Writing about my response to the normative gender codes as a high school student requires me to think about how I was raised, the expectations within my family, and the influences that shaped these perceptions as I moved across the country, living in 6 states by 9th grade and attending 9 schools.
I grew up in a family characterized by a strong emphasis on a structure that gained its strength from Christian and military values. My parents were high school sweethearts from a very small suburban town where community was as important part of childhood development. My father was a disciplined self made man who attended the United States Naval Academy and received a degree in Aerospace engineering. After his serving in the military he took on a self proclaimed role as an entrepreneur and started several successful companies.
My parents raised me with a heavy emphasis on the bible and the values it preached. These conveniently coincided with the discipline that characterized the military. These often clashed with the cultural norms in public schools I attended. Because I attended so many schools and moved so often, I rooted myself in the values that my parents actively tried instilling in me. In order to fit in and operate in new environments however, I was forced to mold myself to the cultural norms that I was in. I was never able to give myself steadfast generic identity that I was able to share with a larger group of people.
My mother, coming from humble beginnings, raised me to be extremely aware of how I presented myself to others and how I was accepted. This caused me to place a disproportionate emphasis on conforming, however superficially, to the accepted norms.
While I was just like any other adolescent developing through his teen years, I was an atypical student in the sense of the barriers and obstacles I had to overcome in spite of fitting in. I had lost some friends to suicide in middle school and early high school, so as a result my focus was coping with personal guilt by placing heavy emphasis on finding intimate meaningful friendships. Whether I was trying to replace the friends I lost and re-instill feelings of legitimacy as an individual is debatable, but I did experience an identity crisis that brought me to try on many subcultures and change friends rapidly.
Going back to the normative gender roles—While I was submersed in friends who were living out cultural gender norms, and while this no doubt had an impact on my behavior with them, I always retained a degree of conviction towards the values that I was raised on. These values of the males role included adventure, security, self sustenance, power, competition, service, success, winning, being a gentlemen, being patriotic for ones country, and treating women not as objects of sexual desire, but as holy temples that were consecrated by God to serve and support men in a mutually respectful relationship that revolved around the development of their whole persons. Women were always to be treated with the utmost respect. Etiquette was at a premium when interacting with them.
This contradicted the message my peers were sending me about women as purely objects of sexual gratification. Because of my ability to adapt socially on a whim, I was able to fulfill any of the peer expectations I found myself against. In high school I felt like I needed to have sex in order to legitimize myself as a man. I felt guilty but found myself experimenting with relationships with this end in mind. This caused immense dissonance as the conflicting expectations I was trying to fulfill. On one hand I was to treat women as someone’s sister, daughter , or future wife. On the other, they were purely used for sexual gratification with little regard to their feelings, which were seen as insignificant. After this unfulfilling stint in which I felt horrible for hurting girls I began to look for relationships that would repair the guilt I was feeling. I had no desire for sex so as a result I was friends with many girls. This was seen as feminine. I was often teased for being gay for not having the desire to sleep with all the girls that I had built relationships with.
Regarding physicality—I was raised to be physical superior. My father was an athlete and from a young age was taught the importance of being the best at everything I did psychically. My father was very hard on me in these points. I remember feeling like a very bad son for not out performing my peers. When I wanted to be a kid, I was expected to be an achiever.
As I grew, my peers caught on to this physical superior mentality. I was often picked on for various reasons by the older kids. In hindsight I see that they were threatened by my success in sports and ability to adapt to friends. My father resolved this by helping me beef up. I wanted to be respected like the big kids. I wanted to be muscular and dominant so that when I walked into a room everyone knew that I was the alpha male. I began lifting in the seventh grade and gained immediate respect from the males, although I still struggled with the much older kids because the years of development I was trying to make up for my lifting in order to match of supersede them.
More to write but I’ll save it for later.
William Dare 