High school, the best years of your life with everyday shaping and molding you from a feminine boy to becoming a respectable masculine adult, in truth its surviving everyday without being called a fag. In C.J. Pascoe’s ethnography she examines the dynamics of masculinity carefully exploring gender conformity that’s extracted from a collection of humiliations, fears and anxieties among high school boys. Within the eighteen months that Pascoe tediously studied the students of River High, she opened my mind to reminisce about my high school years at El Capitan. From the pep rallies in the gym to the weight room discussions, however, Pascoe’s research expressed a deeper meaning to the formation of gender identities in Which never made sense to me because I was more sexually active then everyone trying to weaken my masculinity by being in a relationship; however I was not a man whore/ pimp because it was the same girl. Even though your peers have a large influence because of social organization another influence is the administration of the school. The administration of a school is what creates the tone for social regulation. From the janitor to the principal of the high school these adults control not only a high school but almost like a close knit community. It all depends where they draw the line from what you can wear to school daily to how you can dance at occasional festivities it all creates a strong social regulation that influences that students within the school. As weeks states “Laws designed to control the behavior of certain groups of people can actually give rise to an enhanced sense of identity and cohesion amongst them” (8). Within the high school these are enforced with such customary patterns of public shaming. In example at El Capitan if you violated the dress code you had to wear an oversized neon green shirt, displaying “Property of El Capitan” in bold writing. These methods were used to reinforce the norms of the community or high school campus (8). Whether people rebelled or not the administration is what set the standards having a large influence on the masculinity and sexuality of the students. From elementary
