On Identity and Masculinity:

Water’s article on ethnic/immigrant identification was everything short of eye-opening or mind-blowing. It was interesting and easy to read, but I didn’t feel like I really learned anything by it. It seemed like it was just spewing common sense. If identifying as a an immigrant or as an American benefited an individual, they identified appropriately. The benefits of identifying covered getting a good career to just getting along in school. I will say that I found it interesting that Waters explains how much parents strictly regulate their daughters’ lives, because (and Waters admits this by the end), the boys have it much harder, both in employment and social events.

As teachers, it seems important to remain sensitive to social pressures to conform. There’s a gazillion (I rounded up) posters on being an individual in my school, but you never see the poster discussing the benefits of “fitting” into an identity. While I think it’s important to convey the importance of being an individual, and not doing something or behaving in some way to fit a category or group, I recognize that beyond the pressures of “fitting in” there are also benefits. I am unsure of how to use this to my students’ advantages, though.

Moving on, I found Kimmel’s piece on masculinity very interesting. I felt it really tied in with the Gilligan reading, in regards towards males creating ourselves as the complement, or antithesis of females, in particular, of our mothers. I also found it interesting how the history of American masculinity presents itself as not just the opposite of “sissy’s,” but also of different races given the time period. I was taken aback by Italians and Irish not being considered “manly,” however, that could be because my scope of masculinity has been narrowed down to the opposite of femininity. Qualities that I think partially represent a decent human being (modesty, cleanliness, politeness, and neatness), were looked on as of feminine demand, and therefore, not masculine. Not only must we be set apart from females, any and all valid perspectives of and demands on our character must come from the manliest of manly men (no girls allowed). The Waters article also touches on how the inability to be like your group (race, ethnicity, etc) resulted in an un-masculine view: being perceived as homosexual. To combat all of this, Kimmel proposes that the very idea of masculinity is “homosocial,” which, shockingly, looks a lot like the word “homosexual.” We are now eliminating certain types of men from being “masculine.” Kimmel goes further to show all of the groups that have been used as the counterpoint for masculinity, many of which make up a great portion of the men in the United States (I may have failed to say that the views presented above tend to reflect a US masculinity, not a global masculinity). So... 1% of men get 80% of the masculinity. I am the 99%.

On a disturbing note, Kimmel works through the Freudian concept of Oedipal growth, mentioning how the son eventually sees himself as a continuation of masculine tradition by identifying himself in terms of his father. That in itself is not disturbing, but I am left wondering about the children of abusive, negligent, or inconsistent parents. We know that violence begets violence, and abused children learn the nature of abuse, and eventually execute it. What about negligent parents, or the child who moves his way through a foster system, having multiple parents. Do they identify with what little experience they have with the father, or are they given some divine gift to define themselves on their own terms?

In brief, I think it is important for adults, especially public figures like teachers, to represent the positive characteristics of humanity, to be examples of what we’d want for our students, children, and neighbors’ children to identify as. More-so, Kimmel places a large burden on men’s shoulders: we will always look for approval of our masculinity from other men. To that point, we (men) need to be (and show that we are) proud of who are, as we are, and are not looking for approval on our character (beyond internal approval, of course). The terms that define masculinity have changed, and are most likely going to change again. As teachers, it is our duty to society to instill the positive kind of thinking in our students that will prevent masculinity from being a way of denying a culture or walk of life. As a male teacher, it is equally pertinent that we do not allow masculinity to be an excuse for a student to be a bully, or for another student to feel inadequate. We must be pillars of what masculinity should (and could!) be.