How do high school students perceive gender? How do those perceptions contribute to homophobia? And how does gender impact the decisions teens make? A new documentary, Straightlaced, is packed with Interviews with some 50 teens providing a powerful look at the ways that rigid gender roles pervade high school life. TheColu.mn was recently offered a sneak preview of this excellent documentary.

Produced and directed by Debra Chasnoff who has also created Let’s Get Real, a documentary in which youth talk about bullying, and That’s a Family, a documentary about how youth view family diversity, Straightlaced with be screened at the Children’s Theatre Company on Nov. 16.

Straightlaced is fascinating look into the lives of students and the daily struggle to conform to rigid gender stereotypes, the impact of which leads to a host of social problems. Boys admit to having sex at a young age to prove they aren’t gay. Girls starve themselves on strange diets and purposefully underperform in school to maintain a “feminine” persona. Both boys and girls avoid activities they are passionate about for fear of retribution (think boys in ballet, girls in football).

In Straightlaced, we get to hear those students talk about those issues in their own words. “It sad that guys can’t just have the freedom to do what they want to do,” says one student who laments the machismo of sports and the denigration of women that pervades the masculine side of high school culture.

Instead of merely exploring the problems that gender non-conforming students face, Straightlaced allows those students that try so hard to fit stereotypical gender roles to explain the ways those roles constrain them.

Despite the pain visible in many of the students stories, viewers get a look at how things are changing. The courage of some kids to be themselves, dress the way they want, and participate in school activities that are outside typical gender norms, is empowering. For those of us who attended high school decades ago and remember the harshness with which those who didn’t fit in were treated, it is amazing to see how accepting many students can be today.

It’s an in-depth, fun-but-serious documentary that will be an important learning tool for students, certainly, but also for anyone who has ever been felt constrained by gender — which includes all of us whether we consciously acknowledge it or not. Straightlaced allows for some very much needed self reflection on gender, how we perform it and how we can be more open to its fluidity.

Straightlaced: How Gender’s Got Us All Tied Up
Monday November 16, 2009
7:30pm (Doors open at 7pm)
VIP reception at 6:30pm with the director precedes the screening

Children’s Theatre Company
2400 Third Ave So, Minneapolis
(adjacent to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts)

Tickets: Purchase online or at the door.
Online orders: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/85167
$15 General admission
$8 Student/educator
$50 VIP (screening + 6:30 reception)