‘I help her,she helps me:’ Mexican men performing masculinity through transactional sex

Introduction: Transactional sex and identity

Through sexual practice, people perform gender in ways that make sense within their cultural and structural settings (Parker et al., 2000). Although companionate marriage, focused on emotional fulfillment rather than economic production or reproduction, is becoming ideal worldwide, money nevertheless mediates love, sex and coupling in a context where global capitalism fuels economic inequality and hopes of achieving modernity through consumption (Padilla et al., 2007; Pateman, 1988; Wardlow and Hirsch, 2006). Thus, investigating ‘the materiality of everyday sex’ is crucial for understanding how people perform gender through diversely interrelated sexual and economic practices (Hunter, 2002: 99, Zelizer, 2000).

Studying how people enact locally-specific gender norms through ‘transactional sex,’ the ‘exchange of money or gifts for sexual favors’ can reveal how social and economic contexts shape these practices and ideals (Chatterji et al., 2004: 1). While research that equates transactional sex and prostitution links the practices to economic survival, scholars are increasingly highlighting individuals’ agency in obtaining social benefits that range beyond financial necessity (Poulin, 2007; Swidler and Watkins, 2007). Researchers have noted that not all financially-mediated sexual encounters feel the same to participants, who may draw clear lines between prostitution, defined as direct payment for sex, and relationships they label as social (i.e. girlfriend/boyfriend, sugar daddy/mommy/baby) in which exchange and sex relate more circuitously (Chatterji et al., 2004; Kuate-Defo, 2004). In practice, the boundaries between sexual labor, other employment and affective engagement may blur, as demonstrated by research on sex work, tourism work, and romance in the Caribbean (Brennan, 2004; Cabezas, 2009; Kempadoo, 1999; Padilla, 2007) and Asia (Cheng, 2010; Kay Hoang, 2011; Zheng, 2008).

Understanding transactional sex as including but not limited to prostitution enables investigation of the diverse meanings and effects of exchange-mediated relationships that participants may define in ways other than sex work (Hall, 2007). Researchers have demonstrated that such relationships not only provide money, goods and physical pleasure, but may also enable participants to enact modernity (Leclerc-Madlala, 2003), gendered kin bonds (Groes-Green, 2013; Wamoyi et al., 2011), social status (Hawkins et al., 2007; Potgieter et al., 2012), and romance (Poulin, 2007). Scholars have identified how transactional sexual practices reflect locally-specific social and structural changes over time, analyzing how young women in economically unequal post-colonial settings use the practice to perform gender (Cole, 2004; Hoefinger, 2011), how college students use it to meet social expectations (Masvawure, 2010), and how it may make sense within local traditions of simultaneous partnering (Merten and Haller, 2007; Senior, 1992; Wojcicki, 2002).

These findings also show that participants may enact specific forms of masculinity and femininity through transactional sexual relationships, even using them to assert gender identities that others may question (Kulick, 1998). Existing work in this vein shows that local ideals of masculinity profoundly influence men’s experiences of transactional sex; while young men in Tanzania acted out hegemonic ideals of men as sex-obsessed through the practice (Maganja et al., 2007), Chinese businessmen used it to cultivate homosocial working relationships that could enhance masculinities closely linked to career success (Zheng, 2006). Investigations of men’s experiences of diverse kinds of transactional relationships across varied settings, especially in the case of the older men who most frequently seem to engage in these relationships (Shefer and Strebel, 2013), are needed to deepen our understanding of the ways that transactional sex may facilitate the performance of locally meaningful masculinities.

