Reddit reviews Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School

I'm currently reading Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. It's an awesome book about gay theory and how out environment can shape sexuality and our perceptions on sexuality and masculinity.

and here's [your reply] (http://www.amazon.ca/Dude-Youre-Fag-Masculinity-Sexuality/dp/0520271483/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1456965122&sr=8-1&keywords=dude+you%27re+a+fag)

Nice that someone agrees with my POV on TRP.

> This is one of the first things I've disagreed with. I think it's pretty clear that shit test are real, although not as common as TRP likes to make out. There are plenty of times when I've been hitting on a girl and she's reacted like a total bitch. When I stay and show I'm not intimidated by it, I've had a lot of cases where you can visibly see them become attracted. I don't think it's a stretch to say other people do this on a smaller scale.


In that setting yes shit tests are very real, I absolutely agree.

But if you read the context for this, I am arguing against the notion that is something primal that people do all the time, and that women do constantly in a relationship. I know some women do it a lot in dating. Hell, some women have outright told me that they test guys. But they're a rare breed in my experience. And they're usually the types who like head games. I think the one case where you'll experience a lot of things as shit tests is if you're not being genuine or authentic. People smell that and will try to call you out.

> I'm not sure your point about scientists holds. Scientists haven't studied banter, but it's clearly an important part of interacting. Likewise, they haven't really studied why some people are are cunts, but it's easily identifiable as a character trait. There's barely any research about human cuckolding, but it's very clear it's an evolution strategy we have evolved. In any case, it's very difficult to differentiate shit testing from just being horrible, not least because "passing the test" would have the same effect in both situations. I don't think it would be easy to identify.

Actually, scientists have studied banter. For examples, here's a book about banter amongst teenage boys.

If shit tests were so common and meaningful, at least one psychologist, anthropologist, sociologist or whatever would have described them as such in my opinion.

Answers to this question and many more in: Dude, You're a Fag

> you end up with a cultural association that manliness = fucking women, which leads to not fucking women = unmanly, which leads to homophobia.

I think that's a remarkably simplistic and rather shallow way of thinking about sexuality and homophobia.

Culture has to have a foundation somewhere. To suggest that basing it from biology [is a bad thing] is to suggest that it have no foundation at all. The problem is when cultures become averse to augmentation and evolution. Cultural stagnation is what leads to homophobia, not the reality of biology.

There is no one single cause behind homophobia, and anyone telling you that is just plain wrong. There are, however, a few bigger causes of it. Now, my focus in research for the last few years has been in homophobia in a high school setting - so what follows is mostly associated with that (specifically, US high schools).

One of the larger causes of homophobia goes way back to our more primal roots: pack behavior. We are codified to align with a larger pack, because throughout history those outside of the pack aren't treated well, and (going way back) end up dying of starvation or exposure.

So, skipping a whole lot of time, let's turn the page to the high school setting - which is probably more like the old pack behavior than any other time in one's life. Many / Most kids haven't an inkling of what they'd like to be - and not just in career trade, but in what sort of person they'd like to be. So, packs form around social custom. Much of this - and this is the point you were trying to make - comes from how they observe others behaving. And, naturally, much of this comes from the media. (Sidepoint: HS is also where the gender divide begins but that's a whole different paper).

The harsh reality is, fucking women does equate to a higher social standing. It is codified into our systems, through centuries of natural selection. There were points in our evolution that said, "If you don't spread your seed, you'll be pointless." That's a pretty important thing to have in the genes when you're trying to establish a species.

We're no longer at the point where we need that in our mentality, but it is still codified in there, like it or not. Social customs and social obligations are two different things. Two hundred, even a hundred years ago, you were socially obligated to pump out a few kids to help in the fields. A few decades ago you were obligated to pump out some kids to complete the Nuclear Family (two children, minimum, generally).

As much as the Conservative Right here in the US wants [you to believe], you're no longer held to these obligations. Thankfully.

But all of this time with these obligations which have now become customs has left us with a bit of generational lag. My mother, for instance, has a seven brothers and sisters. I've got one younger sister - that's a good indicator of how much generational obligations/customs have changed.

Part of that generational lag occupies a large part of the media, for several reasons. 1) Sex is codified, and because of that, sex sells. As the media is discovering, all kinds of sex sells - so this little media lag will be going away in a generation or two. 2) It becomes part of the cycle (we're still seeing what's socially acceptable to the previous generation on TV - we're just now seeing that change, just like it'll change again at the end of our generation / set of generations).

Let's get back to our high school kids, who've been organizing themselves into their little wolf packs (thankfully, the French gave us a better word: clique). They see these social customs in the media, and naturally use them as a boilerplate for their own behavior.

Now, here's the important part: evolution.

