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"I'm Not Going to Be a Girl": Masculinity and Emotions in Boys' Friendships and Peer Groups Matthew Oransky and Jeanne Marecek Journal of Adolescent Research 2009; 24; 218 DOI: 10.1177/0743558408329951

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“I’m Not Going to Be a Girl” Masculinity and Emotions in Boys’ Friendships and Peer Groups

Journal of Adolescent Research Volume 24 Number 2 March 2009 218-241 © 2009 Sage Publications 10.1177/0743558408329951 http://jar.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Matthew Oransky Fordham University, Bronx, New York

Jeanne Marecek Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania

This study examines the peer relations and emotion practices of adolescent boys in light of their expectations and assumptions about masculinity. We carried out semistructured interviews with middle-class and upper-middle-class boys from an independent high school. The boys reported that they assiduously avoided displays of emotional or physical pain and disparaged such displays in other boys. They tied tough, stoic self-presentations to manliness; moreover, they said that their peer groups derided expressions of hurt and worry and of care and concern for others as “gay” or “girly.” Boys described interactions with boys as centering on taunting, mocking, and “shoving around.” Although these practices were hurtful, boys valued them as means of bolstering one another’s masculinity. The study points out that securing masculinity demands ongoing efforts from boys and their peers. Moreover, it points to feeling rules and emotion practices as important constituents of young White masculinities. Keywords: masculinity; friendship; emotion; adolescence; peer group; gender

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peaking of boys in his high school, Nick, a 15-year-old sophomore, remarked as follows:

The only way they can connect is to drink or get rowdy or break things. . . . It’s like, “Wow, we can break things and get rowdy and make fun of people; we’re pretty macho; we’re pretty cool.”

Authors’ Note: Please address all correspondence to Matthew Oransky, Fordham University, 441 East Fordham Road, Bronx, NY 10458; e-mail: [email protected].

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Oransky, Marecek / Masculinity and Emotions in Boys’ Friendships

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Articulate and insightful, Nick (a pseudonym, as are all other names given to research participants) takes a critical stance on his peers’ activities. In this article, we position ourselves much like Nick: as outside observers who take stock of, give voice to, and interpret the meanings that boys assign to their friendships and interactions with one another. In our analysis of indepth interviews with adolescent boys, we examine boys’ emotion practices, friendships, and peer relations in light of the ideals and expectations of heterosexual masculinity in their peer culture. Many researchers have noted lack of emotional intimacy and limited expressions of care and concern for one another among teenage boys in the United States. Compared with girls, teenage boys have reported less intimacy, affection, and companionship in their same-sex friendships; moreover, boys say that they disclose less about themselves in their friendships than girls do (Lempers & Clark-Lempers, 1993; Rose & Rudolph, 2006). Furthermore, researchers have reported that friendships between boys provide them with autonomy and status, not social support, empathy, or nurturance (Buhrmester, 1996; Lempers & Clark-Lempers, 1993; Parker & Asher, 1993). In addition, boys reported that they were unlikely to seek out emotional support from or share unhappy feelings with one another (Buhrmester, 1996; Rose & Rudolph, 2006). When asked to evaluate what contributes to successful friendships among their peers, boys placed less weight than girls on qualities such as being nurturant and considering another’s feelings (Jarvinen & Nicholls, 1996). Boys’ emotion practices constitute a major target of the ongoing nationwide concern over what has been termed the “crisis” of contemporary boyhood. Indeed, pop psych offerings such as Real Boys (Pollack, 1998) portray emotional isolation and so-called emotional illiteracy as the linchpins of that crisis. According to “boys-in-crisis” writers, a stringent “Boy Code” compels boys to hide their feelings and weaknesses so that their “real selves” are kept secret (Pollack, 1998, p. 6). Spokespersons for the boys-in-crisis movement urge parents, teachers, and psychotherapists to rescue boys from a societal “gender straitjacket” that prohibits emotional intimacy and expression of troubled feelings (Pollack, 1998, p. 6; Pollack, 2006). Conventional ideals of masculinity, which Kindlon & Thompson (1999, p. 78) term the Big Impossible, are held partly responsible for a broad swath of problems— school failure, aggression, violent outbursts, low self-esteem, and depression (Kimmel & Mahler, 2003; Pollack, 2006; Kindlon & Thompson, 1999). Boys-in-crisis writers also hold that the adults who socialize boys are responsible for lacing them into this gender straitjacket. Kindlon & Thompson, for example, hold that early childhood experiences, marked by


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“destructive emotional training,” result in boys’ “emotional illiteracy,” an inability to understand emotions and engage in close relationships (Kindlon & Thompson, 1999, p. 5). Pollack has argued that from early childhood, boys are trained—indeed “forced” and “pushed”—by parents, teachers, mentors, coaches, and other adults to avoid emotional intimacy and selfdisclosure (Pollack, 2000, p. 9). In these accounts, the early experiences provided by adults leave indelible traces on boys’ personalities. As adolescents, boys, they say, are incapable of establishing or partaking in emotionally meaningful relationships, and they habitually hide their troubles, feelings, and worries beneath tough poses (Pollack, 1998, 2006; Kindlon & Thompson, 1999). A good deal of evidence supports the claim that at least for White boys in the United States, contemporary young masculinities disallow expression of feelings, intimate friendships between boys, and open acknowledgment and expression of vulnerability and hurt. In our view, however, the causal account offered by the boys-in-crisis writers is flawed in a number of ways. We take issue with the notion of a single overarching regulatory ideal (e.g., a Boy Code or cultural straitjacket) because this notion does not readily account for the diversity among boys. If all boys were confined within the same gender straitjacket, boys’ behavior would be far more uniform than it is. Studies of adolescent boys in Britain have shown that boys differed in their uptake of the ideals of masculinity, even though they had similar cultural and social backgrounds. Some boys drew on conventional norms of emotional “hardness” to fashion their identities, but others, who described themselves as “progressive” or “modern,” did not (Edley & Wetherell, 1997; Gough, 2001). In another study of boys in London, the researchers observed that boys shifted between stoic, tough postures and more expressive and emotionally vulnerable stances in accord with the demands of different social situations (Phoenix, Frosh, & Pattman, 2003). Furthermore, Reichert (2001), who studied boys in a private school in the eastern United States, observed that although the boys usually were emotionally disengaged from one another, they expressed troubled emotions and displayed their vulnerabilities to one another when in a “peer counseling” context. In reviews of the literature on masculinity, Connell has pointed out that multiple definitions of masculinity exist, oftentimes within the same localized community (Connell, 1996; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Thus, the notion that boys adhere to (or are imprisoned by) an unchanging, monolithic regulatory ideal (as terms like straitjacket and Boy Code imply) does not accord with direct observations of boys’ behavior or with their own accounts of their experiences.



