by David Balashinsky
Many years ago, when I was in my late 20s or early 30s, I got into a phone conversation with a young woman who had dialed my number by mistake. She hadn't misdialed: it was a recycled number that formerly belonged to someone she knew. The phone call began, naturally, with my explaining that the person she was trying to reach did not live at that number. However, a conversation ensued that seemed for all the world as though there were some flirtatious testing-of-the-waters going on at both ends. That is the vein in which the call proceeded for several minutes until the young woman abruptly said "You sound like a fag," and hung up.
The recollection of this incident - one of about a half dozen in my life in which my sexual orientation has been mislabeled - either by mistake or intentionally but always as a way of policing my gender - was prompted by a meme that has been making the rounds on social media for several years and that appeared in my Facebook feed yet again last week. The meme presents a quote from Farida D. and it is item number 214 in "The 2nd List of Shit That Made Me a Feminist." Here is the quote as it appears on Farida D.'s Instagram wall:
I do not know how Farida D. comes by her special insight into the psychological lives and inmost fears of men - she describes herself simply as "an Arab gender researcher and poet." But what I do know, as a cisgender, hetero male - what Farida D. refers to as a "cishet" - is that most men in our culture fear being seen as feminine, not just those of us who identify as cisgender or as hetero and certainly not only those men who mistreat women. This fear is instilled in us beginning in our earliest childhoods, it is reinforced throughout our lives and it is ever-present. It influences and even controls the choices we make about the clothes we wear, the color of the cars we buy, it determines how we walk, how we talk, how we hold our bodies, how we interact with others and which hobbies and interests - even which careers - we pursue. For many of us who are gay or trans, it has kept us closeted. For those of us who are not it has, nonetheless, inhibited us in our relationships with other men. The fear of being seen as feminine is one of the defining characteristics of masculinity because, as we are taught to be masculine, so we are taught not to be feminine. In childhood or adolescence, most of us internalize this strict gender code and, having internalized it, actively aspire to be seen as masculine just as we actively fear (dread, really) being seen as feminine.
None of this is news. On the contrary, it's Feminism 101. Nor does the concept of gender, obviously, apply only to men. Women, too, have their own form of gender instilled in them. They are expected to be feminine in both appearance and behavior; they are expected to be accommodating, indulgent and supportive of men, ingratiating ("Smile, Honey!"), conciliatory, domestic and, above all, they are expected to be fecund.
Just as masculinity is positively reinforced in men because it is rewarded, femininity in women is positively reinforced because it is rewarded - but only up to a point: the rewards that women "earn" for being feminine are not nearly so great as the rewards that men "earn" for being masculine.
And just as masculinity is both negatively and positively punished in women, femininity is both negatively and positively punished in men. A refresher from Psych. 101: a negative punishment is "a form of operant conditioning that aims to suppress or discourage certain behaviors by taking away something valued or desired by the individual" while a positive punishment entails the delivery of an aversive stimulus in order to discourage certain behaviors. In my phone call with the young woman, I was on the receiving end of both negative and positive punishments for sounding insufficiently masculine. The positive punishment was being called "fag" and the negative punishment was the young woman's hanging up on me and withdrawing even the potential of our forming a relationship. The result was one of those periodic reinforcements of my fear of being seen as feminine.
As I suggested, this is basic stuff. That is why I was surprised to see Farida D.'s quote mindlessly shared by feminist- and pro-feminist pages and individual Facebook users. In contrast to mainstream, even orthodox feminist analyses of gender, Farida D. presents a radically different view here. In this view, the fear of being seen as feminine is not a behavior that is inculcated in most males but is, instead, simply the manifestation of guilt that, by definition, most men feel - since most men fear being seen as feminine - because they mistreat women.
This was news to me. After all, despite still being prey to the fear of being seen as feminine, I don't fear being treated the way I treat women. More than this, though, it was because I have experienced the sting of gender policing many times in my life (and not only by being called "fag") and it has always taken the form of an external force or influence (a catcall by a stranger on the street, a sneer, a reproach by a friend) which I have dutifully internalized and which has always tended to reinforce my fear of being seen as feminine.
Another example from my own experience comes to mind. When I was about 10, some friends and I were "goofing around" (that's what we called it in those days) in the process of which we discovered a freight elevator (this was backstage at the New York State Theater). The elevator car was huge - we had never seen anything like it - and three of its walls were covered by thick, quilted moving blankets. Obviously, we had to ride it although we knew we were not supposed to (I think there was a sign that said "Authorized Personnel Only"). The combination of amazement, the sense of our own mischievousness, the fear of getting caught and the sheer fun we were having led to a kind of giddiness. I think we all felt that. "We all," I should explain, were three or four girls and me, the sole boy. In the midst of our cackles, one of the older girls - she must have been about 12 or 13 - suddenly turned to me with a look of concern on her face and said, "David! Stop it - you're acting like a girl."
