidirectional, the interactions always ended with Cathy giving up… while this sort of interaction disrupted Cathy’s work and actually looked exceedingly painful, she never seriously tried to stop it.
There are quite a few similar, heartbreaking anecdotes. Pascoe notes, not surprisingly, that this sort of aggressive behavior (which to an impartial observer regularly constituted assault) was only done in the presence of other men. Pascoe notes what I’ve often observed:
When not in groups — when in one-on-one interactions with boys or girls — boys were much less likely to engage in gendered and sexed domination practices. In this sense boys became masculine in groups… when with other boys, they postured and bragged. In one on one situations with me they often spoke touchingly about their feelings about and insecurities with girls.
Bold emphasis mine.
Many men in the men’s movement have lamented the “fag discourse” in American youth culture. Most adult men have their own scars and wounds that they received in adolescence as they struggled to establish their manhood in the eyes of their peers. Less often discussed, most adult men — when pushed in therapy or group discussions — will cop to the various ways in which they cruelly inflicted wounds on other boys. As Pascoe and others have pointed out, the only way to deflect the fag label is to slap it on to some other nearby man. Most adult men carry with them the wounds inflicted by the fag discourse in their youth — and many carry the guilt of the verbal and psychic violence they did to their peers.
But when men get together to lament the fag discourse and to talk about how difficult it is to grow up male in this culture, how painful it is to try over and over again to establish one’s manhood, we forget something that Pascoe, rightly, doesn’t. The fag discourse doesn’t just victimize men; indeed, men aren’t even it’s chief victims. Pascoe notes that time and time again, women’s bodies are used as yardsticks for men to measure their manliness. When boys brag about their sexual conquests, or pressure young women for sex in order to have a story to tell “the guys”, it is women who are the chief victims of the fag discourse. When boys, as Pascoe describes, snap bra straps and slap bottoms and pull hair in order to display their apparent “right of access” to girls’ bodies, they do this not out of authentic sexual desire but because of this compulsive need to perform, over and over again, as masculine. Women are harassed, assaulted, and taunted because we are raising generation after generation of young boys that sees no better way to establish their manhood than by demonstrating their ability to impose their will on the bodies of their female peers.
So much of the writing by pro-feminist and gay men about the “fear of faggotry” has focused primarily on the profound psychic (and occasionally, physical) injury young men inflict on each other. Pascoe doesn’t dispute the genuine pain and desperation that adolescent guys endure, but she convincingly makes the case that they are not the chief victims of the discourse they perpetuate and try, over and over again, to escape.
I recommend Dude, You’re a Fag with enthusiasm.
Thanks for the review, Hugo. I hadn’t heard of this book. Most of the boys in my high school peer group were “soft” and within our group one didn’t see this phenomenon (though I observed it elsewhere). It’s both heartbreaking and disgusting.
Do you see this happen among your youth? How do you address it?
This sounds really interresting; I probably won’t buy a copy, but I will see if I can find one somehow.
What Dr Pascoe reports sounds a LOT like my experience–in which my lack of avid pursuit of women caused a good number of people to think I was gay. (Which bothered me very little, and which I still find amusing–my wife thought I was probably gay when we first met.)
Sorry for the serial post, but I realized I wanted to clarify what I meant by “soft.” I don’t mean that they were negatively feminine, weak, pansies, etc. I meant “soft” in the way that my favorite kind of adult men are “soft” - gentle, thoughtful, and not oriented towards being masculine.
We do a lot of work on this with my high school boys, and that’s worth a separate post.
Pascoe talks about refuges from the fag discourse, noting that at “Riverton” drama productions provided a safe haven for boys to escape.
I would really like to hear about that sometime - the work you do with your high school boys around this issue.
Excellent and thoughtful post, Hugo. I’ve had reason recently to think about this very topic; it’s nice to find a resource about it here. I regard your opinions on things pretty highly, so thank you for this.
Also - I absolutely hate APA formatting. Just had to say that!
Your review of the book seems to be focused around chapter four; Compulsive Heterosexuality: Masculinity and Dominance. And when you say about how young men need to prove their “manhood” it might be better phrased that young men in a peer setting need to demonstrate that they live up to the ideas of masculitity and specificially heterosexuality embedded in their culture. And, no being a “fag” ISN’T about being feminine, but rather about not adhering to percieved/expected gender identity that goes with an percieved orientation (you seem to have omitted the tormenting of the male teen who wanted to dance “like a girl” which was done without interference from the faculty).
