The New York Times Magazine, Sunday, August 22, 1999

The Outsiders
whose regional high school, ConVal, sits in Peterborough, N.H., the setting that
inspired Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." But what it shares with those other
places, and with countless others across the country, is a brutally enforced
teen-age social structure.
Below the
popular kids, in a
shifting order of
relative
unimportance,
are the druggies,
trendies,
preppies,
skateboarders,
nerds and
techies, wiggers,
rednecks and
Goths, better
known as freaks.
Real losers are
invisible.
Boys at the bottom of the pyramid use different
strategies to cope -- turning inward and outward,
sometimes in highly destructive ways. (There has
been a fivefold jump in the homicide and suicide
rates of boys in the last 40 years, a rise some experts
attribute to increasing male depression and anger as
well as access to guns, among other factors.) Most
boys live through it, suffer, survive. But the journey
may be especially deadly now because, as the
avalanche of new "male identity" literature
demonstrates, the old prescriptions for behavior no
longer hold, and the new ones are ambivalent.
Today's young males may be feminism's children,
but no one is comfortable with openhearted or
vulnerable boys.
ConVal is in some ways progressive. There are
about 900 students and an administration that
consciously works to minimize the ultramacho
sports culture that dominates many schools. Says
Bob Marshall, the head of the social studies
department, who founded the football program in
1992: "We had to create a football culture. People
didn't know when to cheer. We didn't even have a school song."
Even so, the traditional hierarchies operate: the popular kids tend to be wealthier
and the boys among them tend to be jocks. The Gap Girls-Tommy Girls-Polo
Girls compose the pool of desirable girlfriends, many of whom are athletes as
well. Below the popular kids, in a shifting order of relative unimportance, are the
druggies (stoners, deadheads, burnouts, hippies or neo-hippies), trendies or
Valley Girls, preppies, skateboarders and skateboarder chicks, nerds and techies,
wiggers, rednecks and Goths, better known as freaks. There are troublemakers,
losers and floaters -- kids who move from group to group. Real losers are
invisible.
Bullying, here as elsewhere, is rampant. Even in small-town, supposedly safe
environments like Peterborough, a 1994 study found, the vast majority of kids
from middle school up are bullied by their peers. The shaming is sex-based, but
the taunting is more intense for boys -- an average high-school student,
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