English Assignment

English 1302: Essay #1

Don't use plagiarized sources. Get Your Custom Essay on

English Assignment

Just from $13/Page

Order Essay

Rethinking Norms

The purpose of this essay is to explore how the Orenstein article on raising young men sheds insight into Boyle’s “

Greasy Lake

.”

You will embed quotations from both:

T.C. Boyle, “Greasy Lake (its in the upload box)

Peggy Orenstein, “

The Miseducation of the American Boy

(its in the upload box)

Examine how one particular incident, one particular character, or one specific relationship between two characters in “Greasy Lake” proves or disproves what is stated in Orenstein’s article.

You may assume that the audience of your paper is a group of people familiar with these selections, so don’t summarize the plot. Devote your paper instead to in-depth analysis of the story and the article.

The structure of your paper should follow standard, rhetorical formula, with an introduction that includes the clear, specific, debatable thesis of your paper, the body that supports your thesis (and contains embedded quotations from the story for support), and a conclusion that ties together your ideas.

Specific criteria of this paper:

Include a clear, cogent thesis and well-developed body paragraphs that support that thesis
Embed quotations from both the story and the article to prove your interpretation of the story and of the historical document valid
Type your essay in MLA format with a Works Cited page
Paper should be about three pages in length.
On your Works Cited page, there must at least two entries:
Short story citation
Article citation

Rubric

Gender Norms EssayGender Norms EssayCriteriaRatingsPtsThis criterion is linked to a learning outcomeIntroduction sets up the essay topic, includes a specific and debatable thesis statement, and a compelling conclusion.20 pts
This criterion is linked to a learning outcomeEssay examines how the Orenstein article on raising young men sheds insight into Boyle’s “Greasy Lake.”25 pts
This criterion is linked to a learning outcomeEssay is typed in MLA format, is 3 pages in length, and cited correctly in-text and on the Works Cited page.20 pts
This criterion is linked to a learning outcomeEssay is grammatically and mechanically correct, typed in academic voice with no personal pronoun references.25 pts
This criterion is linked to a learning outcomeEssay correctly and adequately includes embedded quotations to support observations. Essay includes signal phrases and follows through on quotations.10 pts
Total points: 100

Note : Work cited should be in different page and including it should be 3 pages

<<<

>“

”

‘

dar

–

s a

y a

s g

when

you

adenc

a t

nge

ers

en.

tom

–

the

hed

rou

ith

too

thpicks

mouth

nd eth

what

bod

med w

ine.

n w

e wh

led

our par

ent

‘

nin

g s

tion

ago

s o

ut in

the

left

patch

rubber

hal

f a

block

lon

g. We

gin

and

gra

juic

ngo,

nderbi

, and

Bali

e we

nineteen. W

e w

ere

ad.

We re

d Andre Gid

e[footnoteRef:

]

nd str

k ela

bora

at we

didn

‘t gi

abo

t a

nythin

, w

e went u

. [1:

Andre Gide:

rench novelis

t and

cri

tic (18

9-1961) who

was

ch con

rned

with

unconventional beh

ior. ]

Throu

h the

nte

wn , up

e s

trip, p

ast the

hou

sing

dev

elo

pments

and

shop

g ma

lls,

street

ligh

iving w

y t

e t

n strea

min

illumin

ation of the he

adlight

s, tree

s c

row

ding the

phalt

in a

black

unbro

ken

ll:

that

was

the w

out t

o Gr

easy

Lak

e. T

ans

had

called

it W

akan, a re

fer

to the

clari

y o

s w

ater

it w

as fe

tid

and

murk

the

mud

nks

itt

ing

with

roken gl

ass

and strewn with be

er c

ans and th

e cha

rem

ain

s o

f bo

The

e wa

s a sin

gle

ged

island a

hund

red

rds

shor

so st

of v

ege

tation

it l

oked

the ai

r fo

rce had strafe

d it. We

went up to

the l

ake

becau

eryon

e we

nt th

ere,

because

wan

ted

snuff th

rich

nt of

possi

bility

the

bre

e, wa

tch a

tak

off

r cloth

es a

plun

int

the

feste

rin

g murk, d

ink

bee

moke

wl at

the s

tars

r the incong

ruou

full

-th

ted ro

of roc

k and

ll a

inst the

prime

val

susu

rru

s of

fro

and crick

ets

Thi

s was

natur

I wa

s there one

night

, l

ate,

in th

e c

ompan

y of

danger

ous

haracte

rs.

by w

ore a

gold

star

in hi

s rig

ear

and a

llo

wed

his fathe

r to

pay hi

tuition

at Co

rnell

;

eff w

as thin

kin

uitting

school

to b

eco

me a pai

nter

musi

cian/

hea

shop

prop

ietor.

wer

e bot

h exp

rt in

the

socia

l gra

ces,

quick

with a sneer,

abl

e to

man

ge a

ord

with lous

y sho

cks o

ver

tte

d an

d g

utt

blackt

p road

ghty-fi

ve w

hile

roll

a j

int

comp

act as

a T

oots

ie R

ll P

p sti

k. The

y c

ould

lounge a

gains

t a

bank of booming

spe

akers and trade

“

man”s w

ith th

e bes

t of them

or roll out ac

ross

the

dance

oor as if their

joints

rked

on be

arin

gs.

They were slick and q

uick and they w

ore

their mi

rro

r shad

es at break

fas

t and di

er, in the shower, in closets and cave

s. I

n s

hort

, they were bad.

I d

rov

e. Digb

y po

unded

the

dashb

rd and

sho

uted

alo

ng with T

oots

the

Maytals while Jeff

ng his head out th

wind

ow and strea

ked th

e s

ide of m

mother

‘

s Bel

Air

with vo

mit. It

was

earl

Jun

the air

ft as a h

nd on

your c

heek

, the

third ni

ght of s

umm

r v

cati

on.

The fir

o night

s we

‘d

been

ut till da

wn, looking

for

some

thin

we n

eve

found

. O

n this

, the third night, we

‘d cru

ise

d the stri

p s

ixty

-seven

times, been in and

ut of ev

ery

bar and club we c

uld thin

of in

a twe

nty

–

mil

e ra

dius

, stoppe

d twi

ce fo

r bu

et c

hick

en a

nd forty

-ce

nt hambur

gers, debated going to a

party

t the hou

se of a g

irl J

ff’

s s

ister

kne

w, and chucked

two d

oze

raw e

ggs

t mailb

oxes

and hit

hhiker

s. I

t was

2:00

A.M.;

the

bars w

ere

closin

. There w

as no

thing

to do

but

take a

bottl

e of

lemon

– flav

ored

gin up to Greasy

Lake

The ta

illi

ght

s of a s

ingle car winked a

t us a

s we s

ng into

the dirt l

t with i

tufts

wee

d and was

hboa

rd co

rrugati

‘5

7 C

vy,

mint

, me

tallic

blue.

the

far

side

of the

lot,

lik

e the e

xos

keleton

of some ga

unt

chrome

inse

ct, a

chopp

er lea

ned against

its kick

sta

nd. And

that was it for

exci

eme

nt:

som

junkie h

-wit

bik

and

a car freak pumpin

g his g

irlfriend . Whate

ver

it was we

were looking

for, we weren’t about to find it at

Greasy Lake.

Not that night.

But then all of a sudden Digby was fighting for the wheel. “Hey, that’s Tony Lovett’s car! Hey!” he shouted, while I stabbed at the brake pedal and the Bel Air nosed up to the gleaming bumper of the parked Chevy. Digby leaned on the horn, laughing, and instructed me to put my brights on. I flicked on the brights. This was hilarious. A joke. Tony would experience premature withdrawal and expect to be confronted by grim looking state troopers with flashlights. We hit the horn, strobed the lights, and then jumped out of the car to press our witty faces to Tony’s windows; for all we knew we might even catch a glimpse of some little fox’s tit, and .then we could slap backs with red-faced Tony, roughhouse a little, and go on to new heights of adventure and daring.

The first mistake, the one that opened the whole floodgate, was losing my grip on the keys. In the excitement, leaping from the car with the gin in one hand and a roach clip in the other, I spilled them in the grass-in the dark, rank, mysterious nighttime grass of Greasy Lake . This was a tactical error, as damaging and irreversible in its way as Westmoreland ‘s decision to dig in at Khe Sanh.[footnoteRef:2] I felt it like a jab of intuition, and I stopped there by the open door, peering vaguely into the night that puddled up round my feet. [2: General William C. Westmoreland commanded U.S. troops in Vietnam (

% 4–68). When the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in 1967 attacked Khe San (or Khesanh) , Westmoreland chose to defend an area of little military significance.]

The second mistake–and this was inextricably bound up with the first–was identifying the car as Tony Lovett’s. Even before the very bad character in greasy jeans and engineer boots ripped out of the driver’s door, I began to realize that this chrome blue was much lighter than the robin’s-egg of Tony’s car, and that Tony’s car didn’t have rear-mounted speakers . Judging from their expressions, Digby and Jeff were privately groping toward the same inevitable and unsettling conclusion as I was.

