Abstract
Very little research has examined what goes on in the minds of young men during sex. Such an exploration might reveal gender-normative discourses as well as challenges to such. This discourse analysis understands internal speech as that which both instantiates status quo ideals of masculinity and which challenges them. We use theories of hegemonic masculinity and Vygotskyan notions of “others in the head” to understand how hegemonic masculinity is reproduced during the act of having sex. This study is based on qualitative interviews with thirteen heterosexual young adult US men asking what goes through their mind during sex. Young heterosexual men produce a masculinity discourse that supports dominant constructions of heterosexuality, monitoring their sexual behaviors based on imagined and expected reactions of abstract and very real male reference groups. The analysis shows men describing thoughts during sex that make sex like work, keeps in mind a variety of other people, some literally awaiting news of the sex, and some abstract representations of masculinity. Men report a constant self-evaluation based on women’s performances of pleasure, for example, screaming, never construed as inauthentic, or as a performance at all. Thoughts about masculinity were not present in intimate moments when men described a “letting go of masculinity” in order to be intimate.
Hegemonic masculinity, constructed to be Western, white, and middle class, is a set of shifting goals based on heteronormative ideals that can never be fully reached. Connell originally and in her revision with Messerschmidt (Connell 1987, 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) defined hegemonic masculinity as a dominant ideology that legitimized and naturalized the interests of a particular group of men through subordination and marginalization of women as well as other groups of men and alternative forms of masculinity. It is represented by dominance, control, physical strength, and economic success and defined by constant struggle and competition not only between men and women but among men themselves (Connell 1987; Kimmell and Mahler 2003). And it has been understood as “the pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that allowed men’s dominance over women to continue” (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005, 832).
Upon reviewing the critiques of the theory, Connell and Messerschmidt (2005) argued that the use of an oversimplified model of social relations and the notion of masculinity as a fixed character type should be rejected from the concept of hegemonic masculinity. However, there are features of hegemonic masculinity that should be retained, such as the multiple patterns of masculinity and the hierarchy of masculinities, which include the widely documented subordination of those not belonging to hegemonic masculinity identities. One area they focused on in their reformulation is the process of social embodiment of hegemonic masculinity discourse, which leads to the amplification of power through reproduction of the construct of masculinity. In addition to the critique of the model of hegemonic masculinity as too oversimplified, the theory has been criticized for not offering men subjects the possibility of and avenues for resistance (Wetherell and Edley 1999).
Contemporary hegemonic masculinity takes multiple forms, responding to changing historical and cultural ideals, including forms that stem from diverse ethnic and racial identities (Messner 1993) but it continues to include physicality, heteronormativity, homophobia, violence, misogyny, and control (Kimmel and Mahler 2003). Explorations of black masculinity (Gray 1995; Majors and Billson 1993) and Latino masculinity (Messner 1993) have shown how it can work to preserve hegemony while adapting to oppression and marginalization (Cooper 2005).
One of the areas in which the concept of hegemonic masculinity has been explored is in research on sexuality. Research confirms that the act of having sex is an experience in which masculinity is required to be performed and confirmed through bodily practices. As Hollway (1984) wrote, the male sex drive discourse is one that essentializes biology and positions men at the mercy of powerful drives. Researchers have also found that the confirmation of masculinity through bodily practice interferes with condom use, as sex is supposed to be experienced as a “spontaneous, uninterruptible, powerful, hydraulic force” (Vittelone 2000, 152). This essentializing discourse is matched by discourses about sex as performance (Brubaker and Johnson 2008; Tiefer 1986, 1995) that confirms masculinity. Flood’s (2008) qualitative study also shows heterosexual sex can be a medium through which “male bonding is enacted.” This is a point that Kimmel (2008) has made regarding the bonding over sex as a way men address their vulnerability around not knowing or not being competent. More generally speaking, Holland et al. (2004), in their large-scale interview study, describe young people’s sexual practices as linked to the social organization of male power.
Still, some recent research on hegemonic masculinity in heterosexual sexual relationships has shown young men resisting the hegemonic gender regime. Dworkin and O’Sullivan (2005) found young men reporting that they desire more equality in sexual practice (e.g., with regard to initiating sex) and others report young men redefining hegemonic masculinity to include intimacy (Allen 2005; Seal and Ehrhardt 2003). Some studies report that young men deny using power to control their partners in the context of heterosexual relationships and endorse a continuum of subject positions from powerful to powerless in relationship without condemning either extreme (Doull et al. 2013). At the same time, contemporary “gender regimes” still position women as submissive in sex and men as “sexually experienced and insatiable in their ongoing pursuits of sexual activities with women” (Oliffe et al. 2013, 331).
