Advanced Essay #2: The Language of Masculinity

The Language of Masculinity:

When I was fourteen I entered the workforce with my first job, which was anything but glamorous. I was condemned to spend a little more than a month of my summer trapped in a very old and hot gym with a gaggle of small children. While the children were annoying, it was my fellow coworkers who I found to be the most unbearable.

I have this complex when it comes to interacting with guys my own age. I do not consider myself to be overly masculine in the slightest, so I find myself feeling lost and mildly annoyed at the behavior of my fellow men. Not all men, but just the majority of them who flaunt their masculinity and force it onto others. The ones who find ways to insult not only each other but different groups of people as well.

The camp in which I worked seemed to reinforce stereotypical gender norms much to my dismay. Me and the rest of the boys were in the gym playing sports with the older kids while the girls were confined to the “tot room” watching over the smaller campers.

Lunches, where all of us guys would sit in the break room, were the worst for me. Conversation would buzz around me, but it was as if the guys were speaking a foreign language that I barely had a grasp of. I had mastered the art of nodding along and laughing in order to pass as just another guy, but every now and then though one of them would say something that snapped me to my senses.

“Dude stop being such a faggot,” I had heard one of them yell.

“Shut up, you’re the faggot,” another had retorted, his mouth full of sandwich. They all laughed except me. I always hoped that no one would notice my flinch when they said certain words like faggot or retard. Those were words of their language that I had refused to speak.

It had always fascinated me that men use the term faggot as an insult, as if being gay would  suddenly strip a man of what makes him a man. It seems as though men are obsessed with the concept of a fag, which is to say an overly feminine and flamboyant man who likes men. It must make them feel better about their own fragile masculinity.

To me, masculinity is a language in itself. It is one born from years of privilege and entitlement, of aggression and hate. It not only harms those who are not men, but it also harms the men who use it.

As Steve Almond wrote in his article What I Learned in the Locker Room, “We look to pro sports as a reminder that it is our duty to conceal the parts of ourselves that feel vulnerable, the parts we associate — erroneously, but inextricably — with the feminine.”

Hypermasculinity not only harms those who are not men, but it also harms the men who perpetuate it. The fear of being feminine or the fear of being a “fag” is what drives men to act the way in which they do.

Men conceal their feelings, their vulnerabilities, and repress them until there is no other choice but to push those negative feelings onto others. It makes sense then, that they would attack the so-called “faggots” because they are jealous of a man who can take ownership of who he is and who can take responsibility for his emotions and actions. “Faggots” are a threat to their way of life.

Towards the end of my first summer of work, I found myself exhausted keeping up the charade of masculinity. I think the facade that I had put up began to fade because one boy reached out to me during my last week of work. We were in the gym, and he had stopped me in the middle of my weak attempt at shooting some baskets.

“I just wanted to tell you that I notice how uncomfortable you seem around some of the other guys, I get it,” he admitted. “I just don’t want you to think that I’m a horrible person because of how I act around them. I’m not like this really, I just do it to fit in,” he had told me.

I think I replied with something along the lines of, “Yeah don’t worry about it, it’s no big deal,” but in reality I was confused. Why did this boy care so much about what I thought of him?

The answer didn’t come to me until much later, after I had become more comfortable in my own skin. He was trying to reassure me that he was not a “horrible” person, but in reality it seemed as though he was trying to reassure himself, which makes me think about what Gloria Anzaldúa emphasizes in her work How to Tame a Wild Tongue, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.”

This boy had given up who he was in order to fit into the male archetype. He took the parts of himself that were against the norm and cut them out in order to become what every man is expected to be. While he may have found comfort in the conformity, he had lost himself in the process of doing so. I came to realize that you cannot bargain with society, you either speak the language it wants you to or you risk becoming a social pariah.

Works Cited:

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands = La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999. Print.

Almond, Steve. What I Learned in the Locker Room. The New York Times Company, 11 Sept. 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/what-i-learned-in-the-locker-room.html. Accessed 10 Dec. 2017.