Gender Roles and the Modern Urban Teenager
Oct. 9th, 2005 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
omorkaOne of the first things I have to get out of the way for each new crop of students is my classroom expectations for their behavior. This includes not just how they interact and behave towards me, but also, to some extent, how they interact with each other while they're in my classroom. My basic requirement is that they act as if they respected each other. I explain to them that this does not mean that they actually have to respect each other - I can't mandate how they feel, obviously - but that I expect them to treat each other like they did as long as they're in my classroom.
There are a couple of things that I almost always have to catch individually that fall into that category for me, but don't seem to intuitively do so for them. One is "yo mama"s and other manifestations of the perennial teenage male game of "the dozens." It's pretty easy for me to explain to them that that language is disrespectful even if they only mean it as teasing. Another one is the phenomenon of put-downs when someone doesn't know something; again, while it's hard to get them out of the habit, it's easy enough, once I point it out, to get them to realize that this is disrespectful. The hardest one every year, and the one I have to keep reminding them on throughout the whole year, is the use of "gay" as a put-down, meaning "stupid."
By this point, the kids know I have a personal issue with that. A few of them always make the mistake that I don't like gays from my objection to that language, but most of them figure out pretty quickly that that's not it - that my problem is with the use of "gay" to mean "stupid," or sometimes merely "unfashionable." On occasion, they leap the other way, like my one student last year who assumed from that and the fact that I call the Spouse "the Spouse" at school, too, that I was a lesbian. But usually, they just accept it and don't say it in my classroom - although I can't influence what they do outside of it.
Often, the first time I object to it, they immediately say something like "oh, I didn't mean it that way." I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to what they actually meant. Usually I use the example of "how would you feel if someone used the word [insert student's ethnicity here] to mean 'stupid'?," although sometimes their response is "I wouldn't care," which sort of ends the conversation. On occasion, when it's been a student I knew well, I've explained that using the term that way reinforces the idea that being gay is a bad thing, and that I don't want any students in my class who might, in fact, be gay to have to feel that way in my classroom, that it makes it harder for them to learn. The explanation has always been accepted, but rarely internalized.
The strange thing, to me, is that a great many of my male students, the ones who use the word, dress and act in ways that, if they had done so while I was in high school, would have been taken as frank acknowledgments that they were, if not gay, at least not straight, either. The use of hair gel is almost ubiquitous. Many of my male students pay a great deal of attention to their hair and clothing, far more than would have been "masculine" when I was in high school. Some of them have their hair dyed, or at least frosted. Many of my guys wear earrings, often in both ears, and - for the African-American males, at least - often large, flashy cubic zirconia studs. (I'm used to the "acceptable" male earring being in one ear only, and either a small metal stud or a very small metal hoop, nothing flashy or dangly.) I've seen more boys than I can count wearing pink in the past couple of years. On occasion, I've seen guys wearing concealer. As a sort of final shock, a great many of my male students, on the day before Homecoming, were wearing mums. Not pinned to their chests, where the girls wore theirs, but on elastic garters around their upper arms - and otherwise indistinguishable from the singleton mums the sophomore and junior girls wore.
So why have they adopted so much "feminine" stuff than when I was in school, but have attitudes towards gay/bi males - and often women - that are far more regressive than the ones I'm used to from high school students? And why is it that the one femmy thing that used to be perfectly acceptable on guys when I was in school, long hair, is nearly verboten now? (As is eyeliner, except for the goth-boys? Not that that was really acceptable in my day, either.)
Well, if we take a developmental approach, it turns out that - according to most child psych textbooks, at least - one develops one's idea of gender roles when one is between eighteen months and four years, but one doesn't really finalize one's ideas of how these roles apply to one's self until one hits puberty. So these kids were mostly born in '88-'90, and were becoming aware of gender roles in the early '90s. That was about the time when the male form started getting the same sort of objectification in advertising, if not the rest of the media, as women had. So perhaps that's where the obsessive concern with their appearance came from. But their coming into their sexual selves occurred/is occurring in a repressive political atmosphere, in which being gay will get you a lot of negative attention - not just from one's peers, but from the adult world. Not that this wasn't always true, but I think in the sociopolitical atmosphere of the early '90s, if a teenage boy came out to his schoolmates, there was a certain peer pressure among the girls to accept him, whether the boys did or not - and pressure from them, in turn, for the straight boys not to ostracize him when the girls were around. (At least, that was the case for us, and we were in Mississippi at the time.) This was piss-poor protection for when the girls weren't around, but it was better than things had been in the '80s. Now, it seems as if the girls are as judgmental as the guys, if not worse.