Voices of the Mind
Hegemonic masculinity informs us of the ideals men attempt to live up to. Discourse theory enables us to see what kinds of ideologies get taken up and reproduced in the minds of men as they pursue and embody masculinity in our attempts at understanding the subjective experience of individuals (Hollway 1984). We see Vygotsky’s cognitive psychology as helpful in understanding how these discourses are reproduced as voices in the mind of individuals. Working from a Vygotskian perspective, Wertsch (1991) described a sociocultural approach to understanding the mind where language is just one means of mediation for a “mediated action” of human thought (p. 12). The term voice was originally used by a Soviet philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1993) to refer to the speaking personality or the participating or speaking consciousness, based on the idea that even psychological processes that are carried out in isolation involve communication because they initially develop through social interaction. Bakhtin and Vygotsky both claimed that communication creates mental functioning and not vice versa, and thus, consciousness should be seen as inherently social. Rather than speaking about “roles” and “personalities,” Wertsch underscores that “when a speaker produces an utterance, at least two voices can be heard simultaneously” (p. 13), referring to the idea that the social and the personal cannot be separated. Wertsch speaks about “voices” rather than one voice of the mind and argues that “certain forms of speaking and thinking (voices) rather than others are invoked on particular occasions” (p. 14), and some voices are privileged in particular contexts.
Recently, Ryan and Johnson (2009) have described Bahktin’s notion of dialogism as useful in understanding “the ways in which the individual and the social interact to constitute the diverse, multifaceted identities or subjectivities of individuals as they construct and express meaning” (p. 248, emphasis added). They note that this theory helps in conceptualizing how identities are both constructed and experienced and highlight the interplay between self and the ideologies of psychology.
A voices-of-the-mind approach also hearkens back to philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934) who anticipated the discursive psychology approach in his work on self and mind; he described a dialectical relationship between society and the individual and argued that individual psychology was only to be understood through social processes and there is no mind without communication. He wrote that the self is always social and constructed in two ways, through reflecting a generalized other and through responding to that generalized other: “The ‘I’ is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the ‘me’ is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes” (Mead 1934, 175).
One previous study looked at “voices in the mind” as interactional and social. Holland and colleagues’ (2004) term “the-male-in-the-head,” a male they describe as the “game master” (p. 25), seems to fit with our efforts to understand how the relationship of men to other men is enacted in the minds of men during sex.
This approach is different from sexual script theory (Gagnon and Simon 1973; Simon and Gagnon 2003) which attempts to show that sexual interactions are scripted through predictable stages, references to common knowledge, and active voicing among other formulations (Frith and Kitzinger 2001). Script theory sees individuals as reproducing what has been learned, in rather a fixed way, from cultural messages. Such a conceptualization focuses on individual cognitions whereas discursive psychology understands cognitions as “interactional and social resources” (Frith and Kitzinger 2001, 228).
Voices of the Mind and Discursive Psychology
The voices of the mind approach is consistent with discursive psychology’s approach regarding subjectivity and how subjectivity cannot be separated from culture and society. Wetherell and Edley (1999) argue that the formulation of an internal life occurs through discourse, through the “personal enactment of communal methods of self-accounting, vocabularies of motive, culturally recognizable emotional performances and available stories for making sense” (p. 338). As will be evident in our analysis, we take “communal methods of self-accounting” to also apply to those people “in the head.” In their discussion of masculine subjectivity, Wetherell and Edley (1999), as well as other authors writing about gendered subjectivity in psychology (Billig 1991; Magnusson and Marecek 2012) and in line with writings of Vygotsky on speech as internalized social ideals, emphasize the discursive nature of psyche, experience, and thought, as well as a direct connection between language, social discourses, thought, and gendered subjectivity.
One of the key views of masculine sexual subjectivity from discursive psychology is Hollway’s (1984). Hollway conceptualizes male sexual subjectivity as discursive, as socially and historically reproduced. One of her key ideas on masculine subjectivity is that male and female gendered subjectivity is a mutual reproduction of one another, constructed always in opposition and on the basis of one another, and thus is dependent on available social and historical discourses of gender differences.
