ABSTRACT
Many boys and young man's place for banter and playful teasing. The locker room presents a plausible theatre for male dominance, posturing, and bullying. A boy's or man's nakedness can seem wrong when it means exposure, when there's a threat and the naked male body becomes a target. Ronald Levant notes that there are four contemporary debates about masculinity: essentialism versus social constructionist; mutability; biological, social, and psychological differentiation between masculinity and femininity; and affirmative and negative perspectives shaping intervention and research. Puberty is usually a time when a boy begins to recognize his emergent sexuality as also shaped — socially constructed — by external things such as transmitted masculine gender ideologies, family dynamics including sibling relations, and the demands of one's peer group. A linkage between homosexuality and narcissism dates to Sigmund Freud, whose writing gave us the psychological terminology of narcissism thanks to his amplification of one scene from the myth of Narcissus.
