I don’t generally like hanging out with straight people, specifically young straight men. When I say “straight,” what I really mean is the young men who take a certain pride in being straight. You know, the 18-year-old who walks around in a backwards baseball hat. The one who complains loudly about how hard it is to not cheat on his long distance girlfriend, and then proceeds to dump her to have sex with the girl across the hall. When I say “straight men,” what I mean is the 20-year-old man who will slap the ass of a seventeen year old male coworker while making derogatory comments about women and homosexual men to prove how straight he is. When I say, “straight men,” I am referring to the young men who are constantly worried about being straight enough.

There is this pervasive idea about what constitutes being straight enough, about what being a heterosexual male entails. Men should have lots of sex, not care about women, like to drink, and hate showing emotion of any kind. Moreover, men are not allowed to be sensitive, and a man should never put the feelings of his girlfriend above what his feelings should be, otherwise he is “whipped.” None of this is new information; we have heard this before. We know that this notion of overpowering masculinity is bad and that this shouldn’t be what a “real man” is. Yet these young straight men still exist, and they are everywhere, despite so many people hating this stereotype. Specifically, heterosexual men are still not allowed to show femininity because being feminine is equated with being weak.

Because being feminine is perceived as being bad, it is so much harder for a man to dress femininely, despite the fact that a woman can wear traditional men’s clothing, like a bowtie or a suit, and have it not be a big deal. A woman can be heterosexual and still dress masculinely, but this is absolutely not the case for men. Sure, heterosexual men are able to wear dresses and makeup, but only as a joke when they are dressing in costume. It’s called cross-dressing instead of just dressing when men choose to wear feminine clothing. A heterosexual man could not possibly wear a dress simply because he likes the dress and have people think that he is straight.

I didn’t realize just how difficult it is for straight guys to embrace more feminine things until I met a young man named Mortimer, who has worn eyeliner out at least four times since I’ve met him. When we went to the mall, he put on red sparkly heels and strutted up and down the aisle letting me take pictures. He does not mind putting on lipstick and being feminine, and he looks fantastic whilst doing so. Mortimer is heterosexual, but by all standards, he is an anomaly. Despite the fact that he is comfortable enough with his own masculinity to wear eyeliner in public, it took me nearly two full months to tell him how great he looks with makeup on. I was, and still sort of am, afraid of scaring him away from these feminine things. It was my interactions with Mortimer that made me realize that, as a society, we have so much further to go in breaking down the barriers between the genders.

Straight, male culture exists to keep those barriers intact, and as a result, straight men feel pressured into behaving in awful ways that no one really likes. The reason that women can dress however they want is because they fought for it, and in the same way, men must fight for the right to dress the way that they want. In order to end this culture of misogyny, disrespect, and hatred, men must want not to be forced into this box that dictates exactly how a man can or cannot behave. Heterosexuals must stop seeing being feminine as being weak. By allowing the straight guys that we interact with to be feminine and not jumping to the conclusion that they are queer, and by embracing the fact that masculinity presents itself in different ways besides the picture of a straight guy that is prevalent in society maybe we can change the idea of what being a heterosexual man looks like. One thing is certain, if more heterosexual men were like Mortimer, I would like hanging out with straight men.