The Present Study
The present study differs from previous studies as it focuses on men during sex. In asking what goes through their minds during sex, we consider that men, while having sex, are filtering the account of their sexual behavior and orienting it in relation to the ideals of hegemonic masculinity. We also expect that an inner discourse will monitor their performance in relation to those expectations and others in mind. Because of the nature of sex, we also believe we open up talk about intimacy and ways in which gendered expectations may be relaxed, while also mindful about the ways that masculinity might also determine how a man performs intimacy. One limitation is that we are not inside the mind of men during sex but are asking them to reproduce these voices in a social and research context. We thus focus on two aspects of how masculine subjectivity is constructed through sexual experiences: (1) through the voices of the mind that men describe they have during sex and (2) through the intersubjective interviewing process.
We explore that other people and voices might be “in the head” during sex, inspired by the voices of the mind approach of Wertsch (1991) and Mead (1934) as well as from the discourse analytic perspective and theoretical approaches developed by Wetherell and Edley (1999) and Hollway (1989), also evident in the male-in-the-head theory of Holland and colleagues (2004). We argue that the call to produce a masculinity discourse in the head is hyperactivated during sex. This hyperactivation occurs in context where there are restrictions around intimacy and emotion, that is, when intimacy and emotion challenge masculinity. This hyperactivation also occurs in a cultural context that is saturated with discourse relating to male use of sex as a way to prove masculinity. Our interview focuses on the voices of the mind and we ask our participants directly about their thoughts relating to masculinity during sex. Our analysis, as described below, focuses on both reproducing voices as well as transgressive ones. We focus on these because transgressions can unveil that which is taken for granted in reproducing heterosexual hegemonic masculinity.
Method
Participants
Participants for this study included thirteen students at an urban, public university in the northeast whose graduating class is always over 50 percent first time college attendees. These students were thirteen heterosexual participants in a larger study that contained eighteen students. All participants self-identified as male. The age of participants ranged from 19 to 25 (mean age 23). Most of the participants were in college; one participant was in graduate school. All participants provided more than one identity when asked about their race/ethnicity. The participants identified as white or Caucasian (7), Asian (1), African American and African (1), black (1), Haitian (1), Latino/Haitian (1), and Middle Eastern (1).
Procedure
All the participants were interviewed one-on-one by a team member (Elena Kosterina), using a semistructured interview protocol. The interviewer was a heterosexual 26-year-old female and an international graduate student in psychology whose first language was Russian. The interviewer was trained by the first author (Sharon Lamb) to conduct in-depth interviews in the style of qualitative research under the tradition of discourse analysis and following guidelines by Braun and Clarke (2006) and Magnusson and Marecek (2015).
The length of the interviews varied from forty minutes to an hour and a half, with most interviews being an hour in length. Some of the interviews were brief due to the interviewer’s sensitivity to reported and observable discomfort of some participants around discussing sexual encounters. During the interview, the participants were asked to describe the thoughts in their mind during several past sexual experiences. A sexual experience was not defined for the participants beforehand, except for the requirement that it should be an encounter with another person or persons. If the participants requested any clarification, they were asked to talk about any sexual experience involving vaginal, anal, or oral sex, and any other interaction which they chose to identify as a sexual encounter. Participants were asked to first talk about one recent experience, then one adolescent or first experience, then one experience that they considered troubling, and then one particularly intimate experience. In relation to all experiences, the participants were asked some of the following questions: I would like you to think of a specific sexual experience you had with another person, perhaps the most recent one. Make sure you remember enough details so you can speak about this one. Let me know when you have one. Think back, and this might be hard to do, but can you say what thoughts went through your head and what feelings you were having? (Probes)
The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim by five members of a graduate student research team. Transcripts included contextual and nonverbal elements of speech, such as pauses, hesitations, and repetitions. This study was approved by the university institutional review board. In order to protect the privacy of participants, all identifying information was removed from the interview transcripts.