What makes this review shocking is that you use the word “fag”, probably the most offensive word that can be used to describe gay men at least 16 times in your relatively short piece WITHOUT talking about gay men (as chapter 3 talks about; Dude, You’re a Fag: Adolescent Male Homophobia; it is the constructed homophobia which allows for the enforcement of heterosexist lines of masculinity). Would you write a piece using other incredibly offensive racial, ethical or similar slurs without actually talking about the group mentioned by the slur, or is this just some blog version of “you’re so gay!” where the hatred of gay men is drawn out and pasted on other ideas and people without ever noting the origins themselves (the cultural fear and hatred of gay men - or percieved non-gender compliant males, labelled as gay and socially tortured as such).
I don’t disagree that the need to overcompensate and “prove” masculinity doesn’t lead to old and bad ideas (dominance and actions against women) but to say that this is the root of “Fag” - no way - at least acknowledge what anyone in North American high school already knows, that there is nothing worse that being thought of as a gay or gender varient male - that is the fear, that is the hatred.
Wow Elizabeth, I am stunned that you can read that entire post and miss the point so COMPLETELY and THROUGHLY. It is impressive. I haven’t seen such a stunning display of whoosh-over-my-head in a long long time. Kudos.
Feminists have been proving for 30 years that the male fear of being considered a fag is DIRECTLY connected to the perception of fag=feminine. The hatred of fags is directly connected to the hatred of women. That isn’t a revelation or a surprising new development (although you seem to be plenty shocked-I-tell-you-shocked at it). Not all discourse about the power of the term fag needs be all about gay men since the origins of the term are actually not all about gay men. I’m also slightly offended that you are bringing race/ethnic slurs as a comparison — that’s not just apples to oranges, that’s like apples to unicorns.
I’m a bit baffled as to what to say about your comment besides that you obviously need to learn a lot more about feminism, gay history, gender theory, misogyny and male identity before you can write anything that makes a glimmer of real sense.
Elizabeth, since you have the book, surely you read on p. 82:
The fag epithet, when hurled at other boys, may or may not have explicit sexual meanings, but it always has gendered meanings. When a boy calls another boy a fag, it means he is not a man but not necessarily that he is a homosexual. The boys at River High knew that they were not supposed to call homosexual boys fags because that was mean. This, then, has been the limited success of the mainstream gay rights movement.
That jives with what I observe as a teacher and youth leader.
Thus Pascoe’s clear conclusion that femininity, not homosxuality, is the real enemy in the fag discourse. And that women are the real target, not gay men.
The problem guys have with other guys acting feminine isn’t that acting feminine makes you seem gay, and they hate gays. It’s that they hate gays because gays are stereotypically feminine, and the worst thing you can be in our culture is a girl. (Oh, it’s fine for girls to be girls - they can’t help it, and they’re good for sex - but for a boy to act like a girl is terrible.)
Even a lot of gay men don’t like other gay men who seem girly. Why isn’t it just another happy variation? You could say it’s self-hatred, but I don’t buy it. It’s just the same old misogyny.
The fag discourse doesn’t just victimize men; indeed, men aren’t even it’s chief victims.
“World to End Tomorrow, Women Hardest Hit.”
sheesh.
Hugo,
I agree that the term is used to police male behavior and particularly male gender expression - amoung heterosexual males by calling them “non-men” (by using a word that refers to “non-men” in our culture, gender varient or gay men). It is not that I don’t understand that when gay men tried to expand what is male behaviour by incorporating non-traditional gender expressions they were attacked, and labelled as “Femme” - ergo, using the lower social status of women to attack men.
But coming off the Day of Silence, just finishing National Homophobia in the workplace day and with the work of PFLAG and GLEN and other studies in schools - it is no particular secret that if you are gay or percieved as gay, you will be attacked - verbally, often physically. Locally a straight teen killed himself because he couldn’t stand the harrassment of being tormented as gay anymore. Gay and gender varient teens don’t finish school, end up on the street, end up beaten up, end up dead - that’s what Day of Silence is about - and while that intense hatred has its effect on all ideas of western masculinity, it is the gay teens who get beaten up - it is not, “Hey, there is a gay teen, let’s go beat up a woman” it is “Let’s treat women the way movies show me men are supposed to so no one will threaten to label or attack me as a gay teen.” Is there hatred of women, yes. Some may say this is apples and unicorns but we call people “retards” because of the way our society views and treats the disabled, and teens call people “fags” because of the way gay and gender varient teens and men are percieved - the term “fag” and its double standard is covered in The Celluloid Closet or if you want a recent example, in Anne Coulter calling Al Gore it on air.
The topic of masculinity keeps cropping up lately. (Over at RepublicofT, Terrence had an insightful and painful series about the connection between masculinity and school violence.) Being teased for being a fag doesn’t hurt a gay boy the same way it hurts a straight boy. Being gay and being teased about being a fag is a deeply ambivalent experience of being known for who you truly are. There is an “in crowd” quality to it - a sense of the joke being on the person teasing you. They are trying to get you to prove your heterosexual bonafides by calling you what you are; proving your straight masculine identity is a trick on the person who is teasing you. You ultimately get the last laugh - “I fooled that asshole. If only he knew.”