Turns out, a lot of people get sick of these social customs in the previous generation, and they end up passing those protests on to their kids. That's why you have a generation of women who, when told to stay in the kitchen, respond with, "Go fuck yourself." Over a few generations, this leads to some pretty profound social change. That's how you go from women's suffrage being proposed in 1878, to proposed as an amendment in 1919, to ratified in 1920, and to having the first woman <insert_pretty_much_anything> about a generation (give or take) later. 96 years between "Women? Voting? Sure, I guess." and "Hillary 2016!" seems likt a lot, but think about it. That's the rough lifespan of one person.

And each time a huge social change sweeps through, it makes the ones that follow even easier. Just look at LGBT rights. It didn't take 100 years for a massive amount of change. It seems slow to those of us who get to see the worst of it - but it's remarkably fast.

The other, and in my opinion slightly more important factor in social change, comes from the "Defense of the Different."

It's easy to lose yourself in the articles about cruelty - and that needs to be dealt with. But what we very rarely take note of, is how often it happens that things go well.

Another natural, codified, part of our humanity, comes from saving face, both of ourselves and for our friends. When we form bonds of any sort with another person, we expect those bonds to stay intact [and will take lengths to defend them]. The act of "coming out" is a pretty big change in those bonds, and the reason the process is so painful is that you know you're changing the relationship, because - in a way - you're changing your character. Most of the time, these things go just fine. Horror stories scare us so much because, well, they're horror stories.

Anyway, without going on that particular tangent for another six paragraphs, I'll get back to the simpler point: people like their friends. So, say you've got our little pack of high school kids. Say one of them comes out. The natural reaction of the group may be to cast out the injured individual and keep moving. This is where our evolution comes into play, and when we're supposed to say, "So what?"

Friends have the ability to grab back onto that person and pull them back into the group. The group changes. The group evolves. And as that group grows up and gets out into the world, that little interaction shapes the way they deal with people in their lives.

All of this is very complex, and I'm leaving a whole lot out for the sake of brevity.

The West Wing addresses this group behavior with a nice little DADT discussion that I'm quite fond of.

My points are:

1. There are things codified into our system. One of those things is "fuck women procreate, be powerful."
   
   
2. Codified behavior is the basis of our social structure.
   
   
3. The evolution and adaptation of our base social structure is what leads to social change.
   
   
4. Social Change comes in many shapes and sizes.
   
   
5. Homophobia doesn't come from "fuck women, be powerful." It comes from, "This is something I've never encountered before, and I'm scared of it."
   
   
6. We, as a species, get over it^1 by saying, "Oh, this is what that is. That's not so bad." ^1 - "it" can be replaced with anything: women voting, blacks in the military, gays being a thing, gays in the military, etc.
   
   
7. Having social obligations and social customs doesn't lead to a problem. The species neglecting to evolve those social customs is a problem. (We're doing a damn good job of evolving).
   
   ---
   
   Some further reading:
   
   
8. "Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School", an ethnographic study conducted and authored by C.J. Pascoe. (Read this even if you're not interested, it's good.)
   
   
9. "On Facework" - Goffman. One of the best papers on social identity and obligations we hold to each other.
   
   
10. "Victory" - Linda Hirshman. Documents the LGBT community's rise from minority outcast, to one of the strongest and fiercest social movements in the world.
    
    
11. "Queer Bullying" - Tracey Peter & Catherine Taylor. "How Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia Hurts Students".
    
    
12. "The Ideology of "Fag": The School Experience of Gay Students" - George Smith.
    
    
13. Hallway Fears & High School Friendships: The complications of young men (re)negotiating heterosexualized identities" - Michael D. Kehler.
    
    These are only a few of the papers you could read, there's an absolute mass of research out there on homophobia and heteronormality. All it takes is some patience, some reading time, and the ability to coherently form a message from combining and understanding a mass of other content (which is what I do!).
    
    --
    
    Some edits, noted in strikethrough or [additions].

Go buy him the book Dude, You're a Fag. It's an ethnographic study of high school students and their use of the word "fag." The author concludes that it essentially has no relationship to sexual orientation, but rather that "fag" is used to police masculinity.

I'm not totally sure if it's really that much different from how "feminine" operates here...

Here's a nice summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dude,_You're_a_Fag

> The questioning of quantitative objectivity by many is not, in-itself, a questioning of the possibility of objectivity, but the form it takes as quantifiable, i.e. as number.

So then how is objectivity possible? (Not being flippant -- I think I'm missing something here.)

> As a structural Marxist it would be very hard to fit him into the paradigm you want: between the quantifiers of objectivity and its qualitative deniers.

1. Marxism is a great example of a theory that Popper claimed was impossible to disprove. 2) I think I was unclear: I never meant to imply qualitative methodologists themselves eschewed objectivity. There have been many qualitative studies that have not. This and this illustrate the distinction well.

> Its fact.

My assertion is that it is not fact. For example, here is a book by a feminist partially about how the idea that men must be big and strong, that they shouldn't have emotional vulnerabilites or rely upon others, is harmful to men.