Asserting Masculinity in the Cultural Context of Camp

Asserting Masculinity in the Cultural Context of Camp

Summer camp is an important annual experience in many children’s lives. Some kids choose to continue with camp long past their camper years and become counselors. A program, the Camper in Leadership Training (CILT) program, exists within the camp structure as a leadership program designed to educate kids, aged fifteen through seventeen, on how to become effective counselors. Each session typically concludes with a closing campfire, which the male CILTs extinguish after the females have left by urinating on the embers. This folk ritual, affectionately known to the CILTs as “pissing out the fire,” is employed by the male CILT folk group as a strategy that allows them to reassert power, to reaffirm the solidarity of the all-male group, and to regain their masculinity, which has been altered within the camp environment, before leaving the shelter of that environment. During this transitional period, the CILTs anticipate returning to the larger social world and are socializing themselves accordingly. These kids’ experiences with gender identity at camp mirror Barrie Thorne’s point that gender is socially constructed and highly contextual (Thorne 10). This folk ritual allows these boys to regain their gender identity, the identity largely accepted by the outside culture, as they prepare to re-enter mainstream society.

The program is an emotionally challenging one: apart from teaching the foundations of counseling skills, the CILT directors encourage an opening of one’s true self that often involves breaking down the gender fronts kids bring with them. Thorne argues that “boys’ social relations tend to be overtly hierarchical and competitive” (92). The program does not encourage this type of social interaction. Rather, the program chooses to emphasize the emotions in personal relationships and self-disclosure typical of girls’ social relationships (94). After two weeks of learning, sharing, and growing within the camp context, the males’ social relations operate similarly to the females’ because there is no threat of being socially outcast for adopting the behavior values of the other gender. That is to say, the males have become bicultural along gender lines. Just as teasing (as Thorne points out) dissuades cross-gender interaction, social pressure outside camp plays a similar role in limiting males’ expression of things seen as feminine, such as sharing feelings (54). For an age group faced with many social anxieties, extinguishing the fire at the end of the session is an essential tool of anticipatory socialization used to recreate the male gender identity necessary for acceptance in the outside male social world.