Working with youth at my church, I have seen incidents of the assymetric violence Pascoe describes. The boy inevitably proves his social dominance over the girl, who as often as not coyly submits in a strikingly learned way. Communication isn’t just verbal. By contrast, the same pair if alone in the room except for me or my co-facilitators, will interact somewhat gently with one another. The violent interchanges I’ve seen are frequently begun by the girls almost as if they are giving the boys an opportunity to prove their masculinity to their male peers. I’m not sure what to make of these incidents - the girls in some way are allowing the boys to whom they are attracted an opportunity to use the themselves to score points with their male peers. Neither the boy nor the girl involved enjoys the exchange.
In watching these interchanges, I get the impression that the girl involved is at the edge of out of control from the start; she is wild-eyed, flailing about to successfully strike the boy. The boy, by contrast, appears tightly controlled, focused, his expression and body language revealing determination. The boy narrows his eyes, almost closes them and fixes his gaze directly on the girl. The girl’s expression reveals a combination of fear and uncertainty, as if she is unnerved at what she is unleashing for reasons she does not fully comprehend. Both participants are, more often then not, visibly relieved when adults intervene and say, “No more.”
The masculinity obsession
Growing up as a gay man in American society, a male child learns early on the obvious superior position the more masculine the male the higher social standing he will likely attain by it’s sheer virtue. It is very clear that the masculine male athlete is considered of the highest social standing. How Americans worship their male athletes is the prime example of this hyper-masculine obsession within American culture. I believe this obsession with masculinity is one of the major issues behind homophobia. People need to understand that there is a wide range of behaviors ranging from very masculine to very effeminate. This range is not only found in homosexuals, but heterosexuals as well.
Having spent much of my life traveling all over the world because of my interest in cultures, I have however particularly noticed that in most of the European countries there isn’t quite the masculine obsession we Americans have. Being a gay man, we all know what gaydar means. Some heterosexual people may even have heard this term but don’t understand quite what it means. It means having almost a sixth sense about which men are gay and which aren’t. It’s an interesting phenomenon that needs greater study in its own right. Gay men tend to have pretty good gaydar which is clearly a learned behavior that can be quite accurate. This learned trait I believe is based on the phenomenon of the American masculine obsession and how gay men unconsciously during their lives observe what it is to be masculine in America. This obsession actually causes men that are not stereotypically masculine by nature to try and become masculine acting by practice. You see it in our own president who has obviously bought into this belief and is clearly acting out a hyper masculine image. He has adapted to walking and taking like an American cowboy hero that just got off from his horse which is clearly evident in his stance and gate. He even feels the need to hold is arms further away from his body than need be to give the impression of his arms being to muscular to be able to hold them closer. This learned behavior stems I believe from hyper insecurity which encourages men to try and become what they consider to be what is most admired. However, conversely one does not often see this behavior within most European cultures because they don’t seem to have the hyper-masculine worship that we Americans have. Perhaps we have it because of the history of how our country was founded. The reason why I mentioned gaydar is because in Europe my gaydar does not work well because many of the European men by American standards act effeminate. It is not that they are effeminate, that is once again only relative to American cultural standards by how we were taught to measure masculinity. European men just walk, talk and act much more naturally and without giving thought to whether they are perceived as being masculine or feminine. This then translates into the fear of being considered gay.
The issue of masculine/feminine ought to be considered a neutral issue within a healthy culture that is not fraught with fear about being considered gay or straight.
Gay men I have observed over my many years of being an out gay man have even bought into this American hyper-masculine worship. They will often try and act masculine, and will on chat lines make certain that the gay man they are talking to knows that they are the masculine type. Most of us, whether gay or straight are somewhere in the middle. However, many men will practice trying to be, on the masculine scale from 1 to 10, will try to act and be perceived closer to a 10. It is truly an interesting phenomenon. This is likely partly the reason why athletes have trouble coming out of the closet because they will lose much of their social standing and adoration. We as Americans need to be more concerned about our ethics, morals and social decay rather than being so concerned about the way we were born to behave and what actually comes naturally to us. This obsession I believe is behind much of the emotional damage done to gay men in particular which manifests in a variety of ways even in adulthood. The emotional damage is done early on in a gay child’s development. This belief is what inspired me to author the book;” why gay men do what they do, inside look at gay culture. In this book I explain in detail what this obsession has done to the gay psyche. Thank you, Aaron Jason Silver http://www.aaronjasonsilver.com “Why gay men do what they do”, an inside look at gay culture.