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The idea of cultural norms imposed through top-down socialization also cannot readily account for many practices that are widespread among teenage boys but sharply at odds with dominant cultural values. These include homophobic mocking (Martino, 1999; Nayak & Kehily, 1996; Phoenix et al., 2003); bullying and hazing (Phillips, 2007; Stoudt, 2006); petty vandalism (such as spray-painting graffiti); and sexual harassment and crude heterosexual performances, such as groping girls (Eder, Evans, & Parker, 1995; Franklin, 2004; Larkin & Popaleni, 1994). Even if teachers, parents, coaches, or other adults might sometimes tacitly condone homophobia and sexism, we believe that very few endorse these practices outright. The notion of a gender straitjacket also cannot readily account for the fluidity of individual boys’ behavior. If it were true that boys internalized a set of rigid norms that were imposed on them at an early age, then we would expect gendered aspects of behavior to remain constant over the course of boys’ lives. This is not what researchers have found. For example, in a longitudinal study of boys from low-income ethnic minority backgrounds, Niobe Way (1997) found considerable change over time in boys’ emotion practices and friendship patterns. Boys who had described emotionally intimate and trusting relationships with other boys in early adolescence described relationships lacking in emotional intimacy and trust in the latter years of high school. Thus far, we have described empirical data on boys’ lives that do not square with the boys-in-crisis account of masculinity. Now, we turn to problematic aspects of the epistemological and theoretical frameworks of much conventional psychological research on boys’ gendered behavior. Boys-in-crisis writers, for example, hold that boys passively absorb totalizing messages from the culture and its socializing agents and then behave in accord with those messages. To use Harold Garfinkel’s famous phrase, such accounts figure boys as “cultural dopes,” that is, as actors who can do only what cultural roles or scripts mandate (Garfinkel, 1967/1984, p. 68). A variety of approaches, such as ethnomethodology, sociolinguistics, discursive psychology, and social constructionism, have countered this view of people as cultural dopes. In 1987, the ethnomethodologists West and Zimmerman proposed a powerful and farreaching reformulation of gender. Key to the reformulation is the idea that gender is not a set of fixed personal attributes; rather, it is a matter of active and ongoing social negotiation, which West and Zimmerman call “doing gender.” Doing gender consists of engaging in specific practices with the knowledge of or “in light of normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for one’s sex category” (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p. 127). In the ethnomethodological perspective, an individual’s gender is not settled or


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secure. Instead, individuals continually work to maintain gendered selfpresentations that are suitable to specific contexts and that accomplish relational goals (such as fitting in with or impressing others). This line of theorizing does not deny the existence of cultural codes of masculinity and femininity; however, it shifts attention to how people actively engage with those codes. At some times, they may conform to them, but at other times, they may co-opt, challenge, ironize, or improvise on them. Within this framework, the ways in which individuals interpret, adopt, challenge, take on, and give life to idealized conceptions of gender become important foci for analysis. In line with this reformulation of gender, we sought to learn about boys’ ways of “doing masculinity,” particularly in regard to friendship and emotion practices. We collected boys’ accounts of emotional disclosure, management of emotional distress, intimate friendships with other boys, and other forms of peer interaction. Our goal was to examine the meanings that boys give to expressions of distress, worry, vulnerability, and concern for others. Furthermore, we examined the role of boys’ peer groups in regulating boys’ emotion practices and relations with other boys. Three broad questions guided our analysis of the boys’ interviews: 1. What meanings do boys give to emotional expression, disclosure of vulnerabilities and troubles to others boys, and providing support and comfort in boy-boy friendships? 2. How do boys describe their practices with respect to expressing emotional vulnerability and offering emotional support to male friends in the light of the expectations and ideals that they hold about masculinity? 3. What discourses about masculinity, sexual orientation, and gender difference do boys draw on when they give accounts of their friendships and other peer group activities?

Method We engaged young adolescent boys in private, in-depth conversations about their everyday friendships, peer group activities, and ways of managing personal difficulties and upsetting occurrences. The boys were students at an independent preparatory high school in the northeast United States. Twenty-three boys—19 sophomores and 4 freshmen—took part in the study. Fourteen of the boys were 15, 2 had not yet turned 15, and 7 had recently turned 16. Because the boys were so similar in age, we did not expect to find age-related differences, nor did any emerge. (Note that



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Way’s, 1997, report of age-related changes in boys’ friendships is based on a much wider age span.) Seventeen of the boys were White, 3 were East Asian, 2 were African American, and 1 was Latino. All but three of the boys came from upper-middle-class families. This group of boys was representative of the overall school population in terms of race/ethnicity and economic status. We acknowledge the relative homogeneity of the group and do not propose to generalize our findings to other populations.