Data Analysis
The data were analyzed using a discursive thematic analysis described by Braun and Clarke (2006). The themes that were inductively identified in the transcripts were used to situate the narratives of respondents within the societal discourses of gender regimes, masculine sexuality, and maleness. The analysis followed the six stages of analysis: familiarizing with data, coding, searching for themes, reviewing themes, defining and naming themes, and producing the report. The analysis was focused on both the explicitly semantic and the latent aspects of the data, with an attempt to “go beyond the surface” of the data and study “the underlying ideas, assumptions, and conceptualizations—and ideologies—that are theorized as shaping or informing the semantic content of the data” (Braun and Clarke 2006, 84). As all authors were engaged in transcription, this process was considered an initial stage of interpretation process and an important phase of gaining familiarity with the data and initial coding. Following that, the authors read the transcripts multiple times in active ways to identify the primary themes. Each theme was coread by two researchers and reviewed for internal homogeneity and external heterogeneity. After the themes and subthemes were defined, the data set was read again by all researchers in order to verify the applicability of themes to the whole data set and to check for additional themes. Finally, the themes were named, relationships between them were established, and the identified themes were related to the discourses around masculinity and masculine sexuality available to heterosexual men, using the discursive psychology approach (Potter 2004; Potter and Wetherell 1987).
Since this study is aimed at studying male sexual subjectivity through reported thoughts and feelings, specifically through the reported memories of those, we chose the discursive psychology approach as it offers a valuable way to look at both thoughts and memories about thoughts in the context of discursive acts of recalling and reporting one’s memories in the interviews. Discursive psychology suggests looking at speech, thoughts, memories, and subjectivity resulting from them as argumentative in nature (Billig 1991), where the voices in one’s head are largely produced by everyday interactions and thus are discursive in nature, and thinking in one “voice” inevitably means thinking instead or against other voices (Billig 1991; Edley 2006). We acknowledge that the accounts produced by the participants in this study are influenced by the limitations of interpersonal process recall as much as by the context of interaction with a woman interviewer who is of their age. The extent to which participants might have been “doing gender” (West and Zimmerman 1987) in these circumstances is accounted for in this study. Thus, the factual accuracy of our participants’ memories of their thoughts is not critical for our analysis and it will not be discussed as a limitation. Instead, we are interested in the communicative goals of the reported memories of thoughts and feelings in the cultural context of this particular interviewing interaction, based on the idea that remembering is always discursive and always “socially occasioned” and depends on the given context of the interaction (Edwards and Potter 1992, 76). As noted below, we were also interested in the potential for discourse to be produced in response to a female interviewer and include the analysis of this rather than see this as a limitation.
Analysis
While men are engaged in sexual activities, they are also constructing themselves as men having sex, through their thinking, positioning themselves in relation to their partner and to various others. Using a combination of thematic and discursive analysis, we identified the following major themes: sex as performance (present in all participants’ accounts), the importance of knowing (present in nine of thirteen accounts), and the theme of control (present in eleven of thirteen accounts). In our analysis, we also take a look at what we call “others in mind” (present in nine of thirteen participants’ accounts), which was not a discursive theme uncovered in the analysis but a response to the question of the interviewer asking if participants ever thought about other people during sex. In our analysis, we also identified a range of particular discursive acts that were understood to be ways of positioning oneself in relation to the female interviewer or in relation to what a participant thought might be public opinion: they worked to both preserve their masculine identity and discursively give nods to feminism.
