High Schools “Teach” Students How to Be Straight Boys and Girls

With sex education programs that scare teenagers with frightening facts about STDs or preach abstaining from sex, we often think of high schools as places that discourage teenage sexuality. While studying teenage masculinity in River High in California, however, sociologist C. J. Pascoe discovered that high school shapes teenage sexuality. She found that many high school rules and events encourage students to fill their gender roles and to accept heterosexuality as “normal”. Heterosexuality, simply put, is love between a male and a female. High school is a place that teaches students that girls and boys are different, and so should be treated differently, and that anything other than heterosexuality, or being “straight”, is abnormal.
It is interesting to note that high schools such as River High claim to prioritize their students’ equality and safety, but write inequality into their rules. Pascoe noted that River High’s dress code told students what they could or could not wear based on what gender they were. For example, boys were not allowed to wear pants below their waistline, but technically, girls could. In this way, although the school appears to be discouraging sexuality and ensuring safety by enforcing an appropriate dress code, the school is telling the students what it means to be male and female, and is enforcing the gender differences that lay the foundation for heterosexuality. Even in their senior yearbook pictures, boys and girls are required to wear different outfits. Girls are required to wear a black off-the- shoulder wrap that is more revealing and suggestive than what the boys have to wear. This outfit, along with emphasizing the differences between boys and girls, suggests the sexual availability of girls.
Many traditional school events also encourage heterosexuality. Popular school dances, such as Prom and Winter Ball, suggest that male-female pairing is normal. River High even held an annual competition, the “Mr. Cougar” competition, in which boys, usually the most popular athletes, competed for the title by putting on skits and receiving votes from their classmates. Often, these skits would portray the boys winning competitions or fights and portray girls as a reward for their actions. During the ceremony, female classmates escorted the male candidates to their seats. This competition was only open to boys; girls could not compete for such a title. Additionally, many of the traditions associated with it establish boys as dominant and girls as inferior. Because the school sponsors events such as this event, the school further reinforces gender differences and establishes heterosexuality as normal.
So although high school appears to discourage sexuality, it actually promotes heterosexuality and gender differences, which produces two types of inequality: institutional sexism and heterosexism. This means that the school rules and practices cause people to treat others differently because of their gender or sexual preferences, and are developed in a way that assumes heterosexuality to be normal. Institutional sexism and heterosexism are hard to address because often the individuals within the institution (which, in this case, is high school) are neither personally sexist nor heterosexist. And their rules and practices often have other, more obvious meanings that are not discriminatory, which makes sexist and heterosexist rules and practices difficult to identify. The unfortunate result of this heterosexism and institutional sexism is the unequal treatment of students who do not identify as heterosexual and also the unequal and subordinate treatment of women compared to men.

Being Straight Is a Process?

Well, not exactly. You know when you see a guy holding a girl’s hand in the hallway of a high school and everyone sees it and copies it? Or when a bunch of male jocks run through a break-away banner before a football game to the applause of an all-female cheerleading squad? Or even back in elementary school when you had to sit boy-girl-boy-girl in your desks so that there would be less giggling and whispering among same-sex friendships? Remember that? C.J. Pascoe in her book, Dude, You’re A Fag, describes these instances as a “heterosexualizing process.”
We have all heard many times in response to anti-gay aggression that being homosexual isn’t a choice; it is a set of desires that you are born with that come into play in the shaping of one’s sexual and personal identity. At the same time, many people are born with heterosexual attractions and couldn’t see themselves being able to conduct a sexual or emotional relationship with someone of the same sex. However, what Pascoe is suggesting is that from a very early age, the way that kids are taught to behave in school and the rituals that they are taught to perceive as normal have a distinctly heterosexual undertone, so that anything contradicting those norms would be considered averse to what is normal.
C.J. Pascoe says that she “Looks at school itself as an organizer of sexual practices, identities, and meanings. Beginning in elementary school, students participate in a ‘heterosexualizing process’ in which children present themselves as ‘normal’ boys or girls through discourses of heterosexuality” (Pascoe 26). What she means by this is that elementary school, middle school, and high school act as a playground for boys and girls monitored closely by the conventions of heterosexuality, and therefore contribute to the establishment of what it means to be masculine and feminine in the American high school.
Some of these discourses that Pascoe alludes to are things like the institution of the school dance and prom. The process of asking a girl to a school dance for a boy is something that has been depicted and satirized in film, television, books, and magazines as a source of anxiety for the male, because if the female rejects his offering, then he is considered to be a failure in the heterosexual practices of high school culture. Similarly, if a girl is going to prom with a boy, she will spend sometimes as much as $500 total on a gown, shoes, bag, hair, nails, and makeup for herself, and a boutinier for her date (and this is not even including the limo!). In this scenario alone, countless hours of preparation are spent by the female to look like a pseudo-princess for her prince in his rented tuxedo. The couple simulates a bride and groom perched on the top of a cake as they pose for pictures in suburban backyards next to flowers or beside other couples whom they share their limo with. Everywhere one turns, there are constant reminders of couplings of boys and girls thought to be clean, attractive, and American.
The process of preparing for high school rituals of prom, homecoming, football games, and the reminder of everyone’s relationship status while just trying to walk to Math class are all part of American schools acting as a breeding ground for heterosexualizing. Pascoe mentions that this process then articulates the degrees of masculinity that males must abide by, and continue to prove by calling their friends “fag” or “gay.” The fact that any of those words would be considered an insult to a male drives home the idea that in high school, straight is what is normal and taught, and anything else doesn’t enter into the curriculum.