Procedure We employed a student to help us recruit potential participants. The recruiter made the initial contact with prospective participants. If a boy was interested in taking part in an interview, we sent his parents a letter that described the study and asked permission for their son to take part. All the parents gave permission. At the beginning of the interview, the interviewer provided the boy with a fuller description of the study and obtained his written consent before the interview began. Boys were interviewed in private at school (65%) or at home (35%), according to their preference. The interviews ranged from 40 to 75 minutes in length, with most lasting for about 60 minutes. Thematic findings did not differ according to interview length; rather, longer interviews were generally characterized by more descriptive and detailed answers. Likewise, no differences were found between interviews conducted in school and at home. All interviews were tape-recorded. Participants were paid 10 dollars at the conclusion of the interview. MO, a White male in his early 20s conducted all the interviews.

Interview Guide The interview included questions about a boy’s peer group, his friendships, his ways of handling emotional difficulties, his ideas about masculinity, and his perceptions of other boys’ ideas about masculinity. The interviewer kept the focus on actual experiences rather than on abstractions or hypothetical situations. The interview questions were open-ended. Probes (e.g., “Can you tell me more about that?”) and follow-up questions were used to encourage boys to elaborate on their responses. Boys were asked to “think of a few specific friends” in answering most of the questions. The topics that were discussed in the interview were the following: (a) typical friendship interactions (e.g., When you are with your friends, what kinds of things do you do? Talk about?); (b) feelings of being close to a friend (e.g., Can you tell me about a specific incident in which you felt close to someone? Do you feel as if you have someone you can confide in?); (c) easing another boy’s Downloaded from http://jar.sagepub.com at SWARTHMORE COLLEGE LIBRARY on October 4, 2009

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emotional distress (e.g., Can you think of a time when you saw a friend worried or concerned or upset about something? What did you do?); (d) reactions to and interpretations of emotional intimacy between two boys (e.g., How do you think that other boys might react to seeing two boys sharing their feelings and/or comforting each other?); and (e) conceptions of what it means to be macho (e.g., Can you describe a situation in which someone would be seen as macho?). The interviews began with a series of relatively superficial questions (e.g., “What year are you in school?” “What kind of activities do you do in and out of school?”) so that participants could gain a level of comfort before delving into more personal topics. The complete interview guide is available from the authors. The interviews were transcribed verbatim by a professional transcriber. MO then annotated the transcripts, adding notes about body language, emphasized words or phrases, evidence of sarcasm and humor, and also physical descriptors of boys where it seemed important.

Analytic Approach The transcripts were analyzed using a systematic approach to thematic analysis developed by Auerbach and Silverstein (2003). Drawing on principles of grounded theory, this inductive approach aims to derive theoretical constructs by identifying recurring themes (or repeating ideas) in participants’ talk. The two investigators independently read through all the transcripts several times. Each identified several potential avenues of exploration. After discussion, the three questions noted above were selected for this analysis. Each investigator then independently made note of the passages that were relevant to each of the three questions; these two sets of passages were compiled. For each set of passages, MO systematically compared the relevant passages with one another, grouping those with similar content together. Decisions about groupings were cross-checked by JM; any differences in interpretation were discussed until agreement was reached. The resulting groupings of repeating ideas were consolidated into themes. Themes were given names, using language close to the respondents’ words. Decisions about themes and names were initially made by MO and cross-checked by JM.

Results In what follows, we present seven interlinked themes that emerged from the analysis, with illustrative passages from the interviews. In the interest of readability, we have removed some dysfluencies (such as “ like,” “um,”



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“you know,” and false starts) from the quoted material. Words and phrases are italicized to indicate the respondents’ emphases. We first describe boys’ descriptions of their self-presentations and emotion practices (Themes 1 and 2). Next, we discuss strategies that boys described using to regulate one another’s emotional expression (Themes 3 and 4). Then, we describe the positive meanings and motives that boys gave to the regulating practices (e.g., teasing, taunting, and mockery) they both initiated and received (Themes 5 and 6). Finally, we describe the negative meanings that some boys gave to these same practices (Theme 7).

Theme 1. “You have to act like a tough guy. You know, show no feelings”: Masculinity requires Acting Invulnerable and Stoic To be seen as macho, boys must show no feelings. The boys emphasized that acting stoic, tough, and unfeeling is vital to a masculine image. Indeed, out of the 23 boys interviewed, 21 said that to appear manly or macho in the eyes of their male peers, boys must hide their feelings and appear stoic. One boy, Gabe, explained this: Gabe: [Sharing feelings is] a rare occurrence in general. I’ve noticed that in high school, it doesn’t happen very often. . . . I think it might have to do with guys and their whole fear with trying to—they want to be macho and they want to kind of show the strong image. And they’re afraid of hurting that reputation.

Furthermore, when the boys were asked, “What should someone do if they want to seem macho?” typical answers centered on hiding feelings: Nathan: Not to care about emotions or other people’s emotions or even your own. I think it’s all, like, suppressing emotions. Todd: I’d say, basically, [you] have to act like a tough guy. You know, show no feelings. Darren: People, I would suppose, want to act tough, or whatever you want to call it, and not express their feelings openly.