I will never forget the impact of that. It's not that, at that age, I had any conscious sense of being either masculine or feminine. I was just having fun and my emotions were simply bubbling out of me in the most natural way possible. In other words - and this is key - my emotions were being expressed in an uninhibited way. This girl's reproach was the first time I was brought face to face with the societal expectation that an uninhibited display of joyful emotion was inappropriate in a boy and that, unless I wasn't afraid to be seen as feminine, I was not permitted to engage in it.
By no means am I the only man to have experienced gender policing like this nor am I the first person to write about it. In a 2017 column for the New York Times, ("Talking to Boys the Way We Talk to Girls") Andrew Reiner explores the ways in which how we communicate with boys helps to shape their gender into the masculine ideal. "Just as women's studies classes have long examined the ways that gendered language undermines women and girls," Reiner writes, "a growing body of research shows that stereotypical messages are similarly damaging to boys."
We tell ourselves we are preparing our sons to fight (literally and figuratively), to compete in a world that's brutish and callous. The sooner we can groom them for this dystopian future, the better off they'll be.
Among the findings of the studies that Reiner cites are that "mothers interacted vocally more often with their infant daughters than they did their infant sons," that "Spanish mothers were more likely to use emotional words and emotional topics when speaking with their 4-year-old daughters than with their 4-year-old sons," that "fathers . . . sing and smile more to their daughters," and that, "[a]fter visits to the emergency room for accidental injuries . . . parents of both genders talk differently to sons than they do to daughters."
Reiner also highlights the work of the masculine-studies researcher, Michael Kimmel, who "maintains that 'the traditional liberal arts curriculum is seen as feminizing by boys.'" Reiner's observations during his own 20-plus years of teaching back this up:
Nowhere is this truer than in English classes where . . . boys and young men police each other when other guys display overt interest in literature or creative writing assignments. Typically, nonfiction reading and writing passes muster because it poses little threat for boys. But literary fiction, and especially poetry, are mediums to fear. Why? They're the language of emotional exposure, purported feminine "weakness" - the very thing our scripting has taught them to avoid at best, suppress, at worst.
Gender policing that reinforces masculinity (and that teaches boys and men to fear being seen as feminine) comes from all sides, not just family or schoolmates. This continues into adulthood. Reiner takes up this thread:
Women often say they want men to be emotionally transparent with them. But as the vulnerability and shame expert Brené Brown reveals in her book, "Daring Greatly," many grow uneasy or even recoil if men take them up on their offer.
I can attest even to this from my personal experience. When I was in my mid-20s, I was speaking with my then girlfriend about some very serious problems I was having in my life. I had become somewhat stuck in a kind of feedback loop of failure, fear, despair and paralysis. I was so upset, in fact, during this one conversation, that my emotions got the better of me and I began to cry. This was too much for my girlfriend. She grew impatient and intolerant and told me to "stop being so mushy." In other words, "Man up!"
Circling back to how men are expected to communicate verbally as opposed, specifically, to how they are expected to keep their emotions in check (although, of course, the two are closely related), Reiner cites yet another study that
found that college-aged female respondents considered men more attractive if they used shorter words and sentences and spoke less. This finding seems to jibe with Dr. Brown's research, suggesting that the less men risk emoting verbally, the more appealing they appear.
- And the less feminine they appear.
A 2018 Harvard Business Review article ("How Men Get Penalized for Straying from Masculine Norms") concluded that "[r]esearch demonstrates that much the same way women face unfair backlash effects for being more masculine or not feminine enough, men similarly face backlash for not adhering to masculine gender stereotypes." This article cites numerous studies that delved into a half dozen specific categories of behavior including "Showing vulnerability, "Being nicer," "Displaying empathy," "Expressing sadness," Exhibiting modesty" and, of all things, "Being a feminist or feminine." In every one of these categories it was found that men were penalized in some way (or, in one of the categories, simply not given credit that was given to women) when they exhibited these behaviors.
The upshot of all this is that the reason boys and men fear being seen as feminine is because they are socialized from birth to conform to masculine gender and heteronormativity. The process of instilling masculinity in boys begins when they are neonates and it continues throughout childhood, adolescence and well into adulthood. In adolescence and adulthood, the penalties imposed on boys and men, respectively, for being seen as feminine can be severe, ranging from bullying to ostracism to rejection and ridicule to violence and death. Boys learn at a very early age, therefore, that few things are worse than being seen as feminine. The fear of being seen as feminine - the heavy psychological baggage that boys and men carry with them throughout much of their lives - is the result of this conditioning and comes from external influences that include both negative and positive punishments. It does not, as Farida D. suggests, come from their guilty consciences. The fear of being seen as feminine exists because all men - straight and gay (and transwomen, too, since, in the eyes of their persecutors, transwomen are effeminate men) know how they will be treated by society if they are seen as feminine and not because they fear being treated the way they treat women.
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