This is a picture of my cousin Alex. The whole family was hanging out and Alex was bored of sitting around listening to the adults talk so he took out some of his toys, all of which were trucks and cars, swords and toy guns. When I was taking this picture of him, his dad told him to ‘look tough’. Alex immediately ran over and grabbed one of his favorite swords and attempted to make his face ‘look tough’.
From the time a child is born, based on their gender, they are told or shown how to dress, act and feel. This picture is a great representation of the gender roles that are instilled into society. Boys are dressed in blue and green and are given cars and swords to play with. An emphasis is put on sports and being athletic. Also, boys have to act tough and not show emotion. Girls are dressed in pink and purple and given Barbie’s and Easy Bake Oven’s to play with. They are told to be sensitive to other’s feelings and are allowed to show a range of emotions. In this picture, Alex is holding a sword because his dad told him to look tough. He immediately associated this with a weapon. Society has instilled these values into boys because they want to appear masculine and don’t want anyone questioning their manhood. “The fear—sometimes conscious, sometimes not—that others might perceive us as homosexual propels men to enact all manners of exaggerated masculine behaviors and attitudes to make sure that no one could possibly get the wrong idea about us” (Kimmel 2009:66). Most men never want to be seen as homosexual because that would imply that they were not masculine. If they don’t act masculine, in given social situations their masculinity will be, “challenged or reinforced,” (Pascoe 2005:331). With swords and toy guns being given to boys at a young age to emphasize the fact that they are boys make them more susceptible to violence. Sapolsky discusses how men have more testosterone running throughout their systems which has shown to increase aggressive tendencies, but what about the ideas we are forcing onto the male race even as children? (Sapolsky 1997).
This is a picture of my Uncle and my cousin. They are very close and like to spend time with each other. In this particular picture he is pushing him on a tire swing at a local playground. Before this, they had spent the entire day together playing baseball and watching movies together and spending what my uncle calls, ‘quality father son time’.
In our society, we assume that the bond between any father and son is strong. A father is supposed to teach his son how to ride a bike and how to play baseball. One of the main reasons we assume there is a bond there and the father is expected to teach his son all of these skills, is because they are both male. The father is supposed to show his son the ropes of being a man, because the mother is not capable of raising the son by herself or teaching her son any of the skills that make a man. As a boy grows up, if he is teased, his dad will show him how to fight or use words to hurt the bullies back. The reason a father has to teach his son all of these things is because if a boy learned these things from his mom it would be wrong and he might get called a homo or a fag. “Fag talk and fag imitation serve as a discourse with which boys discipline themselves and each other through joking relationships” (Pascoe 2005:330). Boys keep each other in check by joking like this. However, if a boy continues to not change his behavior, even with the joking, this joking will turn into real teasing. This is a boy’s worst nightmare so he does everything in his power to avoid being called a fag, and his father is just the person to show him how to be as masculine as he can. But is heterosexuality the norm or has society just made it the norm? In my opinion homosexuality is just as normal as heterosexuality. As Messner discusses, our society has made heterosexuality the norm and when someone isn’t part of that norm, those “sexual desires might appear dangerous due to their socially stigmatized status” (1999:391). This also falls into Rubin and how the charmed circle is explained. Our culture has decided what is ‘good and bad sex’ and if you don’t fit into the good kind of sex, you are not included in the charmed circle (Rubin 1984). From the time kids are little, they are trained to act in a certain way so they remain in the charmed circle.
This is a picture from spring break with my friend. I thought it was interesting how girls and boys are perceived differently in pictures. Guys dress in their regular board shorts and girls dress in regular bikinis like in this photo. When I have taken pictures of guys they just turned their heads casually while girls push their hair out of their faces and suck in their stomachs and tried to have the camera get the best angles of their faces.
When people look at a picture, guys and girls are judged very differently. Girls are judged on their bodies, how tan they are, what they are wearing and what facial expression they are making. When taking pictures girls are always trying to look pretty, because, “women are depicted in quite a different way then men—not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but because the ‘ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the women is designed to flatter him (Berger 1972:64). When a guy sees a girl in a swimsuit, he is judging her body and her potential to be sexual. As discussed in the Social Scripts lecture, “women should look like playmates,” and when a guy sees a girl in a swimsuit he is judging her based on how close she can get to looking like a playmate (Smith 2011). When a man is looked at in a picture, he is a ‘stud’ if he is surrounded by girls in bikinis because this emphasizes the fact that he is masculine enough to attract this many women.
This picture was taken at my friends 21st birthday party. She has clearly been drinking and in this particular picture is making another drink. Birthday parties, especially in college, almost always have alcohol present. That’s because it adds to the party environment and helps everyone ‘loosen up’. Alcohol is used as an excuse for people to act differently and more freely. At this party there was also dancing, drinking games and lots of hooking up. The combination of alcohol and other activities, “such as grinding, may continue into others, such as hooking up in private” (Ronen 2010:357). Also something I noticed at this party was that the social script that the man always had to initiate the sexual conduct was followed (Smith 2011).
Drinking has become one of the main factors in a social gathering. Even at social gatherings like bachelorette parties, alcohol is almost required in order to ‘have fun’ because it allows people to be someone they normally wouldn’t be and act in certain ways that are socially acceptable, only because alcohol is involved (Montemurro 2005). However, girls unlike guys need to be careful about how much they drink, and also who they decide to hook up with. A girl cannot hook up with too many guys or otherwise she will start to get the reputation as a slut. “A common way to damage a woman’s credibility is to call her a slut” (Tanenbaum 1999:403). A girl never wants to be called a slut because this automatically stigmatizes her from the rest of her friends and other girls. A guy can sleep with as many girls as he wants and in fact, the more girls he sleeps with the more he is considered a ‘stud’. The same does not go for a girl so even if she wants to hook up with a lot of guys, she is trained by society not to for fear of being ostracized by her peer group.