As we discuss next, boys marked displays of troubled feelings or vulnerability as gay and girly, characteristics that most of them viewed as not only antithetical to being “manly” but also highly undesirable. Boys expect that displays of feeling will mark them as “gay” or “girly.” In all, 22 of the 23 boys expressed the view that emotional expression,


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openness, and vulnerability would mark them as gay or girly, terms that seemed more or less interchangeable. Both labels were considered insulting and stigmatizing; boys reported that they strenuously avoided behavior that might earn such labels. Most of the boys said that in their peer groups, being strong or macho and being gay or girly were viewed as mutually exclusive. “There’s no middle ground to people,” one boy said. “You’re either strong or you’re gay. There’s nothing in between.” Josh: I think a lot of [boys] think that the more open they are, they’re going to be called gay or girl. And I think a lot of people are scared of that. Todd: I don’t know if they would [share feelings], but if they did, they’d definitely be called gay or fag or something like that. Charlie: There’s a whole bunch of kids who just think it’s not cool [for boys to show that they are upset] because you’d be gay or you’d be homo or whatever.

Boys’ answers to the question “How do you think other boys might react to seeing two boys sharing their feelings with or comforting one another?” were particularly telling: 21 of the 23 boys interviewed said that the boys would be called gay, fag, or queer by other boys. Gabe: They’d immediately start passing out rumors that it’s a gay couple. Todd: They wouldn’t quite know what to think, so they’d probably make fun of the guys. . . . They’d probably be called fags. Heath: Probably call them a fag.

In sum, boys said that among members of their peer group, certain emotion practices were tightly linked to masculinity, which in turn was tightly linked to heterosexuality. Whatever a boy’s private opinion, he believed that the members of his peer group held stoicism and the concealment of distress and vulnerability to be crucial attributes of heterosexual masculinity. Boys who ventured outside the peer group norm would be labeled as gay.

Theme 2. “Guys aren’t that comfortable opening up most of the time:” Boys Said They Avoided Disclosing Feelings Nearly all the boys said that they did not disclose negative feelings and problems to other boys. For instance, in answer to the question “Do boys talk about their fears and worries with each other?” 20 of the 23 boys said “no.” Moreover, many said that disclosing feelings would lead to ridicule.



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Boys said that they chose to keep their emotions private. The interviews contained very few accounts of boys helping one another with personal struggles or offering emotional support. When asked what they would do if they saw that a friend was upset (or what a friend would do if the boy himself were upset), only 4 of the 23 boys furnished a scenario in which two boys delved into the problem with each other. The other boys spoke about keeping such struggles and feelings to themselves: Harry: I don’t really go into my personal life with my friends, like really deep into that a whole lot with pretty much anyone. I usually keep that to myself. Charlie: I don’t really go so deep into myself. I just like hanging out with my friends and having a good time. Darren: [If] there’s something that’s depressing, which I know it’s there, I’m not going to try and talk about it. . . . I’ll try to hide it away.

Boys say they handle distressing situations and feelings “on their own.” Heath: [If I am upset,] I just won’t tell somebody because I’ll figure it out on my own or just rationalize it on my own until I think to myself, “It’s not a big deal.” Albert: I usually try to take care of things on my own.

Boys say they hide their feelings to forestall ridicule. Boys strongly emphasized that a public display of hurt or upset feelings would be met with ridicule from their peer groups. Harry, for example, anticipated how “idiotic” he would sound if he were to disclose his feelings: Harry: Fear of mocking [laughs] obviously. There’s always stuff you don’t want to talk about, because you know you’re going to sound like an idiot. Usually I just stop.

As we discuss next, nearly all the boys portrayed “they” (i.e., an unspecified collectivity of other boys) as taunting or making fun of a boy’s display of feelings.

Theme 3. “There’s going to be someone who’s going to make fun of you:” How Boys Regulate One Another’s Emotion Practices Boys strongly emphasized that public displays of feelings would be ridiculed by male peer groups. They reported that emotional sharing within


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boy-boy dyads was also discouraged and disdained. Indeed overall, 22 of the 23 boys said that fears of being ridiculed, made fun of, or mocked prevented them (and/or boys in general) from openly discussing fears, worries, and other emotions with one another. Boys say that other boys will taunt them for speaking about their feelings in public. Ray: They might laugh at you [if you express a fear]. They might taunt you. They might just really just throw it away. They would think that it would be absurd to have a fear of something. Heath: If you have something deep and personal [to share] . . . there’s going to be someone out there who’s really going to make fun of you. Tom: People don’t see [boys showing feelings] that often and they don’t know what to do when they do see it, so they just make fun of the person.

Boys say that other boys ridicule an open display of physical hurt or pain. Harry: If somebody fell and broke their leg and he started crying, . . . he’d probably get ridden about that. You know, mocked about that. I think there’s a certain grieving time that a person is allowed . . . if you overstep that [or] . . . you make too big of a deal out of [it], then you’re gonna get marked. . . . [You’re] going to get a bit of a stigma. Ray: Like, say, the football team, if you express a fear to them, they might be, like, it might be the big joke for the whole year. Charlie: I know that if you broke down crying in the hallway, you would just get ragged on all day, just ragged on.

The language that the boys used to describe how groups of boys regulated other boys’ expressions of emotion seems particularly telling. Words like marked and stigma describe singling someone out in a punitive and enduring way. Indeed, in Ray’s eyes, the fallout from a single display of fear could linger for an entire year. Given the social penalties for even a momentary lapse in a boy’s tough image, it is not surprising that boys avoid such lapses. Only in the most extreme circumstances did boys permit one another to show that they were upset. Sean: Some people think that it’s all right to be upset if a family member dies, but anything else, “You’re a pussy.” George: If it’s something major like maybe a death in the family, I don’t think they’d look upon it as being gay or queer or something.



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Phillip: I remember being scared for a week after September 11. [It] got me scared. And I guess I tried not to show it. . . . You don’t know how they’re [other boys] going to react. . . . When you say a certain thing, you don’t know how they’re going to react.