Sex as Work Performance
As has been pointed out in earlier studies focusing on male sexuality (e.g., Brubaker and Johnson 2008; Tiefer 1986, 1995) when heterosexual men attempted to reproduce the thoughts inside their heads while having sex, the discursive theme of performance regularly came up. In the current study, this theme was expressed in the language of the “world of work.” The participants discussed their thoughts of having “goals” of pleasing a woman and that they wanted to “measure up to a standard” (with an undefined source) and to be the “best”: I was like oh, I didn’t give her an orgasm, I must have not done my job properly. (Dan)
I am responsible to pleasure my girlfriend. I have to do it and if I don’t do it, I will not feel any pride as being a man because I cannot even do the job that I am supposed to do. (Tom) So me not being able to get up kinda felt like I wasn’t doing my job…Like I said before…when you can’t…when you don’t perform, you just feel less of a man. I don’t know, I just feel…. (James) I feel attractive if I did a good job I feel like I am more…I am good at something and it feels good. [later in the interview] I just felt like you should make them [women] extra aroused, I guess it’s a way to prove my manhood, by being the fastest, being the hardest, you know, being the best and to please her…. (Nick) At that point I was thinking I’ll do this because she wants to…you know because she’s sooo into it and you know I don’t wanna like I don’t wanna like disappoint her or whatever. I also felt…I felt like ummm like I felt also kind of like I wasn’t ummm like you know I felt, what’s…what’s the word? Like ummm like almost like…ashamed or you know… kinda like ummm like she might see me as…[…] I’m not…I’m not…I’m not holding up to my standard […] I hope she doesn’t look down on me for this. I hope umm I hope that you know I hope that she doesn’t see me as inadequate…[…] as a lesser…as lesser of a person for whatever reason or see me as, not as good as a partner. (Dan) […] I was almost going to orgasm but I tried to hold myself back because I felt like she would be dissatisfied or I know she would be dissatisfied and become upset with me and then tell me that I was being selfish so I tried to keep my own satisfaction to a minimum. (Fred)
Additionally, in their references to sex as performance, it was evident that the participants used a phallocentric discourse of male sexuality (Tiefer 1995). This was evident in participants’ interpretation of “sexual experience” primarily as a penetration of vagina with a penis and as the male being the initiator and active performer during this act. As it has been found in other studies on (e.g., du Plessis 2015), male sexuality is pervasively understood from a position of phallocentric and heteronormative discourse and male sexual desire equated with penile erection and penetration. Some findings from our study contribute to the knowledge on phallocentric discourse of male desire. For example, it was interesting to note that when using language from the world of work, all the participants positioned themselves as the only ones “doing the work” and never as the one benefiting from the “work” of the partner or passively being pleasured by women. They constructed themselves as the ones giving pleasure and women as the ones receiving pleasure. In so doing, they were denying any active position for the women. There might have been a number of factors that influenced such a discursive move. One possibility might have been that there are voices in the mind regarding the expectations of women’s work during sex that the men did not feel comfortable reproducing in interview. Perhaps the presence of a female interviewer evoked in the men a discourse around working hard to please, defending against imagined accusations of not caring about a woman’s pleasure. Participants’ responses might have been the result of both their attempts to resist the dominant and pervasive male sexual drive discourse (Hollway 1984) and fight back against wide-accepted construction of male sexuality as uncontrollable and serving only men’s desire.
Only one participant questioned this construction of a male as the only one active during sex. Dan, after positioning himself earlier in the interview as a man who would not want his woman partner to be disappointed in his sexual performance, protested this responsibility: I think like there’s this expectation, like in terms of like being able to satisfy her is like a man, like a masculine notion in a way. Because it’s like, it’s like like “give the girl an orgasm” is such like a masculine thing. Like why does this have to be? Like I’ve wondered that…Like why is that the guy’s job, I mean like if that doesn’t happen it’s like oh the guy was inadequate? It’s like it’s never, the female is never the one who’s…who’s inadequate, it’s always the guy. Like if the sex was bad it’s always the guy’s fault in a way. And it is typical societal notion in a sense. When it doesn’t go well you have that standard above you. I feel like those feelings of incompetence or of ummm or you know whatever it is…guilt or shame or whatever, come from that standard that’s created. The standard of an ideal man who is perfect in bed or whatever you know and then that and then those feelings of proudness…Or of relief […]. (Dan)
From the above excerpt, the subject position of a male as a sexual performer seems to be experienced more through a fear of feeling “inadequate” rather than a desire for feeling successful. Subjectivity is shaped by two sets of feelings which are both drawn from the discourse of performance at the end of Dan’s account: “feelings of incompetence” versus “feelings of proudness.”
Strikingly, participants avoided any discourse around the woman giving pleasure. When any participant discussed enjoying the nice feelings they were having, these were described in such a way as to absent the woman doing anything to produce those nice feelings or, as in Mike’s relating, even purposely absenting the female partner from one’s mind: “Once I was confident that she was done with—or she was finished, then I kind of just focused on myself, kind of going with the moment, I wasn’t really directing my thoughts to anything else; it was kind of like undirected attention, kind of like letting it go, and then it was over.”
It may be that being pleased by someone else positioned the men as vulnerable and passive or even selfish in their own eyes or in relation to the female interviewer. There were also very few times when the participants described sex as mutually pleasing or used the word “we” when describing what was going on. As it will be discussed further, the only situation when woman as “the other” was present in the accounts was when the participants discussed an episode of highly emotionally intimate sexual experience.