In any case, there was no reasoning with this bad greasy character–clearly he was a man of action. The first lusty Rockette[footnoteRef:3] kick of his steel-toed boot caught me under the chin, chip ped my favorite tooth, and left me sprawled in the dirt. Like a fool, I’d gone down on one knee to comb the stiff hacked grass for the keys, my mind making connections in the most dragged out, testudineous[footnoteRef:4] way, knowing that things had gone wrong, that I was in a lot of trouble, and that the lost ignition key was my grai1[footnoteRef:5] and my salvation. The three or four succeeding blows were mainly absorbed by my right buttock and the tough piece of bone at the base of my spine. [3: The Rockettes, a dance troupe at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, were famous for precision and for high kicking ] [4: turtle-like (here, slow)] [5: The holy cup that, according to tradition, Jesus used at the Last Supper. Legend says that the person who finds this object will be saved.]

Meanwhile, Digby vaulted the kissing bumpers and delivered a savage kung-fu blow to the greasy character’s collarbone. Digby had just finished a course in martial arts for phys-ed credit and had spent the better part of the past two nights telling us apocryphal tales of Bruce Lee types and of the raw power invested in lightning blows shot from coiled wrists, ankles, and elbows. The greasy character was unimpressed. He merely backed off a step, his face like a Toltec mask , and laid Digby out with a single whistling roundhouse blow . . . but by now Jeff had got into the act, and I was beginning to extricate myself from the dirt,.. a tinny compound of shock, rage, and impotence wadded in my throat.

Jeff was on the guy’s back, biting at his ear. Digby was on the ground, cursing. I went for the tire iron I kept under the driver’s seat. I kept it there because bad characters always keep tire irons under the driver’s seat, for just such an occasion as this . Never mind that I hadn’t been involved in a fight since sixth grade, when a kid with a sleepy eye and two streams of mucus depending from his nostrils hit me in the knee with a Louisville slugger, never mind that I’d touched the tire iron exactly twice before, to change tires: it was there. And I went for it.

I was terrified. Blood was beating in my ears, my hands were shaking, my heart turning over like a dirtbike in the wrong gear. My antagonist was shirtless , and a single cord of muscle flashed across his chest as he bent forward to peel Jeff from his back like a wet overcoat. “Motherfucker, ” he spat , over and over, and I was aware in that instant that all four of us–Digby, Jeff, and myself included-were chanting “mother fucker, motherfucker, ” as if it were a battle cry. (What happened next? the detective asks the murderer from beneath the turned-down brim of his porkpie hat. I don’t know, the murderer says, something came over me. Exactly.)

Digby poked the flat of his hand in the bad character’s face and I came at him like a kamikaze, mindless, raging, stung with humiliation–the whole thing, from the initial boot in the chin to this murderous primal instant involving no more than sixty hyperventilating, gland-flooding seconds–I came at him and brought the tire iron down across his ear. The effect was instantaneous, astonishing. He was a stunt man and this was Hollywood, he was a big grimacing toothy balloon and I was a man with a straight pin. He collapsed. Wet his pants. Went loose in his boots.

A single second, big as a zeppelin, floated by. We were standing over him in a circle, gritting our teeth , jerking our necks, our limbs and hands and feet twitching with glandular discharges . No one said anything. We just stared down at the guy, the car freak, the lover, the bad greasy character laid low. Digby looked at me ; so did Jeff. I was still holding the tire iron, a tuft of hair clinging to the crook like dandelion fluff, like down. Rattled, I dropped it in the dirt, already envisioning the headlines, the pitted faces of the police inquisitors, the gleam of handcuffs, clank of bars, the big black shadows rising from the back of the cell . . . when suddenly a raw torn shriek cut through me like all the juice in all the electric chairs in the country.

It was the fox. She was short , barefoot, dressed in panties and a man ‘s shirt.

“Animals!” she screamed, running at us with her fists clenched and wisps of blowdried hair in her face. There was a silver chain round her ankle, and her toenails flashed in the glare of the headlights. I think it was the toenails that did it. Sure, the gin and the cannabis and even the Kentucky Fried may have had a hand in it, but it was the sight of those flaming toes that set us off–the toad emerging from the loaf in Virgin Spring[footnoteRef:6], lipstick smeared on a child: she was already tainted . We were on her like Bergman’s deranged brothers-see no evil, hear none, speak none- panting, wheezing, tearing at her clothes, grabbing for flesh. We were bad characters, and we were scared and hot and three steps over the line–anything could have happened. [6: Virgin Spring is a film (1960) by Ingmar Bergman. ]

It didn’t.

Before we could pin her to the hood of the car, our eyes masked with lust and greed and the purest primal badness, a pair of headlights swung into the lot. There we were, dirty, bloody, guilty, dissociated from humanity and civilization, the first of the Ur-crimes[footnoteRef:7] behind us, the second in progress, shreds of nylon panty and spandex brassiere dangling from our fingers, our flies open, lips licked-there we were, caught in the spotlight. Nailed. [7: primitive crimes]

We bolted. First for the car, and then, realizing we had no way of starting it, for the woods. I thought nothing. I thought escape. The headlights came at me like accusing fingers. I was gone.

Ram-barn-barn, across the parking lot, past the chopper and into the feculent undergrowth at the lake’s edge, insects flying up in my face, weeds whipping, frogs and snakes and red-eyed turtles splashing off into the night: I was already ankledeep in muck and tepid water and still going strong. Behind me, the girl’s screams rose in intensity, disconsolate, incriminating, the screams of the Sabine women[footnoteRef:8], the Christian martyrs, Anne Frank dragged from the garret. I kept going, pursued by those cries, imagining cops and bloodhounds. The water was up to my knees when I realized what I was doing: I was going to swim for it. Swim the breadth of Greasy Lake and hide myself in the thick clot of woods on the far side. They’d never find me there! [8: Women of an ancient tribe in Rome, raped by Romans and carried off to be their wives.]

I was breathing in sobs, in gasps. The water lapped at my waist as I looked out over the moon-burnished ripples, the mats of algae that clung to the surface like scabs. Digby and Jeff had vanished. I paused. Listened. The girl was quieter now, screams tapering to sobs, but there were male voices, angry, excited, and the highpitched ticking of the second car’s engine. I waded deeper, stealthy, hunted, the ooze sucking at my sneakers. As I was about to take the plunge–at the very instant I dropped my shoulder for the first slashing stroke–I blundered into something. Something unspeakable, obscene, something soft, wet, moss-grown. A patch of weed? A log? When I reached out to touch it, it gave like a rubber duck, it gave like flesh.

In one of those nasty little epiphanies for which we are prepared by films and TV and childhood visits to the funeral home to ponder the shrunken painted forms of dead grandparents, I understood what it was that bobbed there so inadmissibly in the dark. Understood, and stumbled back in horror and revulsion, my mind yanked in six different directions (I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second), thinking, The keys, the keys, why did I have to go and lose the keys? I stumbled back, but the musk took hold of my feet–a sneaker snagged, balance lost–and suddenly I was pitching face forward into the buoyant black mass, throwing out my hands in desperation while simultaneously conjuring the image of reeking frogs and muskrats revolving in slicks of their own deliquescing juices. “AAAAArrrgh!” I shot from the water like a torpedo, the dead man rotating to expose a mossy beard and eyes cold as the moon. I must have shouted out, thrashing around in the weeds, because the voices behind me suddenly became animated.

“What was that?”

“It’s them , it’s them: they tried to, tried to . . . rape me!” Sobs.

A man’s voice, flat Midwestern accent. “You sons a bitches, we’ll kill you!”

Frogs, crickets.

Then another voice, harsh, r-less, Lower East Side: “Motherfucker!” I recognized the verbal virtuosity of the bad greasy character in the engineer boots. Tooth chipped, sneakers gone, coated in mud and slime and worse, crouching breathless in the weeds waiting to have my ass thoroughly and definitively kicked and fresh from the hideous stinking embrace of a three-days-dead-corpse, I suddenly felt a rush of joy and vindication: the son of a bitch was alive! Just as quickly, my bowels turned to ice. “Come on out of there, you pansy mothers!” the bad greasy character was screaming. He shouted curses till he was out of breath .

The crickets started up again, then the frogs. I held my breath. All at once there was a sound in the reeds, a swishing, a splash: thunk-a-thunk. They were throwing rocks. The frogs fell silent. I cradled my head. Swish; swish, thunk-a-thunk. A wedge of feldspar the size of a cue ball glanced off my knee. I bit my finger.

It was then that they turned to the car. I heard a door slam, a curse, and then the sound of the headlights shattering–almost a good-natured sound, celebratory, like corks popping from the necks of bottles. This was succeeded by the dull booming of the fenders, metal on metal, and then the icy crash of the windshield. I inched forward, elbows and knees, my belly pressed to the muck, thinking of guerrillas and commandos and The Naked and the Dead[footnoteRef:9]. I patted the weeds and squinted the length of the parking lot. [9: World War II novel (1948) by Norman Mailer.]

