Gender norms (“Gender Commandments”)

Gender norms (“Gender Commandments”) are the learned expectations that sort bodies, behavior, desire, and social roles into what is considered feminine or masculine. In the novel, Julian encounters the concept in a college class that makes familiar assumptions newly visible: the rules can feel natural precisely because they are taught early, repeated everywhere, and enforced by people who may not recognize themselves as enforcers. Their reach is shown not only in explicit ideas about gender, but in the ordinary talk and conduct through which characters perform, judge, or resist masculinity.

Naming the rules

At Eastern Community College, Gender and Society is the exception to Julian’s otherwise disappointing first experience of community college. The night class gathers adult students and is taught by a professor who transitioned in her late thirties. For Julian, gender as a social construction becomes more than an abstract claim because it comes from someone whose life makes the categories under discussion concrete. The reading introduces unfamiliar terminology, but what holds his attention is the invitation to question assumptions that had seemed too basic to notice.

The class’s account of the rules ranges from color-coded clothing and expected temperaments to bodily ideals and the division between looking and being looked at. Boys are supposed to be tough; girls, sweet. Women are cast as caregivers with soft bodies, men as leaders with hard muscles. The prescriptions also regulate grooming and sexual permission: what bodies should look like, who may look, and which person is expected to act. Julian realizes that the rules seem endless once examined together. Their apparent smallness is part of their power: each can pass as common sense while joining a larger system of expectation.

Bodies, identity, and judgment

Margo Fairchild’s lecture gives that system a personal history. In the photographs she presents, her adolescence appears as a period of visible bodily change: she recalls growing gangly, developing pimples and braces, and waking to find that her legs seemed longer. People praised the transformation by telling her she was becoming a handsome young man, but that praise named a future she did not want. She describes her body’s development as having a momentum of its own, making the distance between physical change and personal identification difficult to stop or control. The episode shows how gender expectations can attach meaning to a changing body and how affirming language from others may still impose an unwanted identity.

Julian’s own descriptions of women reveal that learning to analyze the rules does not immediately free him from their habits. He assesses the women in class through their sexual attractiveness, singles out Salima as the only one near his age he considers attractive, and treats her headscarf as an obstacle to his approval. He also notes that she does not drink, date, or dance and is saving herself for marriage. The contrast between her stated choices and Julian’s dismissive appraisal makes visible a gendered gaze: her appearance and availability become measures through which he evaluates her, even as the course asks him to question who is entitled to look and judge.

Masculinity as peer performance

Brendan’s early college friendship with Zack shows how masculinity can be performed as a group style. Zack casually puts an arm around Brendan, an intimacy that reminds Brendan of Wade’s joking physical affection in the lacrosse hallways. Brendan regards such gestures as funny because the players are known not to be gay. The reassurance depends on a boundary: affectionate contact between men is acceptable so long as the group can frame it as heterosexual play rather than a challenge to its assumptions about sexuality.

The roommates’ joking about college life extends that performance into sexual bravado. They imagine a year of drinking, smoking weed, parties, and sexual conquest, speaking loudly enough to draw disapproving looks from two women walking ahead of them. The humor presents the talk as shared male fun, but it also turns women into the implied audience and objects of a script in which masculine status is demonstrated through sexual confidence. Brendan’s later use of degrading sexual language with Amber makes the script less safely comic. She does not welcome the word he uses for a penis and ignores his question, exposing a gap between his assumption that sexual talk is part of the encounter and her actual response.

Repetition, harm, and refusal

The consequences of this language become explicit when Brendan returns to campus after a difficult stretch. He is failing or at risk of failing classes, Amber is not responding to his texts, and Zack is spending much of his time with Lexa, his girlfriend. Brendan feels displaced in their double room and misses the familiar routine of procrastinating, trash-talking, and playing video games with Zack. When he asks why Zack had not told him about Lexa, Zack explains that the way they talk about girls is not something he wants to do to her; she deserves better. He then says that he does not want to be the person he becomes when he and Brendan are together.

Zack’s response makes the idea of enforcement personal rather than merely academic. The shared talk that had helped define their friendship is also conduct he now recognizes as incompatible with how he wants to treat his girlfriend. His change does not erase Brendan’s loneliness or repair the immediate distance between them: alone in the room, Brendan keeps the door open in hope that someone will pass by and interrupt his isolation. The contrast gives the concept its narrative force. Gender norms operate through habitual jokes and bonds as well as formal instruction, and refusing them can alter a friendship even when the person doing the refusing has not rejected the friend himself. Through Julian’s classroom insight and Zack’s decision to change his behavior, the novel connects broad social rules to their intimate costs and to the possibility of choosing not to repeat them.