Feeling rules: Boys’ reactions to a friend who comes to them in distress. Boys anticipated that public ridicule would follow an open display of vulnerability. We also asked boys how they would respond to a private display of vulnerability or distress. We asked two questions: “How would you respond to a friend who came to you upset?” and “How would you want a friend to respond to you if you came to him upset?” In response to these questions, boys described several related practices. The prevailing theme was that boys’ distress should be ignored or made light of. Indeed, only 4 of the 23 boys advocated listening to or exploring a friend’s problem. The rest (19 of the 23) advocated variations on the practices exemplified below. • Tell him “It’s not a big deal.” Todd: “Why would you cry about that?” “It’s not a big deal, it doesn’t matter.” Max: “It’s not like you’ll die.” Harry: Say things along the lines like “Life goes on,” like “When you look back upon it, it won’t be such a big deal.” Because most of the time, people are just overreacting to certain things and they need someone else to reassure them that it’s not really as big a deal as they think it is. • Tell him to “Just suck it up.” Heath: Just kind of suck it up, realize what happened and don’t do it again. Darren: “What the hell are you doing? Deal with it.” • Use jokes or activities to distract a boy’s attention from his problems. Mike: They just have a problem and we just end up joking about it. And it seems like they just forget about it for a minute or something like that. Phillip: I think it’s good to do some of the things that we do usually, like basketball or baseball or whatever. • Leave boys to themselves when they are upset. Sean: I’d leave him alone. Let him get over it himself

Several interlocking themes run through these recommendations and practices: Boys should ignore or suppress their distress; distraction is a good way to cope with distress; male friends who are upset should be either left alone or reprimanded to “get over it.” These practices embody and sustain prevailing norms of masculine toughness and they help constitute male-male friendships.


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Theme 4. “I’m not going to be a girl:” By Discrediting One Another’s Emotional Vulnerability, Boys Shore Up One Another’s Masculinity Boys said that they avoid making emotional disclosures to one another to avoid seeming unmasculine. They also described cutting off other boys’ emotional displays and intimate disclosures, so that interactions would stay within the bounds of acceptably masculine behavior. Sean, for example, whose best friend was upset by his parents’ divorce, explained, “I don’t comfort him because I’m not going to be a girl.” A girl, Sean said, would “sit on the situation until it’s over.” In contrast, Sean urged his friend to “just get over it or whatever. Like, move on.” Sean said that he expected and accepted similar treatment from his male friends. MO: Can you think of a time when a friend saw you worried or upset about something? Do you remember what he did? Sean: You know, the same thing. You know, “Just get over it.” Like “It’s over with.” “Just take it like a man.” “Move on.” MO: What do you do when you “take it like a man?” Sean: Well, I suck it up and just hope nothing bad happens.

Harry offered a similar point of view. For Harry, “a certain amount of stoicism can be an admirable quality.” He described his response to a friend who was upset about getting in trouble at school: I tried not to make a big deal out of it. . . . There wasn’t really a whole lot I could do. . . . I wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with it, because frankly, I don’t know, he was more concerned than I was. [I] kind of found it sort of humorous.

When Harry’s friends are upset, he says, he does not “feed them clichés about . . . how it’s going to turn out alright and that you’re here for them . . . I give very cold advice.” Like Sean, Harry reported receiving similar treatment from his friends: “For the most part, my friends tend to back off. And they just give [me] some space.” Harry gave this example: [I have] an [overdue] paper that . . . teachers don’t trust me to do it and I’ve been procrastinating a lot on it. I can’t really think of a rational way to complain about that to my friends . . . [They] would just yell at me for being so concerned about school.



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Harry further added that the risk of being called “pansy, wuss, or weak” prevented him and his friends from bringing up “emotional insecurities” with one another. “It’s the guy macho thing,” Harry said, “You’re not allowed to show pain so much.” In summary, many boys—18 of the 23 in total—described themselves and their friends as deliberately stripping painful emotional content and disclosure of troubles from their interactions with other boys to avoid being called girlish or gay.

Theme 5. “They didn’t let me fall apart:” Boys Interpret Regulatory Interactions as Helpful Boys described brusque reactions and lack of sympathy as simultaneously a way of acting masculine and a way of helping friends act masculine. Showing emotional distress or physical pain, caring about grades, and worrying about troubling situations were coded as unmasculine. Responding to displays of such feelings by ignoring or brusquely cutting them off enabled a distressed boy to keep up or repair his façade of masculinity. According to most boys (17 of 23), such brusque and unsympathetic acts were helpful. Todd: They helped. You know, they let me not just go down the tubes. They didn’t let me fall apart.

Speaking about how his friends “for the most part back off or tell me to pull it together when I’m upset,” Sean says, “I’m happy with how they deal with it, with their help.” Another boy, Charlie, gave an even clearer picture of how cold, brusque responses help a boy maintain face. MO: Would you ever say that you comfort your friends? Charlie: No. I mean, maybe comfort with humor. Like maybe make fun of your friends, you know, just to poke fun and just laugh at each other. But not console or whatever.

Charlie clarified his thoughts further. If he tried to talk to a friend about his own feelings, he explained, “They’d ask me what I was doing in the first place because if you need someone to console you, you get a girlfriend. Your friends are just . . . who you chill with.” For Charlie, boys’ friendships have no room for giving or receiving consolation. Either would be akin to acting like a girl, effectively “queering” the interaction.