The second car–it was a Trans-Am–was still running, its high beams washing the scene in a lurid stagy light. Tire iron flailing, the greasy bad character was jaying into the side of my mother’s Bel Air like an avenging demon, his shadow riding up the trunks of the trees. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp-whomp. The other two guys-blond types, in fraternity jackets–were helping out with tree branches and skullsized boulders. One of them was gathering up bottles, rocks, muck, candy wrappers, used condoms, pop-tops, and other refuse and pitching it through the window on the driver’s side. I could see the fox, a white bulb behind the windshield of the ’57 Chevy. “Bobbie,” she whined over the thumping, “come on.” The greasy character paused a moment, took one good swipe at the left taillight, and then heaved the tire iron halfway across the lake. Then he fired up the ’57 and was gone.

Blond head nodded at blond head. One said something to the other, too low for me to catch. They were no doubt thinking that in helping to annihilate my mother’s car they’d committed a fairly rash act, and thinking too that there were three bad characters connected with that very car watching them from the woods. Perhaps other possibilities occurred to them as well–police, jail cells, justices of the peace, reparations, lawyers, irate parents, fraternal censure . Whatever they were thinking, they suddenly dropped branches, bottles, and rocks and sprang for their car in unison, as if they’d choreographed it. Five seconds. That’s all it took. The engine shrieked, the tires squealed, a cloud of dust rose from the rutted lot and then settled back on darkness.

I don’t know how long I lay there, the bad breath of decay all around me, my jacket heavy as a bear, the primordial ooze subtly reconstituting itself to accommodate my upper thighs and testicles. My jaws ached, my knee throbbed, my coccyx was on fire. I contemplated suicide, wondered if I’d need bridgework, scraped the recesses of my brain for some sort of excuse to give my parents–a tree had fallen on the car, I was blindsided by a bread truck, hit and run, vandals had got to it while we were playing chess at Digby’s. Then I thought of the dead man. He was probably the only person on the planet worse off than I was. I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back. The owner of the chopper, no doubt, a bad older character come to this. Shot during a murky drug deal, drowned while drunkenly frolicking in the lake. Another headline. My car was wrecked; he was dead.

When the eastern half of the sky went from black to cobalt and the trees began to separate themselves from the shadows, I pushed myself up from the mud and stepped out into the open. By now the birds had begun to take over for the crickets, and dew lay slick on the leaves. There was a smell in the air, raw and sweet at the same time, the smell of the sun firing buds and opening blossoms. I contemplated the car. It lay there like a wreck along the highway, like a steel sculpture left over from a vanished civilization. Everything was still. This was nature.

I was circling the car, as dazed and bedraggled as the sole survivor of an air blitz, when Digby and Jeff emerged from the trees behind me. Digby’s face was crosshatched with smears of dirt; Jeff’s jacket was gone and his shirt was torn across the shoulder. They slouched across the lot, looking sheepish, and silently came up beside me to gape at the ravaged automobile. No one said a word. After a while Jeff swung open the driver’s door and began to scoop the broken glass and garbage off the seat. I looked at Digby. He shrugged. “At least they didn’t slash the tires,” he said.

It was true: the tires were intact. There was no windshield , the headlights were staved in, and the body looked as if it had been sledgehammered for a quarter a shot at the county fair, but the tires were inflated to regulation pressure. The car was drivable. In silence, all three of us bent to scrape the mud and shattered glass from the interior. I said nothing about the biker. When we were finished, I reached in my pocket for the keys, experienced a nasty stab of recollection, cursed myself, and turned to search the grass. I spotted them almost immediately, no more than five feet from the open door, glinting like jewels in the first tapering shaft of sunlight. There was no reason to get philosophical about it: I eased into the seat and turned the engine over.

It was at that precise moment that the silver Mustang with the flame decals rumbled into the lot. All three of us froze; then Digby and Jeff slid into the car and slammed the door. We watched as the Mustang rocked and bobbed across the ruts and finally jerked to a halt beside the forlorn chopper at the far end of the lot. “Let’s go,” Digby said. I hesitated, the Bel Air wheezing beneath me.

Two girls emerged from the Mustang. Tight jeans, stiletto heels, hair like frozen fur. They bent over the motorcycle , paced back and forth aimlessly, glanced once or twice at us, and then ambled over to where the reeds sprang up in a green fence round the perimeter of the lake . One of them cupped her hands to her mouth. “Al,” she called, “Hey, Al!”

“Come on,” Digby hissed . “Let’s get out of here. “

But it was too late. The second girl was picking her way across the lot, unsteady on her heels, looking up at us and then away. She was older–twenty-five or six–and as she came closer we could see there was something wrong with her: she was stoned or drunk, lurching now and waving her arms for balance. I gripped the steering wheel as if it were the ejection lever of a flaming jet, and Digby spat out my name, twice, terse and impatient.

“Hi,” the girl said.

We looked at her like zombies, like war veterans, like deaf-and-dumb pencil peddlers.

She smiled, her lips cracked and dry. “Listen ,” she said , bending from the waist to look in the window, “you guys seen Al?” Her pupils were pinpoints, her eyes glass. She jerked her neck. “That’s his bike over there–Al’s. You seen him?”

Al. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed. Digby poked me in the ribs. “We haven’t seen anybody,” I said.

“
Grea
sy Lake
”

b
y
T.C. Boyle

It
‘
s

a
b
o
ut

m
il
e

down

the

dar
k

si
d
e
of

R
ou
t
e

8
8.

–

Bruc
e

Sp
ringste
en

There wa
s a
time
w
h
e
n
co
urt
esy a
nd winnin
g
way
s we
nt
o
ut
o
f
s
tyl
e,

when it wa
s
g
ood

to
be bad
,
when you
cu
ltivated de
c
adenc
e
lik
e
a taste. W
e
were
a
ll dange
ro
u
s
charac
te
r
s

then.

w
o
re

tom
–
up

le
a
ther

j
ac
kets
,

slou
c
hed

around

with

t
oo
thpicks

o
ur

mouth
s
,

sniffed

g
lue

a
nd eth
e
r
a
nd

wh
a
t
so
mebod
y
cl
a
im
e
d

w
as
c
oca
in
e.
Wh
e
n w
e

wh
ee
led

our par
e
n
ts
‘
whinin
g s
tation

w
ago
ns out in
to

the
str
ee
t we left
a

patch
o
f

rubber

hal
f a

block

lon
g
.

drank

g
in

and

gra
pe

juic
e,

T
a
ngo,

Th
u
nderbird

a
nd

Bali

H
a
i.

wer
e

nineteen. W
e

wer
e

b
a
d
.
We re
a
d Andre Gid
e
1

and stru
c
k ela
bora
te pose
s

t
o

s
how th
a
t

didn
‘
t

g
i
ve

shit

abo
ut anythin
g
.

ni
g
ht
,

w
e

w
ent

Gr
easy

Lake
.

Throu
g
h the
ce
nte
r
of t
o
wn , up

th
e s
trip, p
as
t
t
h
e

hou
s
in
g
dev
e
l
o
pments

a
nd

shoppin
g
m
a
lls,
s
tr
ee
t
lights
g
iving w
a
y t
o
the th
i
n streamin
g
illumin
a
tion

th
e

h
e
adlight
s
,
t
r
e
es

c
row
ding the
as
phalt

in
a

black

unbroken

w
a
ll:

that

was
the w
ay

out t
o

Gr
easy

La
k
e. T
h
e
Indi
a
n
s
had
ca
ll
e
d

it W
a
k
a
n
,
a
r
e
fer
e
n
c
e t
o

th
e

clari
ty o
f

its water
s
.
N
ow it w
as
f
e
tid

and murky,
t
h
e
mud
ba
nks

glitt
er
ing with b
ro
ken

gl
ass

and strewn with be
e
r
c
ans and th
e
cha
rr
ed
remain
s o
f bon
fir
es
. Ther
e
w
a
s a sin
g
l
e

ra
va
ged

i
s
l
a
nd

hund
r
e
d

ya
rd
s
fr
o
m
s
h
ore
,
s
o

st
ripped

v
ege
t
a
ti
o
n

it l
o
oked

if the ai
r fo
r
ce
had
st
r
a
f
e
d it. We
w
ent

u
p
t
o
the l
a
k
e
becau
se ev
eryon
e we
nt th
ere
,

because
we
wanted
to
snuff th
e
rich sc
e
nt of

pos
si
bility
on

the breez
e
, w
a
tch a
g
irl

tak
e

off

h
e
r cloth
es

a
nd

plun
ge
into

th
e

feste
rin
g

murk
,
d
rink

be
e
r
,
s
moke

p
o
t
,

h
o
wl at

th
e s
tars
,
savo
r

the

in
co
n
g
ruou
s

full
–
th
roa
ted

ro
a
r
of

ro
c
k and

ro
ll a
g
ain
s
t

th
e

prime
va
l

susu
rru
s

o
f

fro
gs

a
nd

cri
c
k
e
t
s
.

Thi
s

w
as

natur
e
.

I wa
s

t
h
e
re

on
e

night, l
ate,

in th
e

c
ompan
y o
f

two

d
a
nge
rou
s c
haracte
r
s
.

