3.9: The Policing of Gender and Sexuality

Living in a Heteronormative Society

Heteronormativity is the assumption that heterosexuality is the natural, normal, or expected form of sexuality. It also assumes that people fall into two complementary gender categories: masculine men who are attracted to women and feminine women who are attracted to men.

Gender policing helps maintain heteronormativity because people whose appearance, behavior, relationships, or identities challenge these expectations may be stigmatized. LGBTQ+ people may be treated as deviant for violating the assumption that men should be attracted to women, women should be attracted to men, and everyone should identify with the gender associated with their sex assignment at birth.

The consequences of gender nonconformity are not distributed equally. In some settings, women may adopt a limited range of masculine clothing or behavior without severe sanction. Men who adopt feminine clothing, mannerisms, or emotional expressions may face more intense ridicule or harassment because femininity is often culturally devalued. Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people may experience especially severe policing when their identities or expressions challenge the gender binary itself.

Within families, heteronormativity can shape expectations about dating, marriage, parenting, and future family formation. Parents may assume that their children will form heterosexual relationships, marry someone of another gender, and organize family responsibilities according to conventional gender roles. LGBTQ+ children and adults may therefore have to negotiate whether, when, and how to disclose identities that differ from these expectations.

Hegemonic Masculinity

Raewyn Connell developed the concept of hegemonic masculinity to describe the culturally dominant form of masculinity (Connell, 1987). This "ideal" form is commonly associated with authority, heterosexuality, independence, competitiveness, emotional control, and physical strength.

Boys are frequently monitored by family members, teachers, coaches, and peers for behavior associated with femininity. A boy may be corrected for playing with dolls, expressing fear or sadness, avoiding competitive sports, or appearing "too soft." These messages teach boys that masculinity requires distance from femininity. Sociologist C. J. Pascoe illustrates this process in her ethnographic study "Dude, You’re a Fag." Pascoe found that high school students used the term "fag" not only to question someone’s sexuality but also to discipline boys who appeared weak, emotional, incompetent, or insufficiently masculine (Pascoe, 2007). The insult functioned as a form of gender policing by reminding boys that masculinity had to be repeatedly demonstrated and defended.

Few men embody every feature of hegemonic masculinity. Nevertheless, the ideal provides a standard against which boys and men are evaluated. Men who are gay, transgender, disabled, economically marginalized, emotionally expressive, or otherwise unable or unwilling to conform may be positioned as less masculine.

The term toxic masculinity refers more specifically to harmful expectations associated with masculinity, including aggression, domination, sexual entitlement, risk-taking, and the suppression of vulnerability. It does not suggest that masculinity itself is toxic. Rather, it identifies particular norms that can harm men and the people around them.

In family life, these norms may discourage men from seeking help, sharing caregiving responsibilities, or expressing emotional need. They may also contribute to unequal household labor, controlling behavior, family conflict, and emotional distance between fathers and children. As Victor Rios emphasizes in his talk “Let’s Get Rid of Toxic Masculinity,” boys are often taught that masculinity requires toughness, emotional restraint, and the rejection of anything associated with weakness or femininity (TEDx Talks, 2019).

Emphasized Femininity

Girls and women are also pressured to perform gender, although this policing may take different forms. Connell (1987) used the term emphasized femininity to describe a culturally idealized form of femininity organized around accommodating men’s interests and maintaining women’s subordination within the gender order (Connell, 1987).

Girls may learn that their value depends on appearance, pleasantness, and concern for other people’s feelings. They may be encouraged to take up less physical space, avoid appearing demanding, and remain agreeable even when they are uncomfortable. Within families, girls may also be assigned more caregiving and household responsibilities than boys, teaching them that attending to others is a natural part of femininity.

These expectations can have lasting consequences. Girls and women may learn to minimize their own needs, tolerate unwanted behavior, or feel responsible for maintaining harmony in families and intimate relationships. Cultural pressure to meet narrow beauty standards may also contribute to body dissatisfaction and disordered eating.

Gender policing therefore helps reproduce unequal family roles. It encourages women to perform emotional and domestic labor while encouraging men to distance themselves from caregiving and vulnerability. What appears to be a natural difference between women and men may instead reflect years of unequal socialization and reinforcement.

Gendered Sexual Scripts and the Sexual Double Standard

These gendered expectations are particularly visible in the sexual scripts and double standards that shape how men and women are expected to express sexuality. Society teaches boys and girls different cultural scripts about sex. Boys are often encouraged to appear sexually assertive, experienced, and confident, with sexual activity treated as evidence of masculinity. Girls, by contrast, may be expected to appear desirable but sexually restrained. They may be warned against being "too forward" and judged more harshly for the same sexual behavior that earns boys social approval.