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Mike described what happened when he told a friend that his cousin had had a near-fatal motorcycle accident. Mike: Before winter break, I was talking to my friend John. I was kind of upset because my cousin had got into an accident and so I didn’t really tell anybody that. And he [John] was just asking me what’s wrong. So I told him. And basically, he was just like, “Well, you should be glad that he’s still alive” and stuff like that. So that kind of encouragement.

John’s response, which implied that Mike was overly upset, effectively prevented Mike from continuing to voice his worries. Nonetheless, Mike described John’s response as “encouragement.” Another boy, George, gave an account of helping a friend whose pet dog had died: George: Well, I wouldn’t really put my hand on his shoulder and say, “It’s all right.” I would just say, “C’mon, let’s go eat a pizza” or “C’mon, let’s go play a video game.”

Boys interpreted these stories of disengaging from emotion-laden conversations as encouraging and helpful. By ignoring a friend’s distress, a boy enabled the friend to save face that would be lost were the friend to break down. By disallowing interactions that would be labeled as girly or gay, boys protected one another’s manliness. Indeed, both the initiators and the recipients described disengaging from emotional display and minimizing or discounting troubles as supportive and helpful.

Theme 6. “You’ve got to push them around:” Taunting Helps a Boy Become Tough According to the boys’ accounts, they mocked and poked fun at one another continually. In response to the question “What kinds of things do you do with your friends?” most boys said things such as “Make fun of one another” or “Everyone makes fun of their friends.” Just as many boys gave positive meanings to actions that instigated or maintained emotional disengagement, most boys (18 of 23) also offered positive meanings of teasing and taunting behaviors. Boys say teasing and making fun is playful, not malicious. Heath: We make fun of each other as kind of a social thing. Peter: We don’t do it seriously. When we do it, we, we know that we’re playing around, so we don’t take it seriously. Downloaded from http://jar.sagepub.com at SWARTHMORE COLLEGE LIBRARY on October 4, 2009


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Boys say that making fun of other boys is macho. Heath: One of the macho things actually is to make fun of somebody. Nick: It’s more macho to make fun of people than to do well in school.

“We push him around because we care.” Boys voiced the positive and supportive functions of pushing one another around. Consider Philip’s description of his relationship with Simon. Although he described Simon as his best friend and confidante, Philip told of another side to their relationship: Phillip: He’s a small kid. And sometimes we tease him and we push him around. And because he—sometimes he just doesn’t fight back—we try to tell him that he should probably try to fight back, try to defend himself. Because if you do defend yourself, you probably won’t get made fun of and called those things. . . . He could be called weak.

In sum, taunting and teasing seemed to play a dual role in establishing boys’ masculinity. These practices provided opportunities for boys to assert, test, and improve on their own and one another’s masculinities. That is, taunting, mocking, and shoving around other boys affirmed a boy’s masculine status. At the same time, reciprocating such behavior was necessary to sustain (or restore) the victim’s masculine status. (“You shouldn’t go around life getting shoved around all the time. You have to take a stand . . . You got to shove them around.”) This challenge and response, of course, sets in motion a self-perpetuating cycle. Stepping away from the cycle would mark a boy as, in the words of one boy, “somebody’s bitch.”

Theme 7. “Even boys have emotions:” The Costs of Stoic Self-Presentations Most boys spoke of the positive function of keeping emotional interchanges in their friendships and peer groups to a minimum. Such relational practices helped boys to enact a valued form of masculinity that required disengagement from their own and others’ feelings. However, 10 of the 23 boys also said that confiding feelings and worries could bring relief. For example, Harry: If you have problems, it’s better to share them with other people than just to keep them pent up inside you and not discuss them with anyone. George: I don’t like keeping things to myself. I think that people can do that if they’re used to it. . . . But I think you feel relief when you tell somebody something.


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Gary: I totally think [talking about fears and worries] is okay. I just don’t think it happens a whole lot, or not as much as it should. . . . It’s totally therapeutic and it totally helps you to talk about that stuff. But boys, I think, kind of adhere to the crazy macho thing and it ends up really hurting. Phillip: I think you really need someone to talk to. You don’t want to always have to shoulder everything yourself, keep everything in.

Some boys recounted specific incidents when fear of a negative reaction from their peers prevented them from disclosing their fears and feelings. Phillip: I remember being scared—September 11 got me scared. And I don’t know, I guess I tried not to show it. . . . I should have told someone. But I— wasn’t sure how they would react, so I just didn’t tell them. . . . I think I should have tried to talk about it. It might have made me feel better if I had. Albert: I think part of it was that I just couldn’t bring myself to talk about [being upset], because it’s just really not—because it’s really bad. And like I wanted to, but I just couldn’t make myself do it.

In summary, nearly all the boys readily identified peer sanctions against sharing weakness, fear, or worry. However, a fair number (roughly 44%) also identified positive personal consequences of sharing feelings in times of distress, such as gaining relief.

Discussion Against a backdrop of boys-in-crisis, we have examined the meanings that a particular group of boys—upper-middle-class, attending a private East Coast school, and mainly White—gave to emotion practices, boy-boy friendships, and peer group expectations and interactions. In what follows, we first briefly summarize the main findings, reflecting on how they compare with prior research. We then discuss several ways in which the boys’ accounts of their experiences depart from boys-in-crisis writings. Finally, we consider some questions the findings raise for future researchers. A central finding was that the boys organized their self-presentations, friendships, and many of their emotion practices in light of peer group expectations and assumptions about masculinity and what they identified as its antitheses, girlishness and homosexuality. For example, boys said that acting stoic, tough, and emotionally invulnerable was necessary for being regarded manly by their peers. “Soft” emotions such as fear, pain, and