Di
g
by w
o
r
e

a
gold
s
t
ar
in hi
s

r
ig
ht ear

a
nd

a
llo
we
d

his fathe
r
t
o

pay hi
s

tuition

a
t

C
o
rnell
;
J
e
ff

w
as thinking

o
f

quitting
sc
h
oo
l

to b
eco
me

p
ai
nter
/
mu
s
i
cian/
h
ea
d
shop

prop
r
ietor.

The
y
wer
e

bo
t
h exp
e
rt in

the
socia
l gra
ces,
quick

w
ith

sn
ee
r,

abl
e

m
a
n
a
ge a

F
ord

with

l
ous
y sho
c
k
s

o
ver

ru
tte
d

and
g
utt
e
d

blackt
o
p road

a
t

ei
g
h
ty
–
fi
ve w
hile rollin
g
a j
o
int
as
comp
ac
t a
s
a T
oo
t
s
ie R
o
ll P
o
p sti
c
k. The
y c
ould

lounge a
ga
in
s
t a
b
a
nk

o
f bo
o
min
g
spe
a
k
e
r
s
and

t
r
a
d
e
”
man
”
s w
ith th
e

b
es
t of them

roll

ou
t

ac
ross

th
e

dance

fl
oo
r

th
e
ir

joints

wo
rked

o
n

b
e
arin
gs.

T
hey

w
ere

s
li
c
k and

q
uick and they w
o
r
e
their mi
rro
r shad
es a
t
bre
ak
fas
t and

d
i
nn
e
r
,
in th
e

sh
ow
er
,

cl
os
ets

a
nd

c
a
v
e
s.

s
hort
,

th
ey

w
er
e

b
ad.

I d
rov
e. Digb
y
p
o
unded

th
e
dashb
oa
rd and
s
h
o
uted

a
l
o
ng with T
oo
ts
&
th
e

Maytals while Jeff
h
u
ng his head out th
e
wind
o
w
a
nd str
ea
ked th
e s
ide of m
y

mother
‘
s Bel
Air
with
vo
mit. It
was
earl
y
Jun
e,
the air
so
ft as a h
a
nd on
you
r
c
heek
,
th
e

third ni
g
ht
o
f
s
umm
e
r v
a
cati
o
n
.
The fir
s
t tw
o
night
s we
‘
d
been
o
ut till da
w
n
,
lo
o
kin
g

for somethin
g
we n
e
v
er
found
. O
n this
,
th
e
third ni
g
ht
,
w
e
‘d cru
ise
d the stri
p
s
ixty
–
s
eve
n

times, been in and
o
ut of ev
ery
bar and club we c
o
uld thin
k
of in
a
tw
e
nty
–
mil
e

r
a
dius
,
s
t
o
pp
e
d twi
ce fo
r bu
c
k
et c
hick
e
n
a
nd forty
–
ce
nt hambur
g
ers
,
de
ba
t
e
d g
o
in
g

t
o

a
party
a
t the hou
se

o
f a

g
irl J
e
ff’
s s
i
s
t
er

kne
w
,
an
d
c
hu
c
k
e
d

two d
oze
n

raw e
ggs

a
t mailb
oxes

and hit
c
hhiker
s. I
t was
2:00
A.M.;
t
h
e

bars w
ere

closin
g
. There w
as

n
o
thing

t
o

d
o

but

t
a
k
e

bottl
e

o
f

lemon
–

fl
av
ored

g
in

Gr
ea
sy

Lake
.

Th
e
t
a
illi
g
ht
s of a s
in
gle
ca
r
w
ink
e
d
a
t us a
s
we
s
wu
n
g
int
o
the dirt l
o
t with i
ts

tufts
of
wee
d

and

was
hboa
r
d

co
rrugati
o
n
s;
‘
5
7 C
he
vy,
mint
,
m
e
tallic
b
lu
e.
On

th
e

far

side

th
e

lot,

lik
e

the

e
xos
keleton

o
f

some

ga
unt

ch
ro
m
e

inse
c
t,

chopp
e
r

l
ea
ned against

its kick
s
t
a
nd. And

that was it for
exci
t
eme
nt:
so
m
e
junkie h
a
lf
–
wi
t

bik
e
r
and
a car freak pumpin
g
hi
s g
irlfriend . Whate
ver
it
was
we
were looking

Andre Gide:

French novelist and critic (1859

–

1961) who was much concerned with unconventional behavior.

“Greasy Lake”

by T.C. Boyle

It’s about a mile down on the dark side of Route 88.

– Bruce Springsteen

There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad,

when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore tom-up

leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what

somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parents’ whining station wagons out into the

street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice, Tango, Thunderbird ,

and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andre Gide

and struck elaborate poses to

show that we didn’t give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake.

Through the center of town , up the strip, past the housing developments and shopping malls, street

lights giving way to the thin streaming illumination of the headlights, trees crowding the asphalt in a

black unbroken wall: that was the way out to Greasy Lake. The Indians had called it Wakan, a

reference to the clarity of its waters. Now it was fetid and murky, the mud banks glittering with broken

glass and strewn with beer cans and the charred remains of bonfires. There was a single ravaged island

a hundred yards from shore, so stripped of vegetation it looked as if the air force had strafed it. We

went up to the lake because everyone went there, because we wanted to snuff the rich scent of possibility

on the breeze, watch a girl take off her clothes and plunge into the festering murk, drink beer, smoke

pot, howl at the stars, savor the incongruous full-throated roar of rock and roll against the primeval

susurrus of frogs and crickets. This was nature.

I was there one night, late, in the company of two dangerous characters. Digby wore a gold star

in his right ear and allowed his father to pay his tuition at Cornell; Jeff was thinking of quitting school

to become a painter/ musician/ headshop proprietor. They were both expert in the social graces,

quick with a sneer, able to manage a Ford with lousy shocks over rutted and gutted blacktop road

at eighty-five while rolling a joint as compact as a Tootsie Roll Pop stick. They could lounge against a

bank of booming speakers and trade “man”s with the best of them or roll out across the dance floor

as if their joints worked on bearings. They were slick and quick and they wore their mirror shades at

breakfast and dinner, in the shower, in closets and caves. In short, they were bad.

I drove. Digby pounded the dashboard and shouted along with Toots & the Maytals while Jeff

hung his head out the window and streaked the side of my mother’s Bel Air with vomit. It was early

June, the air soft as a hand on your cheek, the third night of summer vacation. The first two nights we’d

been out till dawn, looking for something we never found. On this, the third night, we’d cruised the strip

sixty-seven times, been in and out of every bar and club we could think of in a twenty-mile radius,

stopped twice for bucket chicken and forty-cent hamburgers, debated going to a party at the house

of a girl Jeff’s sister knew, and chucked two dozen raw eggs at mailboxes and hitchhikers. It was 2:00

A.M.; the bars were closing. There was nothing to do but take a bottle of lemon- flavored gin up to

Greasy Lake.

The taillights of a single car winked at us as we swung into the dirt lot with its tufts of weed and

washboard corrugations; ’57 Chevy, mint, metallic blue. On the far side of the lot, like the exoskeleton

of some gaunt chrome insect, a chopper leaned against its kickstand. And that was it for excitement:

some junkie half-wit biker and a car freak pumping his girlfriend . Whatever it was we were looking

Andre Gide: French novelist and critic (1859-1961) who was much concerned with unconventional behavior.

The Miseducation of the American Boy

Why boys crack up at rape jokes, think having a girlfriend is “gay,” and still can’t cry—and why we need to give them new and better models of masculinity

Anthony Blasko

Story by

Peggy Orenstein

JANUARY/FEBRUARY

020 ISSUE
of The Atlantic

I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him; he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor). The afternoon of our first interview, I was running late. As I rushed down a hallway at the school, I noticed a boy sitting outside the library, waiting—it had to be him. He was staring impassively ahead, both feet planted on the floor, hands resting loosely on his thighs.

My first reaction was Oh no.

It was totally unfair, a scarlet letter of personal bias. Cole would later describe himself to me as a “typical tall white athlete” guy, and that is exactly what I saw. At 18, he stood more than 6 feet tall, with broad shoulders and short-clipped hair. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge into his jawline, and he was planning to enter a military academy for college the following fall. His friends were “the jock group,” he’d tell me. “They’re what you’d expect, I guess. Let’s leave it at that.” If I had closed my eyes and described the boy I imagined would never open up to me, it would have been him.

But Cole surprised me. He pulled up a picture on his phone of his girlfriend, whom he’d been dating for the past 18 months, describing her proudly as “way smarter than I am,” a feminist, and a bedrock of emotional support. He also confided how he’d worried four years earlier, during his first weeks as a freshman on a scholarship at a new school, that he wouldn’t know how to act with other guys, wouldn’t be able to make friends. “I could talk to girls platonically,” he said. “That was easy. But being around guys was different. I needed to be a ‘bro,’ and I didn’t know how to do that.”

Whenever Cole uttered the word bro, he shifted his weight to take up more space, rocking back in his chair, and spoke from low in his throat, like he’d inhaled a lungful of weed. He grinned when I pointed that out. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s part of it: seeming relaxed and never intrusive, yet somehow bringing out that aggression on the sports field. Because a ‘bro’ ”—he rocked back again—“is always, always an athlete.”