Here, I focus on older, heterosexual Mexican men’s performances of masculinity, though transactional sexual relationships they define as exchange-mediated friendship or charity rather than sex work. While Mexican citizens are experiencing the global trends that influence transactional sex elsewhere, such as increasingly valued companionate marriage and immersion in a global economy that promotes both consumerism and economic inequality, their activities are also influenced by longstanding public sphere debates about what constitutes good masculinity. In a discourse that is especially prevalent in urban central Mexico, responsibility and provision are lauded as modern forms of manhood, while ostensibly traditional, virile machismo is widely criticized but commonly understood as innate to Mexican men (Amuchástegui and Szasz, 2007; Ramirez, 2009). However, men’s abilities to perform both responsibility and virility may be compromised by factors ranging from blurred lines between what counts as patriarchal versus responsible behavior (especially in a demographic context where adult women outnumber men and men might seek to provide support to both marital and extramarital partners (INEGI, 2000)), to widespread economic hardship that hampers provision, to aging and illness that impede sexual function.

In this context, I investigate how men in the central Mexican city of Cuernavaca use transactional sexual relationships as fora for performing their desired forms of masculinity despite social and physical difficulties that might compromise their abilities to do so. Here, I analyze the narratives of two men who had medically-assisted penetrative sex with much younger amiguitas (little friends) to whom they gave what they defined as ‘gifts’ of charitable support. Using contextualizing data from a broader study of male urology patients’ experiences with erectile difficulty, I argue that both the transactional nature of these men’s relationships, and their insistence that these relationships were not prostitution, facilitated their performances of responsibility and virility. Beyond providing sexual partnership to men who required patience and medical aid to achieve erection, transactional ‘friendships’ enabled men to perform the financial support, familial care and provision of sexual pleasure they saw as key to good masculinity.

Methods and ethics

This article draws on data from a broader study of the ways that Mexican male urology patients’ experiences of decreased erectile function influenced their practices of masculinity, which took place in the Cuernavaca Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS) hospital over 10 months in 2007–2008. Cuernavaca is a rapidly growing, self-consciously modern city near the nation’s capital, where legally regulated prostitution is relegated to less prosperous nearby towns; these local traits likely contribute to the views of the study participants on exchange-mediated sex. The hospital site was chosen because it provided access to a large population likely to be experiencing erectile difficulty, and also because its clinical nature facilitated discussion of a potentially stigmatizing bodily experience (Finkler, 1991). The study included over 250 Spanish-language interviews with patients, as well as observation of urology clinic practice and interviews with medical professionals. Study participant demographics varied but the majority of participants were working-class men aged 50–60, reflecting the urology department’s patient population.

The urologists invited any patients they thought might have decreased erectile function to participate in an anthropological study of health-related sexual function change. Most invited men agreed to participate, and met with me directly after their medical appointment to learn about the study, sign informed consent forms (this study was approved by all relevant Institutional Review Boards, and all names used here are pseudonyms), and then take part in semi-structured interviews in a private urology department room. These interviews addressed participants’ health and treatment experiences, life histories, and sexual experiences. I followed ethnographic best practices for interviewing on sexuality, including building rapport by focusing first on non-sensitive subjects, avoiding assumptions like heteronormativity, and omitting socially significant terms like machismo unless participants raised them (Herdt and Lindenbaum, 1992; Parker et al., 2000). Interviews lasted an average of about 45 minutes, during which I took detailed notes and audio recorded with participants’ permission. I subsequently transcribed and translated the notes and recordings.

In analyzing these data, I understand interview content as a context-specific ‘cooperative achievement’ rather than an unmediated reflection of reality (Linde, 1993: 12). I also employ a constructivist perspective on gender, understanding masculinity as ‘what men do and say to be men’ (Gutmann, 1996: 17, italics original). From this perspective, men’s narrative accounts of their transactional sex experiences are themselves performances of masculinity, useful for analyzing the ways they construct and assert gendered identities both through sexual activities and their retelling.