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sadness, as well as outward expressions of distress or worry, marked a boy as gay or girly. This finding echoes other studies of teenage boys in the United States and the United Kingdom, which have found that boys’ efforts to establish their masculinity include assuming a stoic front (Chu, 2005; Martino, 1999) and avoiding actions that their peers associate with either femininity or homosexuality (Kimmel, 1994; Nayak & Kehily, 1996; Phoenix et al., 2003). Moreover, the boys said that they avoided expressing fears, worries, and personal struggles or even showing physical pain to other boys. Instead, they reported “sucking it up,” “block[ing] it out,” or “deal[ing] with it myself” when they faced a problem. They urged their peers to do the same and avoided seeking out or extending emotional support. These accounts, given by boys themselves, flesh out earlier findings that adolescent boys refrain from using friendships for emotional support, intimacy, or affection (Buhrmester, 1996; Lempers & Clark-Lempers, 1993; Parker & Asher, 1993; Rose & Rudolph, 2006). Another set of findings concerns the practices that peers use to regulate gendered behavior. School-based ethnographies have described how children “police” the boundaries of acceptable gendered behavior (e.g., Eder et al., 1995; Thorne, 1993). We add to these observations by focusing on the practices that adolescent boys used specifically to police boys’ displays of feelings, worries, and pain. The boys recounted regulatory practices that were both blatant and subtle. Blatant regulation included outright mockery and public humiliation of boys who “broke down” in public. They said that such boys were repeatedly picked on by other boys and jeered as girly, fags, or wimps. One boy asserted that a single display of emotional vulnerability would “mark” a boy as unmasculine and render him a target of ridicule for the remainder of the school year. Boys also reported more subtle ways in which boys’ emotion practices were regulated. These included making light of friends’ problems, joking about their fears, urging an upset friend to be stoical, and avoiding friends when they were upset. Such practices had the effect of expunging much meaningful emotional content from boy-boy friendships. Nearly every boy said that his peer group marked displays of emotional vulnerability or emotional intimacy as unmanly, using epithets such as “gay,” “girly,” “pussy,” and “fag.” No boy reported any other way of derogating such behavior, such as labeling it “childish” or “stupid” or invoking ethnic or class-based slurs. Other researchers have also reported that boys feel compelled to hide their emotions and worries from one another to avoid being ridiculed as wimpy, gay, or girlish (Frosh et al., 2003; Kimmel, 1994; Martino, 1999; Nayak & Kehily, 1996). An important question is whether


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such intense and concerted pressure to live up to gender expectations is specific to males or to individuals in particular age groups or social classes. Future research might address this question. In any case, for the boys in this study, the risk of being taunted as unmanly—as girly or gay—was very daunting. It was sufficiently potent, for example, to keep them from openly expressing sadness about the death of a family member, worry about a parent’s safety, or distress about the suicide of a friend.

Comparing Boys-in-Crisis Accounts With Boys’ Own Accounts The boys told us stories of brusque reactions to others’ problems, continual mocking of one another, and shoving one another around. These stories resembled the “culture of cruelty” described by boys-in-crisis writers (Kindlon & Thompson, 1999; Pollack, 1998). Those writers frame boys’ behavior in the individualist terms that are commonplace in U.S. psychology. They see cruel behavior as the expression of learned attitudes and values inculcated earlier in boys’ lives. Indeed, listening to the stories boys told about one another, we too were tempted to ascribe traits like callous, uncaring, mean-spirited, and bully to the boys. However, the boys’ accounts of cruel behavior differed from the boys-in-crisis account in two important ways. First, boys situated the behavior within their ongoing social relations and saw it as part of the joint project of maintaining and developing one another’s manliness. Second, the boys viewed brusque remarks and hurtful treatment as ultimately serving positive ends. Because they felt obliged to maintain an unconcerned and tough demeanor, they had to steer clear of both displaying emotion and expressing care for others. Dismissing a friend’s problems as “no big deal,” urging him to “just suck it up,” or distracting him with pizza helped him save face and stay within the bounds of masculinity. At the same time, dismissing or downplaying others’ problems maintained a boy’s posture of tough-minded unconcern. Such practices thus maintained the masculine appearance of both boys. Not surprisingly, then, many boys seemed to welcome them and to regard them as helpful. Although many boys spoke of the positive function of ignoring or disallowing emotional distress, some of those boys spoke of negative consequences as well. Compared with maintaining a stoic silence, they said, expressing emotional vulnerability would be easier, even “therapeutic.” Some boys remarked that girls had it “easier” because they were “allowed” to speak about their feelings and turn to friends for emotional support. In short, at least for some boys, the feeling rules imposed by their peers were



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double-edged. The emotion practices supported some goals and desires (e.g., affirming their masculinity) but at the expense of meeting other needs (e.g., gaining relief in times of emotional distress). Boys described teasing, mocking, taunting, and shoving other boys as natural and everyday parts of manly behavior. Ridicule and teasing were said to be means of both eliciting others’ masculinity and challenging it. The cycle of being taunted, “taking it like a man” (or not), and then taunting in return constituted a ritual whereby boys continually enacted and reaffirmed their masculinity. Here too, although an outsider might view these actions as cruel, boys themselves interpreted them as helping one another develop and strengthen their masculinity. The accounts given by the boys we studied raise doubts about other claims made by boys-in-crisis writers as well. Boys’ talk disputes the claim that adolescent boys are “emotionally illiterate,” that is, incapable of understanding and communicating emotions (Kindlon & Thompson, 1999). The boys we spoke to appeared quite skilled in reading others’ feelings: They knew when others were upset, hurt, or afraid, just as they could recount their own moments of terror, strain, or worry. Moreover, they were skilled in concealing their own feelings from others when necessary. Rather than having an impoverished emotional life or a deficiency in comprehending or empathizing with others’ feelings, boys made use of complex strategies regarding the display of their own feelings and shutting down unwanted or taboo communications from others. Like Chu (2005), we observe that adolescent boys possess a “breadth and depth” of emotional and relational abilities. The accounts boys gave of themselves also failed to support the idea that boys passively absorb a monolithic Boy Code from the culture at large. Rather, the boys actively engaged with various prescriptions and proscriptions regarding masculinity and emotion practices. Sometimes, they privately reinterpreted them or took exception to them and, once in a while, publicly voiced their protest. For example, while some boys asserted the point of view that it is unmanly for a boy to show emotions in public, most boys said they put on a show of manly stoicism as a means to avoid their peers’ disapproval. Some boys went further to criticize peer expectations as harmful (e.g., “They can really end up hurting a person.”). Only a few boys seemed to regard ideas about manly emotion practices as truths about male nature; boys did not make statements such as “Boys don’t have feelings.” Thus, contrary to the claim that boys are socialized to adhere to a monolithic, culturewide Boy Code, even the relatively homogeneous group of boys in this study did not share a uniform notion of what it means to be masculine.