Perhaps the adoption of a vaguely traditionally-feminine concern with one's appearance has made it necessary to distance one's self from other aspects of femininity, in a way that the sensitive new age geeks of my youth didn't have to because they wore tight black denim pants and lumberjack flannel with no hair gel? If man-skirts come into fashion, will it mean that the boys will have to be even more verbally abusive to gays and women, or would it be enough to break the line? (It's not as silly as it sounds - I've seen some kilts and male sarongs on runway shows in the past couple of seasons.)
Any suggestions on how I can gently suggest to my kids that explicit expressed homophobia is not okay in my class without preaching to them? Even if it comes from a guy in a pink polo shirt and gel-slicked bleached hair?
There are a couple of things that I almost always have to catch individually that fall into that category for me, but don't seem to intuitively do so for them. One is "yo mama"s and other manifestations of the perennial teenage male game of "the dozens." It's pretty easy for me to explain to them that that language is disrespectful even if they only mean it as teasing. Another one is the phenomenon of put-downs when someone doesn't know something; again, while it's hard to get them out of the habit, it's easy enough, once I point it out, to get them to realize that this is disrespectful. The hardest one every year, and the one I have to keep reminding them on throughout the whole year, is the use of "gay" as a put-down, meaning "stupid."
By this point, the kids know I have a personal issue with that. A few of them always make the mistake that I don't like gays from my objection to that language, but most of them figure out pretty quickly that that's not it - that my problem is with the use of "gay" to mean "stupid," or sometimes merely "unfashionable." On occasion, they leap the other way, like my one student last year who assumed from that and the fact that I call the Spouse "the Spouse" at school, too, that I was a lesbian. But usually, they just accept it and don't say it in my classroom - although I can't influence what they do outside of it.
Often, the first time I object to it, they immediately say something like "oh, I didn't mean it that way." I've never gotten a satisfactory answer to what they actually meant. Usually I use the example of "how would you feel if someone used the word [insert student's ethnicity here] to mean 'stupid'?," although sometimes their response is "I wouldn't care," which sort of ends the conversation. On occasion, when it's been a student I knew well, I've explained that using the term that way reinforces the idea that being gay is a bad thing, and that I don't want any students in my class who might, in fact, be gay to have to feel that way in my classroom, that it makes it harder for them to learn. The explanation has always been accepted, but rarely internalized.
The strange thing, to me, is that a great many of my male students, the ones who use the word, dress and act in ways that, if they had done so while I was in high school, would have been taken as frank acknowledgments that they were, if not gay, at least not straight, either. The use of hair gel is almost ubiquitous. Many of my male students pay a great deal of attention to their hair and clothing, far more than would have been "masculine" when I was in high school. Some of them have their hair dyed, or at least frosted. Many of my guys wear earrings, often in both ears, and - for the African-American males, at least - often large, flashy cubic zirconia studs. (I'm used to the "acceptable" male earring being in one ear only, and either a small metal stud or a very small metal hoop, nothing flashy or dangly.) I've seen more boys than I can count wearing pink in the past couple of years. On occasion, I've seen guys wearing concealer. As a sort of final shock, a great many of my male students, on the day before Homecoming, were wearing mums. Not pinned to their chests, where the girls wore theirs, but on elastic garters around their upper arms - and otherwise indistinguishable from the singleton mums the sophomore and junior girls wore.
