The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 38, No. 2 & Volume 39, No. 1 - 132

Zak Foste • Keith Edwards • Tracy Davis

the phrase “don’t get your panties in a bunch” illustrates the denigration of femininity and its impact on men’s identity. Struggles with other men. more than anything else, it was seth’s relationship with his male roommates that served as a turning point in his struggle with his gender identity. since seth knew virtually no one at rVu, he was eager to form friendships. instead he was met with resistance and rejection, and the men he lived with were constantly picking on and demeaning him. the same names hurled at him by coaches years before were resurfacing in his residence hall room. the situation was amplified by the fact that these were the only three men on campus that seth knew. He said, “i think the fact that i need to be able to voice myself somehow but i wasn’t able to do that . . . it’s hard not to be taken seriously by other men.” seth recalled a particularly painful incident with his roommates when he left school for the weekend: one of the things they did, which was just a little thing that sent me over the edge, was when i went home to watch my little brother and i was coming back. i got a text just outside of [town] that asked if i was back yet. i’m like “oh they are excited to see me.” They gave me this false hope, they were excited, that was cool. i come back and every possession i had in that room had been tampered with and wrapped in newspaper and they weren’t going to help me clean it up. i was almost in tears i was so stressed out. On his way home he felt he finally had gained their friendship, only to return to a cruel prank. this experience in particular led seth to completely “bottle up” and go into what he termed “severe depression.” seth’s story clearly illus132

trates the importance that men place on the approval of their male peers. His yearning for acceptance from other men is consistent with Kimmel’s (1994) assertion that “the nightmare from which we never seem to awaken is that those other men will see that sense of inadequacy, they will see that in our own eyes we are not who we are pretending to be” (p. 104). in this case, the mask is not used to impress women or to elicit sex, but to gain the approval of other men out of fear of being emasculated. Kimmel further maintains that “our efforts to maintain a manly front cover everything we do. What we wear. How we walk. What we eat. every mannerism, every movement contains a coded gender language” (p. 105). if men fail to hide behind this mask, they clearly learn the consequences. A turning point. When seth first came to rVu, he resorted to threats of violence to feel safe and protected against other men: threats he knew he could not back up. He explains how his reliance on threats led him to a turning point in his conceptualization of masculinity: When you threaten them and they brush it off . . . it’s just like, well what happened to that manly definition i learned about when i was younger? What happened to that? it went out the window and my experiences have changed. seth began to see a gap between his perceptions of manhood and reality and at this point experienced a turning point in his understanding of his gender identity. these pivotal moments in the development of masculinity have tremendous power, as mcKinney (2004) describes, though he refers here to ethnicity: “turning points are moments when respondents came

The Journal of College and universiTy sTudenT housing

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 38, No. 2 & Volume 39, No. 1

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 38, No. 2 & Volume 39, No. 1