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Assignment #5

C.J. Pascoe opens the first chapter of her book by recalling an skit that was performed at River High School’s Mr. Cougar Assembly. The skit seemed to offer the definition of masculinity accepted by the students and faculty at River High School, which is this idea of being heterosexual and having physical strength. The skit proved that having a high pitch voice and female clothing on the male body was viewed as humorous and emasculating since everyone erupted in laughter. On the other hand, the female gym teacher in the skit lifting weights recieved cheers, as she was showing her masculinity. In Chapter 2, Pascoe says that the curriculum at River High teaches students to follow normative heterosexual practices, discouraging homosexuality. She also explains how the school board had a sort of contradictory idea about sex- education since they don’t want to explicitly teach it because they don’t want students to engage in sexual activities yet they are so interested in the sexual lives of their students. One of the teachers mentioned, Ms. Mac had a great reputation with her students especially because of her curiosity about their romantic relationships. On one particular instance, she teased friends Angela and Jeremy about being couple of the year (Pascoe, 2007: 32). She contributes to the school’s encouragement of heterosexual romantic relations because she took what is a cross-gender friendship and paired Angela and Jeremy up as if they were a couple. She admired this because it pushed the school’s agenda of discouraging homosexuality. To me, this school’s policies are quite disturbing because they are not trying to be inclusive towards all students and they are forcing students to fit in to a certain mold rather than trying to make and educational institution a safe space for everyone. Ms. Mac had also assigned a class project and one of the groups creates the Safer Sex Party and handed out condoms, their reason being to prevent HIV and AIDS. Ms. Mac went around and collected all the condoms, and saying that she could lose her job because of the distribution of them in her class. Pascoe explains that the condom was a cultural object which signified the importance of heterosexual activity to masculine identities (Pascoe, 2007: 34-35). This whole situation was strange and upsetting to me. Ms. Mac was more concerned about losing her job than proud of the fact that her students were being responsible sexual agents, in wanting to practice safe sex. Also, the student distributing the condoms got them from the Planned Parenthood Office which is in the school so the school board is full of contradictions. Why have condoms available if you don’t want students to use them? The school want to push their heterosexual relations agenda onto the students while also keeping the topic of sexuality taboo which makes absolutely no sense.