I became conscious of gender in a societal sense at seventeen when I was first introduced to the Bechdel Test which asks the listener to think of a time in a movie or book when two named women are speaking about something other than men. At the time, I was reading The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. Though maybe I was drawn to the book because I had delusions of living adrenally running from bulls or being “hard boiled” in the day time, I began to make passing mental annotations about the movies and literature I was ingesting, whether Catherine Barkley of A Farewell To Arms or Fitzgerald’s Daisy Buchanan modeled the humanity I saw in my mother or if they were simply a feminine counterpoint to emphasize the male protagonist’s masculinity. Not
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In the mid-1980’s, the AIDS epidemic continued to claim more lives, particularly those of gay men, many of whom traveled to the West Coast for a chance at living in a more accepting atmosphere. My mom was working at UC San Diego at the time and frequently recounts her observations of the men who died either alone or in the hands of similarly dying partners. Meanwhile on the other side of America, their families either didn’t know or had long disowned them and didn’t care. This subversion of traditional masculinity was reason enough for Reagan Administration and many others to reject their humanity as they slowly died in the tens of thousands (La Ganga 2016). While society certainly favors masculinity over femininity, my mother saw the disgust it held for gay men. True, Christian influences much homophobia in America, but even outside of the Bible Belt there is a societal unease with homosexuality that appears to relate to gay men’s aberrant approach to gender roles. They were “gifted” masculinity, but rather than living up to expectations and having sex with women, they engaged with the traditionally feminine role of having sex with men. Learning about the societal view of gender with my mother allowed me to better contextualize the central theme of masculinity in the seemingly disparate patterns of social values surrounding sexuality and …show more content…
Though some of these injuries could have been attributed to the normal practice of fighting, many stemmed from the “spine” that my legal father told me to grow that compelled me to choose blacking out over yielding, to accept fights from people legitimately a foot taller, to feeling a sense of accomplishment when delivering a concussion to someone. This understanding of masculinity presents unrealistic obligations to
In the mid-1980’s, the AIDS epidemic continued to claim more lives, particularly those of gay men, many of whom traveled to the West Coast for a chance at living in a more accepting atmosphere. My mom was working at UC San Diego at the time and frequently recounts her observations of the men who died either alone or in the hands of similarly dying partners. Meanwhile on the other side of America, their families either didn’t know or had long disowned them and didn’t care. This subversion of traditional masculinity was reason enough for Reagan Administration and many others to reject their humanity as they slowly died in the tens of thousands (La Ganga 2016). While society certainly favors masculinity over femininity, my mother saw the disgust it held for gay men. True, Christian influences much homophobia in America, but even outside of the Bible Belt there is a societal unease with homosexuality that appears to relate to gay men’s aberrant approach to gender roles. They were “gifted” masculinity, but rather than living up to expectations and having sex with women, they engaged with the traditionally feminine role of having sex with men. Learning about the societal view of gender with my mother allowed me to better contextualize the central theme of masculinity in the seemingly disparate patterns of social values surrounding sexuality and …show more content…
Though some of these injuries could have been attributed to the normal practice of fighting, many stemmed from the “spine” that my legal father told me to grow that compelled me to choose blacking out over yielding, to accept fights from people legitimately a foot taller, to feeling a sense of accomplishment when delivering a concussion to someone. This understanding of masculinity presents unrealistic obligations to