So why have they adopted so much "feminine" stuff than when I was in school, but have attitudes towards gay/bi males - and often women - that are far more regressive than the ones I'm used to from high school students? And why is it that the one femmy thing that used to be perfectly acceptable on guys when I was in school, long hair, is nearly verboten now? (As is eyeliner, except for the goth-boys? Not that that was really acceptable in my day, either.)
Well, if we take a developmental approach, it turns out that - according to most child psych textbooks, at least - one develops one's idea of gender roles when one is between eighteen months and four years, but one doesn't really finalize one's ideas of how these roles apply to one's self until one hits puberty. So these kids were mostly born in '88-'90, and were becoming aware of gender roles in the early '90s. That was about the time when the male form started getting the same sort of objectification in advertising, if not the rest of the media, as women had. So perhaps that's where the obsessive concern with their appearance came from. But their coming into their sexual selves occurred/is occurring in a repressive political atmosphere, in which being gay will get you a lot of negative attention - not just from one's peers, but from the adult world. Not that this wasn't always true, but I think in the sociopolitical atmosphere of the early '90s, if a teenage boy came out to his schoolmates, there was a certain peer pressure among the girls to accept him, whether the boys did or not - and pressure from them, in turn, for the straight boys not to ostracize him when the girls were around. (At least, that was the case for us, and we were in Mississippi at the time.) This was piss-poor protection for when the girls weren't around, but it was better than things had been in the '80s. Now, it seems as if the girls are as judgmental as the guys, if not worse.
Perhaps the adoption of a vaguely traditionally-feminine concern with one's appearance has made it necessary to distance one's self from other aspects of femininity, in a way that the sensitive new age geeks of my youth didn't have to because they wore tight black denim pants and lumberjack flannel with no hair gel? If man-skirts come into fashion, will it mean that the boys will have to be even more verbally abusive to gays and women, or would it be enough to break the line? (It's not as silly as it sounds - I've seen some kilts and male sarongs on runway shows in the past couple of seasons.)
Any suggestions on how I can gently suggest to my kids that explicit expressed homophobia is not okay in my class without preaching to them? Even if it comes from a guy in a pink polo shirt and gel-slicked bleached hair?
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(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 10:22 pm (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 10:27 pm (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 10:34 pm (UTC)Awww, ogres are cute.
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 10:50 pm (UTC)Beacuse it's deliberately hurtful to other people. It causes an active harm in the universe to do so. Why take pleasure in hurting someone else (without their explicit permission, of course; if D&S is your thing, you can fling all the epithets you want at your consenting partner of either gender)? Why use language that you know is going to seriously bruise the spirit of someone else in the room?
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 10:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 11:01 pm (UTC)That's a hard question because they probably don't even realize the implicit homophobia until you point it out, and then it is just one of those things that kids say without really thinking about what they say.
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 11:01 pm (UTC)I know that the common wisdom of this culture is the "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me" type, but it's false for at least half of us. For us, the better version is the Yiddish version - "A blow goes away, but a word stays forever."
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 11:04 pm (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 11:09 pm (UTC)(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 11:11 pm (UTC)Bye, troll. Nice talking with your insensitive side. Go bother someone else now.
(frozen) no subject
Date: 2005-10-09 11:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-10 12:34 am (UTC)And you are 100% right that just "telling people to not be so thin-skinned" isn't an answer; in fact, it doesn't even address the problem. The problem is with the bully, not the victim, and it's high time our society got with the program. Teaching people that bullying and abuse are not acceptable and WILL result in negative consequences is the only approach that has any chance of making a difference.
no subject
Date: 2005-10-10 02:22 am (UTC)Oh the changes...
Date: 2005-10-10 05:23 am (UTC)I for one feel that this is horrible, but at least it's fair.
As for the gay thing, I have been watching this issue since Emenem got in hot water over it. This generation was taught the word by our people, and they had no idea what it was.Our generation had a viscious anti-gay language and attitude that the current trends cannot compete with. Gays are not merely 2D joke figures now. They usually are, but not always. This use of 'gay' as a generic purjorative is going to stick, and we'll all have to suffer for it. I've heard a number of gay men use it in justthe way your students do. Sure, they understand how they are being ironic, but they do it nonetheless.