7. Performing Gender Identity: Young Men's Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity

I was sitting at the dinner table with my roommates, Tina and John, when Tina and I began discussing a woman we both know. Our conversation centered around how she had told her husband that she was pregnant, but how we knew that he was not the father. Tina and I began to analyze the ramifications of her decision to lie to her husband about the paternity of their child, and questioned her integrity as a wife and a friend. John looked at us, rolled his eyes, and asked why we cared so much.

The next night, John's friend Ray came over for dinner. As we all sat at the same dinner table, John asked Ray if he had talked to Brian, another friend of theirs. Ray said that he had and that Brian and his wife were getting divorced and how the wife was already seeing someone else. John was quick to judge her by calling her a whore and called his friend a pussy for letting that happen. Just as Tina and I had passed judgment on our friend about her decisions, John was just as eager to do the same thing.

What I find most interesting about this situation and the conversation recorded in this weeks chapter, is that men don't think that they are susceptible to "gossip." They don't think that their analysis of situations, their deconstruction of human behavior is like that of women. In reality, I have met many men who are just as eager to divulge information as some women. Men can think they are different than women in that regard, but I know better, I've heard it with my own ears.