“World to End Tomorrow, Women Hardest Hit.”
sheesh.
I don’t usually agree with the MRAs who comment here, but it DID strike me as odd that you decided to pull out women as being the CHIEF and primary victims here. Obviously the “fag” problem hurts both genders, I’m not sure why there’s a need to turn it into a competition about who it hurts WORSE.
Look, the fact that women are the chief victims of the discourse doesn’t mean men aren’t being hurt, and don’t deserve compassionate intervention.
Hugo: I would argue that closeted gay boys, who observe the fag discourse and, as a result, are scared off of admitting their homosexuality to themselves, are the chief victims of the discourse. What makes it worse is that it’s largely an unintentional victimization.
Gay men I have observed over my many years of being an out gay man have even bought into this American hyper-masculine worship. They will often try and act masculine, and will on chat lines make certain that the gay man they are talking to knows that they are the masculine type.
In some respects, one could view gay men as exhibiting even more potential for pure social masculinity than straight men.
Unlike straight men, who generally want to associate with women to form relationships (or at least to have sex with partners of their chosen gender), gay men don’t have the same desire. In principle, therefore, gay men can form an isolated, woman-free subculture and peer group.
Many of the most iconic and enduring images of gay male culture are also exaggerated in their level of masculine sexuality - think Tom of Finland, for example.
Another good review.
Subi: Huh?
I suppose, given that I wrote the book, I should weigh in here.
First, let me say thank you Hugo for such a generous and insightful review. It’s always a heartwarming moment for me when I read a review and see my thoughts summed up and rephrased in a much more elegant way! Thank you for taking the time and the care to do so, Hugh. I’m very honored.
I’m grateful that I was able to communicate clearly about the toll I saw the “fag discourse” and “compulsive heterosexuality” take on teenage girls. I didn’t want to repeat the “boys-as-victims” discourse I had seen gaining momentum over the past decade. Indeed, my data indicated that while boys did suffer from the fag discourse, many of them gained social status by engaging in it. Girls could not trade on “compulsive heterosexuality” and the “fag discourse” in the same way. Many (though certainly not all) boys were able to jockey for dominance by engaging in heterosexist and homophobic practices.
That said, boys also suffer. It’s not a zero sum game. In other words I don’t want to pit boys versus girls in terms of who gets victimized more. All of our youth suffer to the extent that we continue to define masculinity based on these practices of repudiation weakness and incompetence and confirmation of sexualized dominance. I think Ricky’s story (bless him) indicates how boys (especially gender variant or gay boys) can be tormented mercilessly. Indeed the fact that 90% of random school shootings over the past 15 years involved boys who were relentlessly teased for being fags or gay (See Michael Kimmel’s fabulous analysis of this) shows how much boys do suffer from these insults.
An apology about the jargon: alas, we sociologists have to speak in the language of our trade. I tried to strike a balance such that academics and parents/teachers etc could all enjoy the book. And one final note, my institutional affiliation has changed. I’m actually at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at UC Berkeley.
Thank you again for the review.
Thanks so much for visiting, C.J. Indeed, I didn’t wish to imply that suffering is a zero-sum game. But I think it’s valid to note that as you say, girls don’t have the same resources as the boys do to use the discourse to their advantage. And in the current wave of “boys are victimized while girls get all the breaks” books, it’s refreshing to read a vital corrective.
Your book fills an important niche, and I’m recommending it far and wide.
Hurrah for being back at Cal. Not that Tacoma doesn’t have its charms, I’m sure.
I haven’t read the book, but I work with high school students (I’m a substitute teacher for a middle sized midwestern city school district), mostly inner city kids, and those observations are dead on. The boys will do their ‘bonding’ thing where they call each other (and other kids not present) fags or gay or some other feminizing insult, and/or they do the play fighting thing with the girls. This isn’t to minimize or downplay the damage that this sort of thing does to gender variant/homosexual kids, but these boys do imply (usually they directly cop to it) that being feminine or a girl is a very, very bad thing.
And it does happen in the classrooms quite often, especially when there is a sub present, because the kids tend to think that because I’m not the regular teacher, the regular standards of behavior don’t apply. This basically means that I tend to have to deal with a lot more discipline issues and a lot more of this kind of behavior than the regular teachers to. Quite frankly, it’s depressing and I’m not really sure how to address it other than the general discipline referral/sending the kid out/letting them know that I won’t tolerate that kind of behavior route because I’m typically not around long enough to form anything other than a casual relationship with the kids where I could help them to find other, more constructive ways to deal with this kind of pressure.
To make the outlandish jump that the real reason for the hatred of gays is actually hatred of women is so loony it’s beyond ridiculous. Anyone who thinks that, has been soaking up way too much militant feminist nonsense.