Gender inequality between homosexuals and heterosexuals is the root of many of the problems that members of society experience today. The use of the words 'fag' and 'gay' as insults synonymous with stupidity, inferiority, or femininity has been highlighted in C.J. Pascoe's piece on adolescent male homophobia. Pascoe mentioned in both her interview and article that male students police the behaviors of other males with the threat of being permanantly associated with the characteristics of a fag (307). At their high school, select characteristics of a fag would include failing at masculine tasks, caring too much about one's appearance, or showing too much emotion. One one is labeled as a fag, they would be seen as a leper until they could successfully prove themselves otherwise by calling somebody else the name. Students claim that the word's meaning is nothing more than any other insult, such as stupid or lame, and not attached to any sexual preference, but using those words has an undeniable negative stigma against those who identify themselves as homosexual. I would like to ask the question, is enough is being done in high schools to create a safe environment which reduces and ideally eliminates gender inequality?
A few years back, the Think Before You Speak advertisements began to air in an attempt to eradicate the use of damaging language which encourage homophobia. An example of one of their ads can be found here. The That's So Gay campaign aims to reduce LGBT student bullying by the act of thinking before you speak.This campaign stresses the importance of having teachers and administrators take an active role in protecting students and also advocates for the formation of more gay-straight alliances to address anti LGBTQ-bullying. I feel that high schools fail to thoroughly defend LGBTQ-student rights by not actively aligning with campaigns like That's So Gay and those similar.
From the Geography of Love (and Hate) article, a graph of frequencies of the words 'faggot', 'no homo', 'so gay', and 'dyke' said on Twitter is displayed. It can be seen that the use of the word faggot has been on an oscillating increasing trend and has been tweeted over 12, 000, 000 times in a period of less than a year. This social networking website attracts relatively young adults and children of middle and high school age and it is assisting in increasing the frequency that these words are said in school as well as on the internet. This is because words are said more often the more that they are used by others, so if you hear somebody else say fag or faggot and you are an impressionable age, you are most likely going to say the word too. Once these words became popular, they remained so and never left high schools. Although these words aren't always meant to be a dig at someone's sexuality, it creates a hostile environment for LGBTQ-students and high schools are not doing all in their power to eliminate the usage of negatively charged identifiers.
I actually somewhat disagree with what Briana said about LGBT groups not getting enough recognition in high schools today. Personally at my school in Birmingham, MI we had a LGBT group called OASIS. They did countless numbers of videos, posters, campaigns, and meetings throughout the year to help spread awareness and support for the students. I believe that many of these groups receive much more recognition than they did in the past, but also at the same time they can be dimmed out or not taken seriously. In support of my point, from Pascoe's article, C.J. talked about how gay people were "born that way" (p. 309) even though they still teased others for being "fags". This gives recognition to the fact that many more people now think being gay is acceptable and/or a biological identity, which can be seen as an improvement in our society today.
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ReplyDeleteI also disagree. Although there were no LGBT groups at my high school, the use of words such as fag, faggot, or gay as an adjective or to insult someone became intolerable. The school administration had ruled these such words just as bad as swear or curse words, resulting in detentions and eventually suspensions, if used in an offensive way. While this is a very tough rule, I believe that reinforcement like this could help reduce the usage of this word in secondary education. Although recently recognized as a problem, I believe that this will soon begin to diminish as efforts are made to help adolescents understand how derogatory these terms are.
ReplyDeleteI also disagree about LGBT groups not getting recognition--especially in high schools. I think through out the years, discrimination against LGBT groups has actually improved because of the rising recognition. In my high school, there were many gay and lesbian students who were not picked on because of their sexual identity. They did presentations at school and posted videos on Facebook about their sexual identity. In addition, the media started many campaigns involving celebrities that gave recognition to gay rights--the media also exposed many suicides by gay teenagers caused by bullying. In my high school, students were exposed to LGBT campaigns that taught us to not discriminate against them. Although LGBT groups in my high school did not avoid discrimination completely, the discrimination and bullying has improved greatly in the last decade because of LGBT awareness. I noticed that when I was in middle school, kids always used words like gay and faggot very loosely. In high school and in college, I noticed that none of my friends every say words like gay and faggot loosely--we are aware how wrong it is to make discriminatory remarks against LGBT groups. If we continue to spread LGBT awareness and continue to stop using words like fag or gay to insult others, I believe that inequality among LGBT groups will diminish.
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