The definition of masculinity seems to be contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male survey respondents said honesty and morality.

Cole eventually found his people on the crew team, but it wasn’t a smooth fit at first. He recalled an incident two years prior when a senior was bragging in the locker room about how he’d convinced one of Cole’s female classmates—a young sophomore, Cole emphasized—that they were an item, then started hooking up with other girls behind her back. And the guy wasn’t shy about sharing the details. Cole and a friend of his, another sophomore, told him to knock it off. “I started to explain why it wasn’t appropriate,” Cole said, “but he just laughed.”

The next day, a second senior started talking about “getting back at” a “bitch” who’d dumped him. Cole’s friend spoke up again, but this time Cole stayed silent. “And as I continued to step back” and the other sophomore “continued to step up, you could tell that the guys on the team stopped liking him as much. They stopped listening to him, too. It’s almost as if he spent all his social currency” trying to get them to stop making sexist jokes. “Meanwhile, I was sitting there”—Cole thumped his chest—“too afraid to spend any of mine, and I just had buckets left.

“I don’t know what to do,” he continued earnestly. “Once I’m in the military, and I’m a part of that culture, I don’t want to have to choose between my own dignity and my relationship with others I’m serving with. But …” He looked me in the eye. “How do I make it so I don’t have to choose?”

I’ve spent two years talking with boys across America—more than 100 of them between the ages of 16 and 21—about masculinity, sex, and love: about the forces, seen and unseen, that shape them as men. Though I spoke with boys of all races and ethnicities, I stuck to those who were in college or college-bound, because like it or not, they’re the ones most likely to set cultural norms. Nearly every guy I interviewed held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at least their role in the public sphere. They considered their female classmates to be smart and competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of their admission to college and of professional opportunities. They all had female friends; most had gay male friends as well. That was a huge shift from what you might have seen 50, 40, maybe even 20 years ago. They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They’d seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A Big Ten football player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. “Everyone knows what that is,” he said, when I seemed surprised.

Yet when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day). It’s not that all of these qualities, properly channeled, are bad. But while

a 2018 national survey of more than 1,000 10-to-19-year-olds

commissioned by Plan International USA and conducted by the polling firm PerryUndem found that young women believed there were many ways to be a girl—they could shine in math, sports, music, leadership (the big caveat being that they still felt valued primarily for their appearance)—young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity.

One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative. In another survey, which compared young men from the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico, Americans reported more social pressure to be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible; they also acknowledged more stigma against homosexuality, and they received more messages that they should control their female partners, as in: Men “deserve to know” the whereabouts of their girlfriends or wives at all times.

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male respondents in the PerryUndem survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.

It wasn’t always thus. According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.

Then, during the second half of the 20th century, traditional paths to manhood—early marriage, breadwinning—began to close, along with the positive traits associated with them. Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyperrationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.

For Cole, as for many boys, this stunted masculinity is a yardstick against which all choices, even those seemingly irrelevant to male identity, are measured. When he had a choice, he would team up with girls on school projects, to avoid the possibility of appearing subordinate to another guy. “With a girl, it feels safer to talk and ask questions, to work together or to admit that I did something wrong and want help,” Cole said. During his junior year, he briefly suggested to his crew teammates that they go vegan for a while, just to show that athletes could. “And everybody was like, ‘Cole, that is the dumbest idea ever. We’d be the slowest in any race.’ That’s somewhat true—we do need protein. We do need fats and salts and carbs that we get from meat. But another reason they all thought it was stupid is because being vegans would make us pussies.”

LEARNING TO “MAN UP”

there is no difference between the sexes’ need for connection in infancy, nor between their capacity for empathy—there’s actually some evidence that

male infants are more expressive than females

. Yet, from the get-go, boys are relegated to an impoverished emotional landscape. In a classic study, adults shown a video of an infant startled by a jack-in-the-box were more likely to presume the baby was “angry” if they were first told the child was male. Mothers of young children have repeatedly been found to talk more to their girls and to employ a broader, richer emotional vocabulary with them; with their sons, again, they tend to linger on anger. As for fathers, they speak with less emotional nuance than mothers regardless of their child’s sex. Despite that, according to Judy Y. Chu, a human-biology lecturer at Stanford who conducted a study of boys from pre-K through first grade, little boys have a keen understanding of emotions and a desire for close relationships. But by age 5 or 6, they’ve learned to knock that stuff off, at least in public: to disconnect from feelings of weakness, reject friendships with girls (or take them underground, outside of school), and become more hierarchical in their behavior.

By adolescence, says the Harvard psychologist William Pollack, boys become “shame-phobic,” convinced that peers will lose respect for them if they discuss their personal problems. My conversations bore this out. Boys routinely confided that they felt denied—by male peers, girlfriends, the media, teachers, coaches, and especially their fathers—the full spectrum of human expression. Cole, for instance, spent most of his childhood with his mother, grandmother, and sister—his parents split up when he was 10 and his dad, who was in the military, was often away. Cole spoke of his mom with unbridled love and respect. His father was another matter. “He’s a nice guy,” Cole said—caring and involved, even after the divorce—“but I can’t be myself around him. I feel like I need to keep everything that’s in here”—Cole tapped his chest again—“behind a wall, where he can’t see it. It’s a taboo—like, not as bad as incest, but …”

A college sophomore told me that he hadn’t been able to cry when his parents divorced. “I really wanted to,” he said. “I needed to.” His solution: He streamed three movies about the Holocaust over the weekend.

Rob, an 18-year-old from New Jersey in his freshman year at a North Carolina college, said his father would tell him to “man up” when he was struggling in school or with baseball. “That’s why I never talk to anybody about my problems.” He’d always think, If you can’t handle this on your own, then you aren’t a man; you aren’t trying hard enough. Other boys also pointed to their fathers as the chief of the gender police, though in a less obvious way. “It’s not like my dad is some alcoholic, emotionally unavailable asshole with a pulse,” said a college sophomore in Southern California. “He’s a normal, loving, charismatic guy who’s not at all intimidating.” But “there’s a block there. There’s a hesitation, even though I don’t like to admit that. A hesitation to talk about … anything, really. We learn to confide in nobody. You sort of train yourself not to feel.”

I met Rob about four months after he’d broken up with his high-school girlfriend. The two had dated for more than three years—“I really did love her,” he said—and although their colleges were far apart, they’d decided to try to stay together. Then, a few weeks into freshman year, Rob heard from a friend that she was cheating on him. “So I cut her off,” he said, snapping his fingers. “I stopped talking to her and forgot about her completely.” Only … not really. Although he didn’t use the word, Rob became depressed. The excitement he’d felt about leaving home, starting college, and rushing a fraternity all drained away, and, as the semester wore on, it didn’t come back.

When I asked whom he talked to during that time, he shrugged. If he had told his friends he was “hung up” on a girl, “they’d be like, ‘Stop being a bitch.’ ” Rob looked glum. The only person with whom he had been able to drop his guard was his girlfriend, but that was no longer an option.

Girlfriends, mothers, and in some cases sisters were the most common confidants of the boys I met. While it’s wonderful to know they have someone to talk to—and I’m sure mothers, in particular, savor the role—teaching boys that women are responsible for emotional labor, for processing men’s emotional lives in ways that would be emasculating for them to do themselves, comes at a price for both sexes. Among other things, that dependence can leave men unable to identify or express their own emotions, and ill-equipped to form caring, lasting adult relationships.

By Thanksgiving break, Rob was so distraught that he had what he called a “mental breakdown” one night while chatting in the kitchen with his mom. “I was so stressed out,” he said. “Classes. The thing with my girlfriend.” He couldn’t describe what that “breakdown” felt like (though he did say it “scared the crap” out of his mom, who immediately demanded, “Tell me everything”). All he could say definitively was that he didn’t cry. “Never,” he insisted. “I don’t cry, ever.”

I paid close attention when boys mentioned crying—doing it, not doing it, wanting to do it, not being able to do it. For most, it was a rare and humiliating event—a dangerous crack in a carefully constructed edifice. A college sophomore in Chicago told me that he hadn’t been able to cry when his parents divorced. “I really wanted to,” he said. “I needed to cry.” His solution: He streamed three movies about the Holocaust over the weekend. That worked.

As someone who, by virtue of my sex, has always had permission to weep, I didn’t initially understand this. Only after multiple interviews did I realize that when boys confided in me about crying—or, even more so, when they teared up right in front of me—they were taking a risk, trusting me with something private and precious: evidence of vulnerability, or a desire for it. Or, as with Rob, an inability to acknowledge any human frailty that was so poignant, it made me want to, well, cry.

BRO CULTURE

while my interview subjects struggled when I asked what they liked about being a boy, the most frequent response was sports. They recalled their early days on the playing field with almost romantic warmth. But I was struck by how many had dropped athletics they’d enjoyed because they couldn’t stand the Lord of the Flies mentality of teammates or coaches. Perhaps the most extreme example was Ethan, a kid from the Bay Area who had been recruited by a small liberal-arts college in New England to play lacrosse. He said he’d expected to encounter the East Coast “ ‘lax bro’ culture,” but he’d underestimated its intensity. “It was all about sex” and bragging about hooking up, and even the coaches endorsed victim-blaming, Ethan told me. “They weren’t like that in class or around other people; it was a super-liberal school. But once you got them in the locker room …” He shook his head. “It was one of the most jarring experiences of my life.”

