Gender Constructed Young

In this book called School Talk: gender and adolescent culture written by Donna Eder with the help of Catherine Colleen Evans and Stephen Parker starts off by talking about the misunderstanding between men and women. How it starts when children are young and usually in middle school. When girls and boys not being able to understand each other at a young age, they grow up having these stereotypes about the opposite sex(9).  These can often cause gender inequality because men often look at women as emotional, needed, insecure and unassertive.  Likewise women have this stereotype of men being rude, assertive, sexual, and even emotionless. So understanding gender is something that should be learned or at least attempted to be understood since it plays a big role in the lives of people in the future.

Another thing that they talked about was the interaction between the girls and boys at school. They stated that as children during elementary and middle school the girls and boys are segregated. They don’t play together at recess and they don’t sit with each other at lunch (14). They stated that the gender in middle school and Junior high is constructed by the peer’s influences to move up socially. So boys are know to be more socially accepted if they succeed though athletics ability, being cool or being tough. Unlike girls who move up socially though their family background, appearance, and have a lot of freedom when it comes to social things (14).

This book touches on a couple topics that pertained to constructing gender but the last one I want to talk about pertained to boys and there necessity to be manly tough and not wimps. Boys are taught though watching family members, peers and most commonly though media that men are supposed to be strong tough and aggressive (61). Many boys look to sports as a way to express their manliness. Playing sports such as football, hockey, basketball, and wrestling all sport that are very contact and require a lot of aggression. They talked about how the boys tend to call each other names but the names they call each other are usually demining and imply some sort of weakness. For example:

o   Pud

o   Squirt

o   Wimp

o   Girl

o   Fag

o   Queer

o   Pussy

These are all things that lack toughness and make you question someone’s gender, they also happen to be names that are linked with femininity and homosexuality (63).

Eder, Donna, Catherine Colleen, and Stephen Parker. School Talk: Gender and Adolescent culture. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Print

Cassie Wilson