Kenneth Koko Jr.
Writing For The Social Sciences
Essay #3
I was honestly stumped about my research question at first glance. I have always been interested in the dichotomy of gender and how it informs so much of our daily life. Still, I understood that I needed a specific enough research question to be engaging and a broad enough question to find a myriad of articles about my subject. On the other hand, I work with children/teens who are growing rapidly and are exposed to more of the world than any generation before them, so to examine and review the impact of societal gender norms that could also be impacting them drew me in. I refined my research question through the use of ChatGPT and the examples provided in class helped a considerable amount to narrow down the wording and phrasing of what I wanted to research. The most major challenge for me in finding sources was pinpointing research on teens in the United States because that was a part of my original research question, but I saw good enough articles from other countries similar to the United States in their culture to drop that angle. The majority of my sources came from Google Scholar. Although I appreciated the resources of the CUNY library, I found Google Scholar a much more streamlined search engine with commonality in the types of sources that I found. The course learning objective that I felt like I met during this assignment was to “strengthen your source use practices (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)”. Synthesizing I feel is such a strong strategy when using sources in retrospect, and I will try to use this strategy going forward in all of my writing.
Society Says: How Boys and Girls Are Affected By Gender Norms
To be a teenager is to be at a fast-moving, tumultuous pace in the human lifespan. Adolescence is marked by attempting to figure out one’s place in their budding social life. One of these puzzles is the path from adolescence to adulthood and the subtext of gender norms. The veil of societal gender norms can be cast in every walk of life, but for teenagers how they act, think, talk, and dress are rapidly fluctuating and can be attributed to how they either play into or reject societal gender norms. These norms can greatly affect teenagers’ development and give them perceptions that might not necessarily be what they think independently and could be falling into what they think is “correct” by a societal standard. Coinciding with teens being aware of societal gender norms, they are also aware of those around them who do not conform to traditional male and female societal norms. The scrutiny those who don’t conform face drives teens who follow more traditional gender norms to reject differences and the idea that those around them won’t necessarily march to the beat of society’s drum. (Blum, Moreau, 2017, Journal of Adolescent Health, It Begins At Ten). The effect of societal norms can influence teens and adolescents in various directions such as causing males to lean into being more aggressive and less emotional due to society’s perceived idea of how a man should act, it can make teens less accepting of their LGBTQ+ and gender-fluid peers and lastly, cause teens to involve themselves in more “risky behaviors” like sexting and drug use. These are just some of the ways that our structured idea of gender can change the developing mind of a teen, or in some cases, smash it, and then build it from the ground up.
A major trend that has been noted by various researchers on this topic is the group of behaviors that male teens specifically develop as a result of societal gender norms. These norms include stoicism and emotional absence, general aggressiveness, having sexual prowess and maintaining dominance in a relationship, and providing for one’s family by being the head of the household. (Amin, Addressing Gender, 2018). Behaviors such as these lack the emotional maturity and social nuances to develop male teens as fully functioning human beings successfully. Expectations such as these can cripple the social ability of a boy who is told again and again that this is the way he should be acting. And once you throw in a setting like a school or a fraternity, the level of impact and influence multiplies exponentially, because instead of seeing it in movies and TV shows, young males are being told by their friends to add a certain way. They “challenge” one another, to see who can involve themselves in the behaviors I listed above, which could be primitive. On the other hand, when this masculinity is not upheld both in society and around a young boy’s peers—they face scrutiny and even potential homophobic attitudes and remarks regardless of whether the victim is LGBTQ+ or not (Amin, Addressing Gender, 2018). As I alluded to earlier in the paragraph, because of the pressure to be sexually proficient early on in their development a lot of teenage boys will engage in sexually irresponsible behaviors, putting themselves and their partners for STIs and teen pregnancies. (Amin, Addressing Gender, 2018). The ignorance of how harmful these behaviors can be to developing males with attitudes such as “boys will be boys” and “boys are trouble” has severe implications both on the males in question and their female counterparts. Risky behaviors such as getting “wasted” and completely abandoning responsibility for your actions while inebriated is more widely accepted as a societal norm as a man than as a woman. (Planas, Galdeanas, 2022, Gender norms in high school). Societal norms deter women from drinking “like a man” and this notion that men can engage in these behaviors because they handle it better sends a potentially harmful message to the youth.