As a freshman, Ethan didn’t feel he could challenge his older teammates, especially without support from the coaches. So he quit the team; not only that, he transferred. “If I’d stayed, there would’ve been a lot of pressure on me to play, a lot of resentment, and I would’ve run into those guys all the time. This way I didn’t really have to explain anything.” At his new school, Ethan didn’t play lacrosse, or anything else.

What

the longtime sportswriter Robert Lipsyte calls “jock culture”

(or what the boys I talked with more often referred to as “bro culture”) is the dark underbelly of male-dominated enclaves, whether or not they formally involve athletics: all-boys’ schools, fraternity houses, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, the military. Even as such groups promote bonding, even as they preach honor, pride, and integrity, they tend to condition young men to treat anyone who is not “on the team” as the enemy (the only women who ordinarily make the cut are blood relatives— bros before hos!), justifying any hostility toward them. Loyalty is paramount, and masculinity is habitually established through misogynist language and homophobia.

As a senior in high school, Cole was made captain of the crew team. He relished being part of a unit, a band of brothers. When he raced, he imagined pulling each stroke for the guy in front of him, for the guy behind him—never for himself alone. But not everyone could muster such higher purpose. “Crew demands you push yourself to a threshold of pain and keep yourself there,” Cole said. “And it’s hard to find something to motivate you to do that other than anger and aggression.”

I asked him about how his teammates talked in the locker room. That question always made these young men squirm. They’d rather talk about looking at porn, erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation—anything else. Cole cut his eyes to the side, shifted in his seat, and sighed deeply. “Okay,” he finally said, “so here’s my best shot: We definitely say fuck a lot; fuckin’ can go anywhere in a sentence. And we call each other pussies, bitches. We never say the N-word, though. That’s going too far.”

“What about fag?” I asked.

“No,” he said, shaking his head firmly.

“So why can’t you say fag or the N-word but you can say pussy and bitch? Aren’t those just as offensive?”

“One of my friends said we probably shouldn’t say those words anymore either, but what would we replace them with? We couldn’t think of anything that bites as much.”

“Bites?”

“Yeah. It’s like … for some reason pussy just works. When someone calls me a pussy—‘Don’t be a pussy! Come on! Fuckin’ go! Pull! Pull! Pull!’—it just flows. If someone said, ‘Come on, Cole, don’t be weak! Be tough! Pull! Pull! Pull!,’ it just wouldn’t get inside my head the same way. I don’t know why that is.” He paused. “Well,” he said, “maybe I do. Maybe I just try not to dig too deeply.”

Although losing ground in more progressive circles, like the one Cole runs in, fag remained pervasive in the language of the boys I interviewed—including those who insisted that they would never use the word in reference to an actual homosexual. Fag has become less a comment on a boy’s sexuality, says the University of Oregon sociology professor C. J. Pascoe, than a referendum on his manhood. It can be used to mock anything, she told me, even something as random as a guy “dropping the meat out of his sandwich.” (Perhaps oddest to me, Pascoe found that one of the more common reasons boys get tagged with fag is for acting romantically with a girl. That’s seen as heterosexual in the “wrong” way, which explains why one high-school junior told me that having a girlfriend was “gay.”) That fluidity, the elusiveness of the word’s definition, only intensifies its power, much like slut for girls.

Recently, Pascoe turned her attention to no homo, a phrase that gained traction in the 1990s. She sifted through more than 1,000 tweets, primarily by young men, that included the phrase. Most were expressing a positive emotion, sometimes as innocuous as “I love chocolate ice cream, #nohomo” or “I loved the movie The Day After Tomorrow, #nohomo.” “A lot of times they were saying things like ‘I miss you’ to a friend or ‘We should hang out soon,’ ” she said. “Just normal expressions of joy or connection.” No homo is a form of inoculation against insults from other guys, Pascoe concluded, a “shield that allows boys to be fully human.”

Just because some young men now draw the line at referring to someone who is openly gay as a fag doesn’t mean, by the way, that gay men (or men with traits that read as gay) are suddenly safe. If anything, the gay guys I met were more conscious of the rules of manhood than their straight peers were. They had to be—and because of that, they were like spies in the house of hypermasculinity.

Mateo, 17, attended the same Boston-area high school as Cole, also on a scholarship, but the two could not have presented more differently. Mateo, whose father is Salvadoran, was slim and tan, with an animated expression and a tendency to wave his arms as he spoke. Where Cole sat straight and still, Mateo crossed his legs at the knee and swung his foot, propping his chin on one hand.

This was Mateo’s second private high school. The oldest of six children, he had been identified as academically gifted and encouraged by an eighth-grade teacher to apply to an all-boys prep school for his freshman year. When he arrived, he discovered that his classmates were nearly all white, athletic, affluent, and, as far as he could tell, straight. Mateo—Latino and gay, the son of a janitor—was none of those things. He felt immediately conscious of how he held himself, of how he sat, and especially of the pitch of his voice. He tried lowering it, but that felt unnatural, so he withdrew from conversation altogether. He changed the way he walked as well, to avoid being targeted as “girly.” “One of my only friends there was gay too,” he said, “and he was a lot more outward about it. He just got destroyed.”

Guys who identify as straight but aren’t athletic, or are involved in the arts, or have a lot of female friends, all risk having their masculinity impugned. What has changed for this generation, though, is that some young men, particularly if they grew up around LGBTQ people, don’t rise to the bait. “I don’t mind when people mistake me for being gay,” said Luke, a high-school senior from New York City. “It’s more of an annoyance than anything, because I want people to believe me when I say I’m straight.” The way he described himself did, indeed, tick every stereotypical box. “I’m a very thin person,” he said. “I like clothing. I care about my appearance in maybe a more delicate way. I’m very in touch with my sensitive side. So when people think I’m gay?” He shrugged. “It can feel like more of a compliment. Like, ‘Oh, you like the way I dress? Thank you! ’ ”

One of Luke’s friends, who was labeled “the faggot frosh” in ninth grade, is not so philosophical. “He treats everything as a test of his masculinity,” Luke told me. “Like, once when I was wearing red pants, I heard him say to other people, ‘He looks like such a faggot.’ I didn’t care, and maybe in that situation no one was really harmed, but when you apply that attitude to whole populations, you end up with Donald Trump as president.”

W’s AND L’s

sexual conquest—or perhaps more specifically, bragging about your experiences to other boys—is, arguably, the most crucial aspect of toxic masculinity. Nate, who attended a public high school in the Bay Area, knew this well. At a party held near the beginning of his junior year of high school, he sank deep into the couch, trying to look chill. Kids were doing shots and smoking weed. Some were Juuling. Nate didn’t drink much himself and never got high. He wasn’t morally opposed to it; he just didn’t like the feeling of being out of control.

At 16, reputation meant everything to Nate, and certain things could cement your status. “The whole goal of going to a party is to hook up with girls and then tell your guys about it,” he said. And there’s this “race for experience,” because if you get behind, by the time you do hook up with a girl “she’ll have hit it with, like, five guys already. Then she’s going to know how to do things” you don’t—and that’s a problem, if she tells people “you’ve got floppy lips” or “don’t know how to get her bra off.”

A lanky boy with dark, liquid eyes and curly hair that resisted all attempts at taming, Nate put himself in the middle of his school’s social hierarchy: friends with both the “popular” and “lower” kids. Still, he’d hooked up with only three girls since ninth grade—kissing, getting under their shirts—but none had wanted a repeat. That left him worried about his skills. He is afraid of intimacy, he told me sincerely. “It’s a huge self-esteem suck.”

It would probably be more accurate to say that Nate was afraid of having drunken sexual interactions with a girl he did not know or trust. But it was all about credentialing. “Guys need to prove themselves to their guys,” Nate said. To do that, “they’re going to be dominating.” They’re going to “push.” Because the girl is just there “as a means for him to get off and to brag.”

Before the start of this school year, Nate’s “dry spell” had seemed to be ending. He’d been in a relationship with a girl that lasted a full two weeks, until other guys told him she was “slutty”—their word, he hastened to add, not his. Although any hookup is marginally better than none, Nate said, you only truly earn points for getting sexual with the right kind of girl. “If you hook up with a girl below your status, it’s an ‘L,’ ” he explained. “A loss. Like, a bad move.” So he stopped talking to the girl, which was too bad. He’d really liked her.

After a short trip to the kitchen to watch his friend Kyle stand on a table and drunkenly try to pour Sprite from a can into a shot glass, Nate returned to the couch, starting to relax as people swirled around him. Suddenly Nicole, the party’s host and a senior, plopped onto his lap, handing him a shot of vodka. Nate was impressed, if a little confused. Usually, if a girl wanted to hook up with you, there were texts and Snapchats, and if you said yes, it was on; everyone would be anticipating it, and expecting a postmortem.

