Groundspark (formerly Women's Educational Media) has come out with a powerful new educational documentary, Straightlaced: How Gender's Got Us All Tied Up. (Full disclosure: we had the opportunity to give feedback on parts of the early version of the film.)

As with their other documentaries (It's Elementary and That's a Family), Straightlaced mainly features kids, alone, talking directly to the camera without prompting and telling their stories in their own, sometimes eloquent, sometimes halting, words.

And what stories they are:

• A football star who goes to hug a friend after an emotional win and is pushed away and told, "I'm no fag."
• A young Asian woman talking about racially tinged gender expectations that she be thin, pretty, passive and smart.
• A young Latino who is attracted to a bright colored shirt while shopping but tells the camera, "If I wear that to school, I'd be killed."

There are dozens of these stories. After awhile, you get a real feel for these kids. You start to see beyond who's gay and who's straight, who's of color and who's white, and you start to see how the gender system affects each and every one of them, in their most intimate decisions, every school day. That's probably Groundspark's intent.

Many of us have observed how when kids finish puberty, learning, conforming to and policing pretty rigid gender role expectations for masculinity and femininity can suddenly seem like the most important thing in the world. Researchers have dubbed this common phenomenon "gender intensification," and it's certainly on high display in this firm. More than a few of these teens talk about their fear of harassment, ostracism, ridicule or even attack.

High school is like a pressure cooker when it comes to fulfilling gender roles. Straightlaced may be the first film to document what life is really like for teens who try to live up to masculine and feminine ideals, want to live up to them, or sometimes simply refuse them altogether. Check out the YouTube trailer here, or embedded below.