Knowing without Communicating
Closely connected to the discourse of sexual performance and man as active during sex in the accounts of our participants is the discursive theme of “knowing”; to perform well, men need to know things, and when they know things, they can anticipate and predict women’s desires and reactions. The discourse of men as “the know-ers” and “the do-ers” has been pointed out before as a discourse that sees men as affected by the expectation to be the initiators of sex and active controllers of sexual interaction as well as of women’s desire (e.g., Exner et al. 2003). Within the discourse of men as the only active doers and knowers during sex, women are positioned as mystifying beings that only a savvy man can read. The reading of the woman, however, is in the service of man’s own success at bringing her pleasure, assessed only to reflect on the man’s performance, as opposed to a woman’s actions during sex expressing a performance of its own. Men never appeared to describe what a woman was doing as also a performance, nor did they judge her performance. The behaviors that participants described in their female partners were only related to what they seemed to perceive as an authentic expression of sexual pleasure: I feel like the more sound she makes, the more I feel like a man, the more masculine I feel, the more, if well I’m pleasuring her yeah and this makes me more of a man. (Fred) And one thing that will be in my mind ok if she’s not screaming, she’s probably not feeling good about it. (Tom) And then, when I’m done, what comes in my mind? Did she like it? I’m probably not going to ask her, but I am thinking about it. (Tom) Ok, well, the thing is that you never know whether you are being too rough or (laughs), whether you’re not doing it enough and then you can’t really ask because it’s just kinda mess the whole mood and so it was kind of awkward for me, personally. (Connor) […]it’s important to understand their body and it’s important to understand their mind. Umm because, I mean to understand their body in terms of you know what they’re ok with and what they’re not. You know, what, umm like in in like what they’re, because some girls like you know want you to…they often don’t communic…there’s very little communication often in sex. (Dan) …I was confused because I didn’t know what her intentions were, I didn’t ask her because I felt I’d be stupid if I asked her. (Fred)
Naturalizing of Male Desire
Many of the participants drew from a naturalizing biological discourse when talking about what was going through their heads while having sex. This discursive theme was in line with previous research on the topic, for example, “male sexual drive discourse” discussed by Hollway (1984), which refers to seeing male sexual desire as exclusively biologically determined, natural, and largely uncontrollable by men. The participants used this discourse to explain or perhaps rationalize fantasies about other partners during sex and sexual “failures.” As Hollway pointed out, the naturalizing discourse is seen also in the “permissiveness” discourse, which naturalizes men having multiple partners and rationalizes this behavior as a biological drive. Nick tries to work out the media influence versus the naturalized quality of men’s sexual appetite for multiple partners whereas Fred simply claims it’s natural. I feel like the more partners the better, and being a man I guess, so…it is the media…cause of how media portrays it but it’s also something that I want personally (incoherent)…so I am not sure if it’s [me] being a man…sometimes I think like is it the quantity over quality? So sometimes I think about…it’s…being a man…[is] just having sex with whoever you want. “I want that person”…I feel like that’s being a man for most of the people because I want that naturally…(Nick) You’re not…you’re not being an actual man if you don’t have other women in your mind. Because men don’t like to be monogamous. They prefer to be with multiple partners. (Fred)
A biologizing discourse was also used to support a feeling of being masculine or being selfish. For example, Joe stated, “I feel like I was like…I feel like (loud bang)…I feel like a monster” and when asked to explain said, “I feel like I have no…uhh other feelings than to just like…umm the only feeling that I’m feeling at that time is to just…I want to have an orgasm. I want to have sex with you and no other thoughts. Yeah.”
The hesitation of Joe during the interview suggests the feelings of uncertainty or even shame in the presence of the female interviewer for behaving in a “monster”-like way, which in this excerpt means “no other feelings” rather than desire to have an orgasm. It is evident also in this excerpt that the male sexual drive discourse can only be understood as selfish and monstrous rather than, for example, transcendent or overwhelming in connection to a partner.