Nate thought Nicole was “pretty hot”—she had a great body, he said—though he’d never been especially interested in her before this moment. Still, he knew that hooking up with her would be a “W.” A big one. He glanced around the room subtly, wanting to make sure, without appearing to care, that everyone who mattered—everyone “relevant”—saw what was going down. A couple of guys gave him little nods. One winked. Another slapped him on the shoulder. Nate feigned nonchalance. Meanwhile, he told me, “I was just trying not to pop a boner.”

Nicole took Nate’s hand and led him to an empty bedroom. He got through the inevitable, cringey moments when you actually have to talk to your partner, then, finally, they started kissing. In his anxiety, Nate bit Nicole’s lip. Hard. “I was thinking, Oh God! What do I do now?” But he kept going. He took off her top and undid her bra. He took off his own shirt. Then she took off her pants. “And that,” he said, “was the first time I ever saw a vagina. I did not know what to do with it.” He recalled that his friends had said girls go crazy if you stick your fingers up there and make the “come here” motion, so he tried it, but Nicole just lay there. He didn’t ask what might feel better to her, because that would have been admitting ignorance.

After a few more agonizing minutes, Nicole announced that she wanted to see what was going on upstairs, and left, Nate trailing behind. A friend handed him a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Another high-fived him. A third said, “Dude, you hit that!” Maybe the hookup hadn’t been a disaster after all: He still had bragging rights.

Then he heard a senior, a guy Nate considered kind of a friend, loudly ask Nicole, “Why would you hook up with Nate?”

She giggled. “Oh, I was drunk!” she said. “I was so drunk!”

They were calling him an “L.”

By Monday morning, Nicole had spread the word that Nate was bad at hooking up: that he’d bit her lip, that he didn’t know how to finger a girl. That his nails were ragged. “The stereotype is that guys go into gory detail,” Nate said, but “it’s the other way around.” Guys will brag, but they’re not specific. Girls will go into “what his penis looked like,” every single thing he did.

Nate said he felt “completely emasculated,” so mortified that he told his mom he was sick and stayed home from school the next day. “I was basically crying,” he said. “I was like, Shit! I fucked up.”

No question, gossip about poor “performance” can destroy a guy’s reputation almost as surely as being called a “slut” or a “prude” can destroy a girl’s. As a result, the boys I talked with were concerned with female satisfaction during a hookup; they just didn’t typically define it as the girl having an orgasm. They believed it to be a function of their own endurance and, to a lesser extent, penis size. A college freshman in Los Angeles recalled a high-school classmate who’d had sex with a girl who told everyone he’d ejaculated really quickly: “He got the nickname Second Sam. That basically scared the crap out of all the other guys.” A college senior in Boston recounted how he would glance at the clock when he started penetration. “I’d think, I have to last five minutes, minimum,” he said. “And once I could do that, I’d think, I need to get to double digits. I don’t know if it’s necessarily about your partner’s enjoyment. It’s more about getting beyond the point where you’d be embarrassed, maintaining your pride. It turns sex into a task—one I enjoy to a certain degree, but one where you’re monitoring your performance rather than living in the moment.”

Eventually, Nate decided that he had to take a stand, if only to make returning to school bearable. He texted Nicole and said, “ ‘I’m sorry that you didn’t enjoy it, [but] I would never roast you. Why are you doing this?’ ” She felt “really bad,” he said. “She stopped telling people, but it took me until the next semester to recover.”

HOW MISOGYNY BECOMES “HILARIOUS”

no matter how often I heard it, the brutal language that even a conscientious young man like Nate used to describe sexual contact—you hit that!—always unnerved me. In mixed-sex groups, teenagers may talk about hooking up (already impersonal), but when guys are on their own, they nail, they pound, they bang, they smash, they hammer. They tap that ass, they tear her up. It can be hard to tell whether they have engaged in an intimate act or just returned from a construction site.

It’s not like I imagined boys would gush about making sweet, sweet love to the ladies, but why was their language so weaponized ? The answer, I came to believe, was that locker-room talk isn’t about sex at all, which is why guys were ashamed to discuss it openly with me. The (often clearly exaggerated) stories boys tell are really about power: using aggression toward women to connect and to validate one another as heterosexual, or to claim top spots in the adolescent sexual hierarchy. Dismissing that as “banter” denies the ways that language can desensitize—abrade boys’ ability to see girls as people deserving of respect and dignity in sexual encounters.

For evidence, look no further than the scandals that keep popping up at the country’s top colleges: Harvard, Amherst, Columbia, Yale (the scene of an especially notorious 2010 fraternity chant, “No means yes; yes means anal”). Most recently, in the spring of 2019, at the politically progressive Swarthmore College, in Pennsylvania,

two fraternities disbanded after student-run publications released more than 100 pages of “minutes”

from house meetings a few years earlier that included, among other things, jokes about a “rape attic” and the acquiring of roofies, “finger blasting” a member’s 10-year-old sister, and vomiting on women during sex.

When called out, boys typically claim that they thought they were just being “funny.” And in a way that makes sense—when left unexamined, such “humor” may seem like an extension of the gross-out comedy of childhood. Little boys are famous for their fart jokes, booger jokes, poop jokes. It’s how they test boundaries, understand the human body, gain a little cred among their peers. But, as can happen with sports, their glee in that can both enable and camouflage sexism. The boy who, at age 10, asks his friends the difference between a dead baby and a bowling ball may or may not find it equally uproarious, at 16, to share what a woman and a bowling ball have in common (you can Google it). He may or may not post ever-escalating “jokes” about women, or African Americans, or homosexuals, or disabled people on a group Snapchat. He may or may not send “funny” texts to friends about “girls who need to be raped,” or think it’s hysterical to surprise a buddy with a meme in which a woman is being gagged by a penis, her mascara mixed with her tears. He may or may not, at 18, scrawl the names of his hookups on a wall in his all-male dorm, as part of a year-long competition to see who can “pull” the most. Perfectly nice, bright, polite boys I interviewed had done one or another of these things.

How does that happen? I talked with a 15-year-old from the East Coast who had been among a group of boys suspended from school for posting more than 100 racist and sexist “jokes” about classmates on a group Finsta (a secondary, or “fake,” Instagram account that is in many cases more genuine than a “Rinsta,” or “real” account).“The Finsta became very competitive,” he said. “You wanted to make your friends laugh, but when you’re not face-to-face,” you can’t tell whether you’ll get a reaction, “so you go one step beyond.” It was “that combination of competitiveness and that … disconnect that triggered it to get worse and worse.”

At the most disturbing end of the continuum, “funny” and “hilarious” become a defense against charges of sexual harassment or assault. To cite just one example, a boy from Steubenville, Ohio, was captured on video joking about the repeated violation of an unconscious girl at a party by a couple of high-school football players.

“She is so raped,”

he said, laughing. “They raped her quicker than Mike Tyson.” When someone off camera suggested that rape wasn’t funny, he retorted, “It isn’t funny—it’s hilarious!”

“Hilarious” is another way, under the pretext of horseplay or group bonding, that boys learn to disregard others’ feelings as well as their own. “Hilarious” is a haven, offering distance when something is inappropriate, confusing, depressing, unnerving, or horrifying; when something defies boys’ ethics. It allows them to subvert a more compassionate response that could be read as unmasculine—and makes sexism and misogyny feel transgressive rather than supportive of an age-old status quo. Boys may know when something is wrong; they may even know that true manhood—or maybe just common decency—compels them to speak up. Yet, too often, they fear that if they do, they’ll be marginalized or, worse, themselves become the target of derision from other boys. Masculinity, then, becomes not only about what boys do say, but about what they don’t—or won’t, or can’t—say, even when they wish they could. The psychologists Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, the authors of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, have pointed out that silence in the face of cruelty or sexism is how too many boys become men. Charis Denison, a sex educator in the Bay Area, puts it another way: “At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to ‘dick school.’ The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?”

Midway through cole’s freshman year in military college, I FaceTimed him to see how he’d resolved the conflict between his personal values and those of the culture in which he found himself. As he’d expected, most of his classmates were male, and he said there was a lot of what passed for friendly ribbing: giving one another “love taps” on the back of the head; blocking one another’s paths, then pretending to pick a fight; grabbing one another’s asses; pretending to lean in for a kiss. Giving someone a hard time, Cole said, was always “easy humor,” but it could spiral into something more troubling pretty quickly. When one of his dorm mates joked to another, “I’m going to piss on you in your sleep,” for instance, the other boy shot back, “If you do, I’ll fucking rape you.” For better or worse, Cole said, that sort of comment no longer rattled him.

Although he had been adamantly against the epithet fag when we met, Cole found himself using it, reasoning, as other boys did, that it was “more like ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re lame.’ ” However, at least one of his friends had revealed himself to be legitimately homophobic, declaring that being gay was un-American (“I didn’t know that about him until after we became friends,” Cole insisted). And Cole had not met a single openly LGBTQ student at the school. He certainly wouldn’t want to be out in this environment if he were gay. Nor, he said, would he want to be Asian—the two Asian American boys in his dorm were ostracized and treated like foreigners; both seemed miserable.

“I do feel kind of like a cop-out for letting all the little things slide,” Cole said. “It’s a cop-out to not fight the good fight. But, you know, there was that thing I tried sophomore year … It just didn’t work. I could be a social-justice warrior here, but I don’t think anyone would listen to me. And I’d have no friends.”