This pattern is known as the sexual double standard. It is reinforced not only by peers and media but also through family rules about dating, clothing, curfews, contraception, and sexual reputation. Parents may supervise daughters more closely than sons because they fear pregnancy, sexual violence, or reputational harm. Although such rules may be intended as protection, they can also reproduce the idea that girls are responsible for controlling sexuality while boys’ sexual behavior is natural or difficult to restrain.

People may carry these different scripts into dating, marriage, and other intimate relationships. Unequal expectations about sexual initiative, desire, consent, and communication can create misunderstanding and conflict. Developing equitable relationships may therefore require partners to recognize and unlearn gendered assumptions acquired through family socialization and the wider culture.

Digital Culture and Beauty Standards

Digital platforms have expanded the reach of gender policing by making people’s appearance continuously visible and open to evaluation. Beauty filters, editing tools, influencer culture, and algorithmically promoted images can create increasingly narrow standards of acceptable femininity.

These pressures can affect family life as parents and children navigate social media, appearance-based comparison, and changing beauty practices. Family members may reinforce these standards through comments about weight, skin, hair, clothing, or attractiveness, but they can also help children critically evaluate the images they encounter online.

Gendered Consumption and the Pink Tax

Gender policing also operates through consumer culture. Products are frequently designed and marketed according to binary ideas about masculinity and femininity, teaching consumers that women and men—and girls and boys—require different clothing, toys, grooming products, and personal-care items.

The pink tax refers to the tendency for products marketed to women and girls to cost more—or provide less product for the same price—than comparable products marketed to men and boys (New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, 2015). Although it is described as a "tax," it is not an official government charge. Rather, it refers to gender-based differences in consumer pricing.

Gendered pricing can begin in childhood. Families may pay more for toys, clothing, and accessories marketed to girls than for similar products marketed to boys. A study by the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs found that girls’ toys and accessories cost approximately 7% more, on average, than comparable boys’ products (New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, 2015). These differences show how gender inequality can become embedded in ordinary household spending.

Gendered marketing is also connected to beauty standards. Girls and women are often socialized to understand grooming, attractiveness, and appearance-related consumption as important parts of femininity. In her TEDx talk "Pink Tax and the BS in Beauty Standards", Felicia Clark argues that beauty expectations encourage women to spend additional money attempting to meet socially constructed standards of femininity (Clark, 2019).

The following image illustrates how gendered pricing can operate even when two products have the same sticker price. Two Byly deodorants marketed to women and men are each priced at $5.99 CAD. However, the women’s product contains 50 mL, while the men’s product contains 75 mL. Although the prices are identical, the product marketed to women costs more per milliliter.

From a sociological perspective, the pink tax illustrates how patriarchal expectations can become embedded in consumer markets and everyday family spending. The added costs associated with femininity may be particularly burdensome for low-income households. However, gendered beauty and consumption standards do not affect all women and girls in the same way.

Intersectionality and Gender Policing

Gender policing is shaped by race, social class, sexuality, disability, age, immigration status, and other social identities. Intersectionality, a framework introduced by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, explains how multiple systems of inequality interact to produce distinct experiences of privilege and disadvantage (Crenshaw, 1989).

Gender expectations are therefore not applied to everyone in the same way. A white, middle-class boy may encounter different assumptions about masculinity than a working-class Latino boy. Similarly, the femininity presented as "ideal" has often centered youth, thinness, whiteness, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, and middle-class respectability.

Women who do not conform to this narrow ideal—including women of color, women who identify as LGBTQ+, working-class women, women with a disability, and women who reject conventional beauty standards—may be judged according to expectations that were never designed to include them. An intersectional approach therefore shows that gender policing does not operate uniformly. Its form, consequences, and intensity depend on a person’s position within several overlapping systems of power.

Open Content, Shared Previously

Adapted by Sarah Earl-Novell from 5.10: Policing of Gender in the United States in Sexuality, the Self, and Society by Susan Rahman with Nathan Bowman, Dahmitra Jackson, Lushtak, Remi Newman, & Prateek Sunder, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Modifications by Sarah Earl-Novell include remixing, editing, contextualization, and the addition of original content.

References

Clark, F. (2019). Pink tax and the BS in beauty standards [Video]. TEDxWilmingtonLive. YouTube. 

Connell, R. W. (1987). Gender and power: Society, the person and sexual politics. Stanford University Press.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167. 

Hu, E. (2024, October). How digital culture is reshaping our faces and bodies [TED Talk]. TED Conferences.

New York City Department of Consumer Affairs. (2015, December). From cradle to cane: The cost of being a female consumer.

Pascoe, C. J. (2007). Dude, you’re a fag: Masculinity and sexuality in high school. University of California Press.

TEDx Talks. (2019, August 27). Let’s get rid of toxic masculinity | Victor Rios | TEDxUCSB [Video].

West, C., & Zimmerman, D. H. (1987). Doing gender. Gender & Society, 1(2), 125–151.