Jock Culture

Men and women in our culture are constantly forced to act a certain way. Humanity takes joy in dictating how each gender should behave. In “Jock Culture” by Robert Lipstye and “Strong Enough” by Wendy Shanker, we learn countless pressures and insecurities that both women and men face in today’s society. The tension placed on both men and women to meet a certain standard may often lead to catastrophic outcomes. Unfortunately, both men and women constantly feel the pressure of fitting into society’s norms, but fitting into these norms comes with many consequences.

Insecure women aren’t born, they are made. In “Strong Enough”, Shanker introduces her personal experience of what being treated as an outcast feels like. Due to rejecting a boy after he asked her to have sex with him, she is then seen as a “lez”. Shanker feels it is devastating that a girl can’t make her own decisions without automatically being labeled. Majority of the reason she is made fun of and is

In “Jock Culture”, Robert Lipsyte introduces us to two types of men on his athletic campus, jocks and pukes. Lipsyte explains, “Jocks were brave, manly, ambitious, foucused, patritioic, and goladriven, while Pukes were wooly, distractible, girlish, and handicapped by their lack of certainty that nothing mattered as much as winning” (305). Lipsyte describes how being a Jock is seen more as the “perfect man” then being a puke. Unfortuanelty, Lipsyte states being described as a puke, you are willing to describe yourself as a “billionare geek, Grammy-winning band fag,wonkish pundit” (307). Lipsyte concludes that men are pressured to be a jock and fear in being labeled as a puke because jocks tend to grow up as a major component to society, while pukes are typically set aside. Today men are pressured to be a jock in society because these jocks are constantly seen as winners and are treated like super