The #MeToo movement has created an opportunity, a mandate not only to discuss sexual violence but to engage young men in authentic, long-overdue conversations about gender and intimacy. I don’t want to suggest that this is easy. Back in the early 1990s, when I began writing about how girls’ confidence drops during adolescence, parents would privately tell me that they were afraid to raise outspoken daughters, girls who stood up for themselves and their rights, because they might be excluded by peers and called “bossy” (or worse). Although there is still much work to be done, things are different for young women today. Now it’s time to rethink assumptions about how we raise boys. That will require models of manhood that are neither ashamed nor regressive, and that emphasize emotional flexibility—a hallmark of mental health. Stoicism is valuable sometimes, as is free expression; toughness and tenderness can coexist in one human. In the right context, physical aggression is fun, satisfying, even thrilling. If your response to all of this is Obviously, I’d say: Sure, but it’s a mistake to underestimate the strength and durability of the cultural machinery at work on adolescent boys. Real change will require a sustained, collective effort on the part of fathers, mothers, teachers, coaches. (A

study of 2,000 male high-school athletes

found significantly reduced rates of dating violence and a greater likelihood of intervening to stop other boys’ abusive conduct among those who participated in weekly coach-led discussions about consent, personal responsibility, and respectful behavior.)

We have to purposefully and repeatedly broaden the masculine repertoire for dealing with disappointment, anger, desire. We have to say not just what we don’t want from boys but what we do want from them. Instructing them to “respect women” and to “not get anyone pregnant” isn’t enough. As one college sophomore told me, “That’s kind of like telling someone who’s learning to drive not to run over any little old ladies and then handing him the car keys. Well, of course you think you’re not going to run over an old lady. But you still don’t know how to drive.” By staying quiet, we leave many boys in a state of confusion—or worse, push them into a defensive crouch, primed to display their manhood in the one way that is definitely on offer: by being a dick.

During our first conversation, Cole had told me that he’d decided to join the military after learning in high-school history class about the My Lai massacre—the infamous 1968 slaughter by U.S. troops of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians along with the mass rape of girls as young as 10. “I want to be able to be in the same position as someone like that commanding officer and not order people to do something like that,” he’d said. I’d been impressed. Given that noble goal, was a single failure to call out sexism a reason to stop trying? I understood that the personal cost might be greater than the impact. I also understood that, developmentally, adolescents want and need to feel a strong sense of belonging. But if Cole didn’t practice standing up, if he didn’t figure out a way to assert his values and find others who shared them, who was he?

“I knew you were going to ask me something like that,” he said. “I don’t know. In this hyper-masculine culture where you call guys ‘pussies’ and ‘bitches’ and ‘maggots’—”

“Did you say ‘maggots,’ or ‘faggots?’ ” I interrupted.

“Maggots. Like worms. So you’re equating maggots to women and to women’s body parts to convince young men like me that we’re strong. To go up against that, to convince people that we don’t need to put others down to lift ourselves up … I don’t know. I would need to be some sort of superman.” Cole fell silent.

“Maybe the best I can do is to just be a decent guy,” he continued. “The best I can do is lead by example.” He paused again, furrowed his brow, then added, “I really hope that will make a difference.”

This article is adapted from Peggy Orenstein’s book

Boys & Sex

* This article has been updated to reflect that the organization Plan International USA commissioned the 2018 survey of 10-to-19-year-olds conducted by the polling firm PerryUndem.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN

is the author of
Boys & Sex
,

Cinderella Ate My Daughter

, and

Waiting for Daisy: A Tale of Two Continents, Three Religions, Five Infertility Doctors, an Oscar, an Atomic Bomb, a Romantic Night, and One Woman’s Quest to Become a Mother

. Her website is

peggyorenstein.com

What Will You Get?

We provide professional writing services to help you score straight A’s by submitting custom written assignments that mirror your guidelines.

Premium Quality

Get result-oriented writing and never worry about grades anymore. We follow the highest quality standards to make sure that you get perfect assignments.

Experienced Writers

Our writers have experience in dealing with papers of every educational level. You can surely rely on the expertise of our qualified professionals.

On-Time Delivery

Your deadline is our threshold for success and we take it very seriously. We make sure you receive your papers before your predefined time.

24/7 Customer Support

Someone from our customer support team is always here to respond to your questions. So, hit us up if you have got any ambiguity or concern.

Complete Confidentiality

Sit back and relax while we help you out with writing your papers. We have an ultimate policy for keeping your personal and order-related details a secret.

Authentic Sources

We assure you that your document will be thoroughly checked for plagiarism and grammatical errors as we use highly authentic and licit sources.

Moneyback Guarantee

Still reluctant about placing an order? Our 100% Moneyback Guarantee backs you up on rare occasions where you aren’t satisfied with the writing.

Order Tracking

You don’t have to wait for an update for hours; you can track the progress of your order any time you want. We share the status after each step.

Order Now Talk to Us

Areas of Expertise

Although you can leverage our expertise for any writing task, we have a knack for creating flawless papers for the following document types.

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Areas of Expertise

Although you can leverage our expertise for any writing task, we have a knack for creating flawless papers for the following document types.

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

From brainstorming your paper's outline to perfecting its grammar, we perform every step carefully to make your paper worthy of A grade.

Preferred Writer

Hire your preferred writer anytime. Simply specify if you want your preferred expert to write your paper and we’ll make that happen.

Grammar Check Report

Get an elaborate and authentic grammar check report with your work to have the grammar goodness sealed in your document.

One Page Summary

You can purchase this feature if you want our writers to sum up your paper in the form of a concise and well-articulated summary.

Plagiarism Report

You don’t have to worry about plagiarism anymore. Get a plagiarism report to certify the uniqueness of your work.

Free Features $66FREE

Most Qualified Writer $10FREE
Plagiarism Scan Report $10FREE
Unlimited Revisions $08FREE
Paper Formatting $05FREE
Cover Page $05FREE
Referencing & Bibliography $10FREE
Dedicated User Area $08FREE
24/7 Order Tracking $05FREE
Periodic Email Alerts $05FREE

Our Services

Join us for the best experience while seeking writing assistance in your college life. A good grade is all you need to boost up your academic excellence and we are all about it.

On-time Delivery
24/7 Order Tracking
Access to Authentic Sources

Academic Writing

We create perfect papers according to the guidelines.

Professional Editing

We seamlessly edit out errors from your papers.

Thorough Proofreading

We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.

Thorough Proofreading

We thoroughly read your final draft to identify errors.

Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

Work with ultimate peace of mind because we ensure that your academic work is our responsibility and your grades are a top concern for us!

Check Out Our Sample Work

Dedication. Quality. Commitment. Punctuality

It May Not Be Much, but It’s Honest Work!

Here is what we have achieved so far. These numbers are evidence that we go the extra mile to make your college journey successful.

0+

Happy Clients

0+

Words Written This Week

0+

Ongoing Orders

0%

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Process as Fine as Brewed Coffee

We have the most intuitive and minimalistic process so that you can easily place an order. Just follow a few steps to unlock success.

Call Us +1 (877) 657-8180 Discuss Order Details Now

See How We Helped 9000+ Students Achieve Success

We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing

We understand your guidelines first before delivering any writing service. You can discuss your writing needs and we will have them evaluated by our dedicated team.

Clear elicitation of your requirements.
Customized writing as per your needs.

We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services

We write your papers in a standardized way. We complete your work in such a way that it turns out to be a perfect description of your guidelines.

Proactive analysis of your writing.
Active communication to understand requirements.

We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades

We promise you excellent grades and academic excellence that you always longed for. Our writers stay in touch with you via email.

Thorough research and analysis for every order.
Deliverance of reliable writing service to improve your grades.

Place an Order Start Chat Now

English Assignment

Rubric

What Will You Get?

Premium Quality

Experienced Writers

On-Time Delivery

24/7 Customer Support

Complete Confidentiality

Authentic Sources

Moneyback Guarantee

Order Tracking

Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Areas of Expertise

Essay

Thesis

Presentation

Dissertation

Term Paper

Research Paper

Book Review

Assignment

Report

Case Study

Letter

Article

Coursework

Speech

Q & A

Critical Thinking

Trusted Partner of 9650+ Students for Writing

Preferred Writer

Grammar Check Report

One Page Summary

Plagiarism Report

Free Features $66FREE

Our Services

Academic Writing

Professional Editing

Thorough Proofreading

Thorough Proofreading

Delegate Your Challenging Writing Tasks to Experienced Professionals

Check Out Our Sample Work

It May Not Be Much, but It’s Honest Work!

0+

Happy Clients

0+

Words Written This Week

0+

Ongoing Orders

0%

Customer Satisfaction Rate

Process as Fine as Brewed Coffee

Share Your Requirements

Place Order & Deposit Funds

Release Payment to Your Writer

See How We Helped 9000+ Students Achieve Success

We Analyze Your Problem and Offer Customized Writing

We Mirror Your Guidelines to Deliver Quality Services

We Handle Your Writing Tasks to Ensure Excellent Grades