The topic of gender norms cannot be separated with LGBTQ+ youth who are finding that they do not fit firmly with societal gender norms and norms regarding sexual orientation. In an interesting intersectionality, teens with more traditional gender norms will be more hostile to those who don’t fit those roles. Absenteeism is a large issue in the discourse of LGBTQ+ students and it is in large part due to bullying because of their peers. (Madireddy, 2020, Strategies for Schools to Prevent). The main reason why LGBTQ+ teens are bullied out of the school and sometimes even to suicide is the perception of them that they’re not “normal.” Realistically speaking, there are no differences between LGBTQ+ youth and straight/heteronormative youth except sexual orientation and gender identity. Yet, due to social stigma, young girls and boys are led to believe this is enough to ostracize their classmates and peers. Studies show that effective ways to combat the impact of these practices are to involve adult and school administration. Students have reported that they feel safer of campus when they have a guidance counselor supervising them or a more inclusive school environment that is devoid of any indication that their gender norms are rigid and potentially harmful for someone who may not directly identify with them (Madireddy, 2020, Strategies for Schools to Prevent). As the information in the previous paragraph stated, teenage boys have a particular tendency to ridicule LGBTQ+ youth, regardless of what gender that teen may be. In areas where male teenagers could take on more “feminine” traits such as doing house chores they are ridiculed and compared to being a “girl” in an obviously derogatory fashion (Amin, Addressing Gender, 2018). This is directly in line with the same diatribe that “hyper-masculine” teenagers would say to LGBTQ+ teenagers as a form of bullying. As one can imagine, the pressures of adolescence are taxing on the mind enough, but coupled with the stigma of not being heteronormative exacerbates mental health concerns in LBGTQ+ youth tremendously, to the point where it is a threat to the crafting of their identity. (Cederved, Glasdam, 2021, A Clash of Sexual Gender Norms and Understandings).
In the case of more general patterns on the topic of gender norms and how they can affect teens, “risky behaviors” and what leads teens to them is often discussed. Social media is a pathway for teens to learn about risky behaviors and emulate them. According to a study where 752 accounts of teenagers were collected and analyzed, one-third of these profiles contained a reference “risky behavior” such as unprotected sex and drug use. About 16% of these descriptions refer to sex and the majority of male descriptions referred to drug use (Planas, Antecol, Gender Norms In High School, 2022). These findings are in line with the ideas that young girls are budding, sexually vibrant creatures to be conquered and young males cannot and will not be chastised for using drugs at an early age. Both of these concepts come from a multitude of sources, but ultimate build up the societal expectations for what a man and woman should act like.
The discussion behind the patriarchy that exists in our society and how it affects everything we interact with, whether directly related to gender or not, is extremely vast and complex. Large concepts exists within this idea, and the world of teenagers just becoming young adults attempting to navigate the walks of life is just one of them. The articles within this field are helpful in gauging why these teens act this way, which is what this entire topic is about in the first place. However, the long term effects and the impact of societal gender norms was only briefly touched on. The idea that thse teens could become adults and end up feeding or completely rejecting these gender norms in the first place is fascinating and requires more extensive investigation. But there is no doubt that gender norms imposed on these teens can misinform them and shape their psychology into what they think is right but not because they believe it is the right thing to do, but because someone told them to do it.
Works Cited
Amin, K. (2018). Addressing gender socialization and masculinity norms among adolescent boys: Policy and programmatic implications. The Journal of adolescent health : official publication of the Society for Adolescent Medicine. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29455715/
Blum, R. W. (2017). It begins at 10: How gender expectations shape early adolescence around the world – journal of adolescent health. https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(17)30355-5/fulltext
Cederved . (2021). A clash of sexual gender norms and understandings. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/07435584211043290
Ecoseven. (n.d.). https://www.ecoseven.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/info.ils_.indiana.edu_herring_teens.gender.pdf
Madireddy, S., & Madireddy, S. (2020, September 15). Strategies for schools to prevent Psychosocial Stress, stigma, and suicidality risks among LGBTQ+ students. American Journal of Educational Research. https://pubs.sciepub.com/education/8/9/7/index.html
M., Antecol, H., Battaglini, M., Bifulco, R., Black, S. E., Cawley, J., Friesen, J., Kaplan, M., Rodríguez-Planas, N., Shakya, H. B., Ours, J. C. van, Waldron, I., Warren, C. W., Abrahamson, M., Akerlof, G. A., Anderson, M., Angrist, J. D., Argys, L. M., … Blau, FD. (2022, February 26). Gender norms in high school: Impacts on risky behaviors from adolescence to adulthood. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016726812200021X