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Our findings also accord more power to peers’ expectations than boys-incrisis writers have acknowledged. The boys seldom made reference to expectations held by parents, teachers, or other adults or to the ideals and values of adults. When they did so, it was usually to disparage adults’ ideas or admonitions. It is true that our interview emphasized peer interactions; nonetheless, it seems noteworthy that boys rarely mentioned any part that adults (including parents) played in setting, enforcing, or refuting expectations regarding masculine behavior. This suggests that boys-in-crisis writers may have overstated the role adults play as socializing agents. Rather than adults, it was peers who, by calling certain kinds of practices “fag,” “gay,” or “girly” or by urging their friends to “take it like a man,” constructed and enunciated expectations and assumptions about masculinity. Moreover, the boys described many aspects of peer-defined masculinity that were at odds with the norms of the culture at large and almost certainly not a product of parental training. These included overt defiance of adult authority and petty rule breaking (e.g., spray-painting graffiti, drinking, crank phone calls, and petty vandalism). In addition, although the boys anticipated attending elite colleges and having professional careers, they cultivated a public image of disengagement from school and disdain for academic achievement. Although we do not assert that peer group ideals of masculinity are the only ones that boys know or espouse, we urge theorists and researchers to give more attention to peer group ideals and expectations, as well as to the mechanisms by which they are enforced.

Questions for Future Research The boys’ accounts of manly behavior and acceptable masculinity offered a tantalizing glimpse of their ideologies of femininity. They expressed an array of ideas about ideal femininity and girls’ nature that seemed to rest on a stringent ideology of sexual difference and sharply divided social roles and obligations. For example, expressions of weakness and vulnerability were relegated to girls and women, as was the task of consoling and comforting others. Prosocial behavior was the domain of girls and women, whether engaging in pleasantries or promoting social justice. An important area of future research is boys’ gender ideology and how it shapes their interactions with girls and women. Another question is whether or not these stereotypical notions of femininity alter once boys embark on intimate relationships with girls. A third question is whether boys from more marginalized social groups would carve up the gendered world the way these boys did. For example, we wonder whether such boys would see social justice as a concern for women only. Indeed, there is reason to expect such ethnocultural differences; research on



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urban African American young men has demonstrated that their masculinity performances are intertwined with responses to societal oppression and marginalization (Cassidey & Stevenson, 2005; Majors & Billson, 1992). Another subject for future research concerns boys who challenge or critique peer ideals of masculinity. Some boys whom we interviewed seemed critical of their peers’ ideas about masculinity and critical of their homophobia. Like Nick, whose words appear at the beginning of this article, some boys dissociated themselves from their peers (e.g., by referring to the peer group as “they”). However, only three boys said that they openly resisted their peer groups’ expectations or stood up against peers’ regulatory practices in their daily lives. For example, they took issue (albeit not unequivocally) with the homophobia that prevailed among their peers. They also described emotional engagements with other boys. All three of these boys were set apart from other respondents in having close friendships with a number of older girls. Two of the three were not involved in competitive athletics; they were the only nonathletes in the study. We cannot generalize from three cases, but we (like Chu, 2005) speculate that certain relational contexts may provide protection against pressures to conform to masculinity norms. Boys’ incessant use of terms like gay and fag as ways of limiting other boys’ behavior warrants further examination. Others (e.g., Thorne & Luria, 1986) have noted this practice among younger boys, for whom the words have little sexual connotation. For the boys in this study, terms like gay and fag seemed to be interchangeable with girly, suggesting that boys may subscribe to a crude version of the inversion theories of bygone eras. Whatever meanings boys give to the terms, their stark denunciation of homosexuality as outside the bounds of acceptable masculinity is problematic for boys and men who are not heterosexual. How do boys who identify as gay or who are questioning their sexuality respond to the inaccurate stereotyping of gay men? Where do boys who do not identify as heterosexual find acceptance and a respite from the predominant homophobia? The boys in this study were middle class, suburban, and privileged; most were White. Their social backgrounds no doubt shaped the specific content of their ideals of masculinity as well as their strategies of enforcing one another’s conformity to those ideals. We do not suggest that either the ideals or the strategies are universal. Rather, we draw on the boys’ accounts of their peer culture to point to the importance of local peer-influenced ideals, expectations, and practices associated with masculinity. The boys’ accounts also underscore the influence of peer groups on boys’ identities, interpretations, and actions. Theorists and activists have noted that prevailing gender orders are deeply entrenched and resistant to change. By


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studying boys’ accounts of their peer culture, we have uncovered some of the reasons why this is so.

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