Cocoa: Gender & Chocolate Milk

As soon as I walk into the Starbucks I am annoyed. Why? The lighting. I don’t know when it started, but sometime recently having the lighting of a strip club just became the thing to do. Fashion? I wouldn’t know. Speaking of things I don’t know, I’m not even sure if this place has enough light to make people’s coffee. Absolute madness. But maybe they like it that way, ambiance they call it.  Anyways, it’s modeled after an old pueblo building, with wooden floors, artsy photos, and even a fire place. The place is popular, college folk linger here reading and studying long after their drinks dry. Once we’re inside I smartly scoot myself in front of my friends. But the second I approach the cashier I realize that contrary to my ego I am not a clever man. You see, what I should have done was feign an oddly perplexed look at the half priced mugs as my friends went to the front of the line. Yes, that would have solved everything. What a fool I was, for now they will discover my weakness, my frailty, my daintiness! When I stop wasting the cashier’s time, staring idly at the menu, I mumble the name of my beverage of choice: Hot chocolate. For a brief, most wonderful second, I am saved as my semi-audible noise went unheard by the rather cross female cashier. I said it again, fully aware that the worst of my friends, the one with the beard, was in earshot of what I’d say. There’s no going back, I told myself, the deed must be done. But before it was, in my meager attempt at alleviating the situation, and using an exaggerated high-class voice, I made a clarifying, and awkward, remark, “Brace yourself, for I am going to do what is ought not to be done. Yes, I, a fully grown man, shall be ordering hot-chocolate.” The cashier stared and responded, “Credit or debit?” Alas, it was debit.

It was foolish, I know. I mean how absurd is it to not do or say something you want to because you don’t want to look girly? Hot Chocolate is good. Almost everyone likes hot chocolate, and they can imagine it’s possible for others to like it, too. At least they should be able to, right? What if they don’t, what if they only associate hot chocolate with either 4 year olds or red-cheeked valley girls? Men don’t buy hot chocolate. Men order their coffee black while they stroke their beards. Don’t they? Not quite. Indeed, the silliest part of it all was the fact that I assigned gender traits to a beverage. Since when did poor ol’ hot chocolate become ‘girly’ and since when did that become a bad thing? I was never explicitly told that men should not drink such a delicacy, but over time that’s the impression I got. That’s the impression engraved into me by the dominant cultural forces. The forces that create and seek to control gender binaries. Now, a man ordering hot-chocolate isn’t exactly a paradigm shifting event. I did not come down with the hammer of Thor on gender roles by buying that drink. But that’s not the point.

The point is that this socio-cultural construct, gender, has done everything it can to control my lifestyle. It’s everywhere, in my hair, in my car, and it’s even in my underwear. In fact, I can hardly sit without it controlling what I do. Literally, sometimes I’ll sit-down and cross my legs only to remember that that's the way ‘women’ sit. No, men, as my great-grandfather told me, sit differently. I recall sitting by my great-grandmothers bed at the hospital, on the verge of tears, when he sitting nearby chastised me for sitting like a woman. Be a man, he said. Accordingly, I adjusted my legs to be a man, to be like great-grandpa.  I made sure he saw, but made sure, also, that he did not see my eyes. If men don’t sit like great-grandma did then certainly men don’t cry like grandma was. That’s the same great-grandfather, by the way, who told me to stop saying ‘Daddy’ and start saying ‘Dad’. The more intimate ‘Daddy’ was apparently for girls, while the more distant ‘Dad’ was for boys. That particular binary, intimacy for women and emotional detachment for men, is what has hurt me the most.

A few months ago I was waiting for closing statements to start while at a Mock Trial tournament at the University of California Irvine. I was listening to Irvine’s cross-examination of our character witness, he was playing a Billy Joel type, when the witness I would be direct examining in the next round asked if we could go over our lines outside. He and I began working together two months prior and had just started to develop a good back and forth so he still was not completely comfortable with the direct examination. In-between reviewing our lines he opened up to me about his current relationship and how he had lost a good friend in the midst of it. At this point he mentioned that one of the problems with our performance was that he was still uneasy about me, that is, he still didn’t know if I even liked him or if we were friends.  ‘Oh no, not this, not now.’ I thought to myself. Annoyed by the question, I responded, “‘Are we friends?’ What is this, the third grade? Listen, this is as good as it gets.” I could not help but imagine little girls by the play-ground asking each other if they were friends, piggy tails and all. Is that what he thinks we are? What a wimp, what a pussy. The trouble is, though, I was wondering the same thing he was, but there was no way I would ever ask. Likely, the only reason he did not know if we were friends was because of me. Because in trying to feel like a man, the type of man who does his crying in the shower, I avoided being a decent friend to someone who was more secure with their emotions.   

Now maybe I have some other psychological problems, and I probably do since even amongst the most insecure I am neurotic, but there’s something wrong when I think doing something I constitute as ‘girly’ is an act of blasphemy. Whether it be V-neck shirts or hot chocolate, I have been bred to look out for and avoid that which is feminine. This has cost me relationships of both the friendly and romantic kind. It has caused me to demean the emotions of others and to a greater degree belittle my own feelings. It has lowered my self-esteem and almost always, in retrospect, made me feel like an idiot. That last part, though, is what I have going for me. Luckily for me, I’m sane enough to know when I need to correct myself. After feeling like a jack wagon for insulting the person I considered a friend, I told him that we were, indeed, friends. Coming from a guy who once struggled to buy hot-chocolate that’s a step in the right direction. But that step toward the rejection of oppressive and insidious aspects of gender roles is not going to lead to their full eradication anytime soon.  Gender roles are like lice on a rat, they never get fully deloused.  People should not put their authenticity on the back burner for the sake of fitting into what society deems to be normal gender types. That is ridiculous and degrading. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go buy a Pumpkin Spice Latte with whipped cream on top, or maybe a Strawberry Frappuccino, I haven’t decided yet.