The naturalizing discourse paradoxically offers a less troubled subject position than a discourse around more vulnerable positions of desiring and wanting pleasure because it constructs men as driven in sex by nature and not as pleasure seekers or as people vulnerable to the overwhelming emotions sex may bring. This was supported by another discourse of “control” that due to page limitations we do not discuss fully below but mention at this point briefly. Participants’ provided many examples of self-talk about being in control or wanting control: “I need to get back in control,” “I’m enjoying being in control,” and “ I feel more comfortable when I’m in charge.” Their discourse about taking control often was linked to providing orgasms to women: “…and when I’m in charge and then she always, she, she’s always satisfied so I feel like I’m in charge ok and then this is what I’m gonna do and whatever I do I think it’s really, to me, being a man like being in charge” (Nick). We also found that there was no account by a heterosexual man that included the giving up of control or the possibility of finding pleasure in losing or yielding control.
Others in the Head
Discourse generally implies “others in the head,” that is, social construction of self in context through discourse. In this study, we explicitly asked who men were thinking about, if anyone, while having sex. Kimmel writes that men are having sex to prove something to other men (2008). Dines (2010) suggests that pornographic images are invading men’s minds and acts and changing the intimacy of sex. A psychoanalytic view may even suggest that mothers and fathers enter the mind, perhaps unconsciously, during intimate moments (Klein 1975). Indeed, some of our participants described thinking about their parents: “I thought about my parents, because like they were gone, and it was like my first time and it was like ‘oh what would they think about this’?” Some participants described thinking about other women while having sex with their female partners, for the reasons of either wishing they were having sex with those women or wishing those women knew how good of a lover they were. But some of the participants referenced groups of men that may judge their performance or whom they might report to after the sex to find some appreciation of their success. Two participants, describing their first sexual experience, mentioned that their friends were literally waiting for them to be done to hear more about the experience, and these participants recognized they would be judged. Tom discussed these “others” less literally but as a reference group who define his masculinity by judging his sexual performance: I was thinking about…memorizing every single thing that she did so I can report to my friends. That’s exactly what I was thinking. She did this, she did that ok I am keeping that in mind. I don’t wanna, I don’t want to forget anything cause I want to give a list of everything I did to show my friends, my older friends that, that’s the transition of kid being a man. (Tom)
This particular excerpt demonstrates how successful sexual performance for men can be measured not only through competition with other men but through claiming a position as part of a group. Although this particular construction of successful performance in this excerpt involves a woman, she is an object, an imaginary preconstructed challenge. The solidarity with other men in this excerpt is represented in another man’s thoughts as connecting him to men of previous generations: [M]y grandfather was [appearing in my head] because he’s the one who taught me how to coerce women. He taught me…I taught myself actually, but he taught me like if you want to have sex with a girl you do this or you have to find a way to…not make her have sex with you, but convince her to have sex with you. (Fred)
Failure to perform in one account is constructed as an inability to prove that one is a “part of the group”: I didn’t satisfy her. I, and we…I think I was scared that we would end up going around and uh…the fact that my friends were just standing outside of the door, it just means that a whole lot of other people would have known that I can’t…you know…
In summary, we were surprised to hear that specific other people were in the minds of the men during sex. Literature would suggest that there is “abstract pressure” (Holland et al. 1991, 239) from society to discipline men and shape their behaviors according to stereotypes of “real” masculinity (Hollway 1984). But the men in our study feel themselves pressured, judged, encouraged, and evaluated by very particular others who potentially represent the abstract male other.
Feeling of Intimacy and Masculine Subjectivity
The only time when most participants appeared not to be able to connect their thoughts and feelings to their thinking about themselves as men was when they were asked to talk about sexual experiences that felt intimate: Now can you think of a time when in or around a sexual experience you felt intimate, or achieved intimacy?
