As a first-year student at Lehigh University, I was automatically enrolled in an English class my first-semester. Within the first day of attending that English class I discovered that we would be focusing on Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice, as well as various adaptations of it. As the first essay prompt was handed to me I automatically knew that I wanted to examine all aspects of femininity displayed in Austen’s work. Coming from a large Brazilian family that only seems to produce women, and a high school where my English teacher was a major feminist, this was a topic I felt very comfortable and familiar discussing and writing about.
However, walking into English class this Spring semester, I quickly realized I would be placed outside of my comfort zone as my professor introduced this semester’s topic: masculinity. Raised mainly by my mother and grandmother, I didn’t have a close male figure around and “masculinity” wasn’t in my vocabulary. Quite frankly, even after my mother remarried and had my younger brother, I still couldn’t understand men. Despite being skeptical on my abilities to understand masculinity after having previously placed so much focus on the aspects of femininity, I soon overcame this after reading our first assigned book Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by Michael Kimmel. All of a sudden, the “male species” made sense to me.
As we progressed through the semester I discovered how much I enjoy analyzing masculinity, what it meant, how men achieved it, and how they maintained it. Who knew men could be just as complicated as women?