The next time you’re stuck in line behind a group of teenage boys boastfully sharing about their sexual adventures you should know that it’s not just because teen males are full of hormones and think about sex all the time. You are actually witnessing those boys becoming and staying masculine. That might sound strange, however in her book about her study in a Californian high school C.J. Pascoe argues that masculinity is a process which involves somebody assuring others that they are masculine and denying and distancing themselves from feminine characteristics.

The bragging about sexual experiences mentioned before is an example of boys assuring or proving to each other that they are masculine. In addition to talking about sex in public, boys prove masculinity by having girlfriends or picking up girls. While boys publicly flaunt the fact that they are thinking about sex, their thoughts about and expression of sexuality is sometimes quite different in private. Through a combination of interviews and observations Pascoe found that the same boys who were trying to one-up each other with descriptions of either their sex life or their graphic fantasies talked much more sensitively, tenderly and even romantically about past or current girlfriends. This shows how the acts that make someone masculine happen in public. “Boys will boys” might have a grain of truth in it but only when the boys are in groups. Masculinity is less about what a person is and more how they act in public, masculinity happens in groups.

Similarly, flirting with girls by touching them is another way to create masculinity. Although this touching is often in the form of playful shoving and poking they all usually involve guys getting into girls personal spaces and usually end with the girl squealing and giving up. This emphasizes men having power over women. This power is one way that masculinity is something that is more similar to a process than merely an adjective for men. Girls who wield this power over other girls are also viewed as masculine. Most people think “men” when they hear masculinity but it’s probably more accurate to think “power” or “dominance” instead.

The other important step in being masculine is to separate yourself from things that aren’t masculine. This includes homosexuality, incompetence, being vain about your clothes, showing emotion and especially weakness. There is this subconscious terror among guys that they will become unmanly and this fear creates a ghost effect. The ghost is a fag and in order to protect themselves by being touched by this ghost they call other guys fag. Once they have been called a fag a guy will try to fling the contaminating word as quick as they can at someone else before it sticks to them. Besides hurling the word fag at each other guys will also mock things that are unmanly by imitating them. You know when you’re uncomfortable and you have to let out a nervous laugh? Well dressing in drag in a joking way and pretending to have high squeaky voices in order to make people laugh serves the same purpose for teenage guys. It’s through this combination of bragging, talking, flirting, or pretending to be women in order to get a laugh that high school boys achieve that wished-for status of masculine.