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.