All descriptions of intimate experience in our research lacked any mention of performance, control, sex as work, pleasuring the woman, or the naturalization of male sexual drive, whereas these themes appeared spontaneously in descriptions of other types of sexual experiences. Our participants’ descriptions of their intimate sexual experiences emphasized connectedness, equality, and continuity between partners as a couple. Furthermore, the accounts of intimate experiences did not include any references to maleness or femaleness at all and thus did not draw from discourses of traditional or real masculinity even when asked if they thought about masculinity and being a man during sex: “I don’t think so. I think it’s more of a, it was more of two people coming together to be as close to one person as two people can be um, and you kind of um, I guess I kind of let go of my masculinity in a way” (Chris). Other men attempted to explain in detail why masculinity and femininity should not matter during intimate moments: [O]ther than us having different genitalia there shouldn’t really be any difference whether there is male or female, that like in that moment it’s us no matter what like the outside impact is, like that going into that episode that we gonna have or that moment that we gonna share together…. it’s what we both want together. (Frank) So…it’s…sex is very different when you have it with someone you care about. So that creates a great intimacy, in my mind. And so, the first time I really felt that was with her and…it felt very special, like it was something completely different, something I had never had before that point…. Um…uh, so, I mean, all my thoughts were directed to how great this was, this, this new experience, it’s just totally mind-blowing. (Max)
Conclusion
Masculine sexual subjectivity was constituted in the subject positions that our participants occupied not only during sex but at various moments in their interviews in relation to the study and to the female interviewer. With regard to the voices in their heads during sex, our participants constructed themselves as masculine by being the ones who (1) do the job during sex, (2) are the only ones in charge, (3) take responsibility for control and pleasuring their women partners, (4) should be successful in sexual performance from the very first time they are having sex, (5) think only about pleasuring their women partners, (6) know women and their desires well, and (7) are driven by biologically determined sexual desire.
Different from previous studies of hegemonic masculinity, this study focused on what goes on in the head during sex. The presumed others in mind were made explicit by our participants. We found in two instances that the others in the head were actual other men waiting to hear about the sexual encounter. Others referred to not only abstract groups of men but also real groups, imagining how these others would judge their performance during sex. These were friends, neighbors, and often men older than themselves, such as older relatives, fathers, and grandfathers. This finding suggests that young men’s sexual subjectivity is developed in the context of sharing social ideals of heterosexual masculinity that are internalized and operate as others in the head during the critical moments in sex when masculinity has to be performed. These experiences with intergenerational others relate to Flood’s (2008) notion that men’s lives are organized homosocially across the life span. As Flood notes, male relationships give meaning to the heterosex that men are having and at times “are constitutive of troubling practices of sexual coercion of women” (p. 356).
The well-studied naturalizing “male sexual drive” discourse (Hollway 1984) was used by our participants to justify a whole range of subject positions: from a position of a man who is defined by how well he can control his desires in order to please a woman, to a position of a man who is himself controlled by his biology or “libido.” It must also be noted that our participants’ sexual success was motivated more by the avoidance of negative feelings, such as shame and inadequacy, than an aspiration toward positive feelings. Masculinity presented a burden and a good performance brings “relief.” Additionally, something that has not been reported by previous research findings was participants’ tendency to actively avoid any reference to being pleasured by female partners.
There were also no references to women’s sexual activity or to complete/holistic images of women partners. The feelings discussed by our participants in relation to their partners referred instead to their own thoughts or fantasies around how they will be judged by other males for their ability or concerns over their ability to pleasure their women partners. Female pleasure, for them, was an indicator of competence. The female pleasure they looked for as confirmation of their masculinity, for example, screaming, may be related to pornography viewing and men’s use of porn as a reassurance of their competence and masculinity (Kimmel 2008).
Learning through conversation with women partners about how they prefer to receive pleasure (e.g., penile vs. manual vs. oral), particularly to reach orgasm, was never described as part of men’s work in sex. This may have been because it was too intimate to discuss this with the interviewer or too intimate to discuss with a partner. Or, it may be that having to ask questions disrupts the masculinity they are performing, given men are supposed to know without asking/communicating. It may also disrupt a view of women as passive receivers of the pleasure.
No participant described concern that a woman may be faking it, which might have been influenced by their speaking to a female interviewer or to men’s avoidance of feelings of inadequacy. That is, they may have intentionally avoided bringing up the possibility that a partner was faking it because then the interviewer might judge them as inadequate.
Finally, in men’s accounts of intimacy, our participants described strong emotions of connectedness, closeness, being in the here-and-now, but, in contrast to other contexts and questions, didn’t see any connection between these feelings and the fact that they are men. This suggests they may be attempting to preserve hegemonic masculine subjectivity separate from intimate masculinity, which was trickier to define. The disconnection of intimacy from masculinity might also stem from the dichotomization of love and sex and the construction of sex as a masculine domain of knowledge, romance a feminine domain (Holland et al. 1994). Nevertheless, our participants clearly face the unspoken when they are asked to construct their intimate experience as masculine, which suggests opportunities for future research on masculinity and intimate sex, especially as this theme opens the possibility of alternative nonhegemonic masculine subjectivities (Allen 2007).
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.