Dude Your a Fag

This book titled “Dude you’re a Fag” discusses the experiences of sexuality and gender identity in a racially diverse working class high school. The book is mostly about gender identity in high school focusing on men’s masculinity but I found that many of the boys quest for masculinity affected the women especially in sport.

The problem with this issue is that I found it affecting many women in sport because many times these stories and male sex talk affected the women around them. For example in the book the weight room seemed to be the prime location for sex talk and some women who were on athletic teams were harassed and disgusted with the vulgarity of the conversations, that they were forced to drop out of the weight room class. The weight lifting teacher did nothing to punish the boys when the two ladies in the class complained that they could not exercise without being harassed. Other instances appear in this book about the ladies sports teams being harassed because they were better than the male sports teams like soccer. It’s the ultimate problem that women’s gender identities come into question just because they can beat the boy’s teams and only suffer because of the male’s quest to identify themselves as masculine men.