Given that these data emerged from our interviews, it is also important to consider how our gender, age and ethnic differences influenced its content (Arendell, 1997; McCorkel and Myers, 2003). In a context where men report feeling the most pressure to seem manly in front of other men, being a woman facilitated discussion of potentially stigmatizing intimate topics, though it likely made men feel unable to discuss others (for example, none discussed same-sex sexuality despite its statistical likelihood in a population of this size) (Hirsch et al., 2007; Melhuus, 1998). My Americanness also mediated my femaleness, as men often said that they would be embarrassed to discuss sexual activities with a Mexican woman but expected me to be more worldly. However, my whiteness and position as a worker in a hierarchal hospital setting also signaled class privilege that may have limited the experiences that participants were willing to share, despite my use of methods to disrupt these power dynamics (like asking participants to correct any language mistakes I might make as a non-native Spanish speaker). Nevertheless, participants often described interviews as cathartic or feeling ‘like therapy,’ and their narratives are revelatory both in terms of content and the ways our interactions influenced it.

Our relative positionalities were likely especially influential for the participants engaged in transactional sex who are the focus of this article, since they constructed masculinity in relationship to providing sexually, economically and socially for younger women. These men were extremely helpful and forthcoming, engaging in longer than average interviews and, more frequently than other participants, expressing praise and support for my project. Through these actions, they may have been performing provider roles in some ways analogous to their relationships with amiguitas (as evinced by the fact that one of these men was the only participant to ask me out on a date). This actually facilitated research as they offered rich and detailed narratives.

In the next section, I draw on statements from a range of participants from the broader study regarding local understandings of masculinity, provision, and (since most participants were married) extramarital sex. These participants did not necessarily engage in transactional sex; rather, I use their comments to articulate the practice’s cultural context. Although each participant’s experience was unique, here I analyze representative statements to highlight common attitudes among study participants in order to provide this context. Subsequent sections then focus on analysis of narratives from two men for whom transactional sex appeared to serve as a key forum for acting out desired forms of masculinity. While the vast majority of participants in the broader study had participated in extramarital sex, and a smaller group reported sex with women they identified as prostitutes, the specific kind of transactional sex these men discussed – trading cash for medically-assisted sex in relationships they insisted were social rather than sex work – was not commonly reported. Thus, their narratives are not representative of men enrolled in the broader study and are not necessarily generalizable. Instead, their experiences extend understandings of transactional sex and gender by illustrating how some urban Mexican men, experiencing social and physical difficulty that could compromise their performances of masculinity, draw on transactional sex to live out locally desirable ways of being men.

Manly sexuality and responsibility

Criticism of ‘traditional’ masculinity has become common in Mexican public-sphere discourse, amid declining fertility levels, women’s increasing education and formal labor participation, and widespread valorization of companionate romance as a key index of modernity (Carillo, 2002; Hirsch, 2003; INEGI, 2009). In this discourse, the notion that Mexican men are macho, or predisposed to womanizing and emotional closure, is both criticized as a barrier to modernity and reified as an innate trait to be struggled against (Escobar Latapí, 2003; Gutmann, 1996; Ramirez, 2009). While responsibly providing for family has historically been cast as the positive side of machismo (Mirandé, 1997), participants in the present study (including those who identified some of their own behavior as macho) defined machismo and responsibility as opposites.

Describing machismo as seeking gratification of one’s appetites at the expense of provision for family, study participants frequently defined ideal masculinity as being responsible. For example, a 23-year-old nursing student said that being a good man entails ‘responsibility; you have to work, and to think of the child and the wife.’ This was a common idea, voiced in almost identical language by a 66-year-old mechanic who said that the way to be a good husband is ‘to work. To educate my children. To support them and my wife.’ This notion of responsibility entailed working hard to provide financially, but also, in a context where companionate marriage is now ideal, providing emotional support including meeting one’s wife’s social and sexual needs. For instance, 48-year-old mechanic Elias noted that ‘I try to care for myself’ by limiting drinking and smoking in order to maintain sexual function, because ‘It’s important that your partner be satisfied… At home, you have to meet the expectations [hay que cumplir], not say that you’re too tired.’ Summing these ideas up, a 64-year-old retired gardener said that a good man must be faithful, work hard and give all one’s money to one’s wife to support the family; in short, to ‘meet all the expectations [cumplir con todo].’

While some men said that fidelity was key to responsibility, others believed that it was not the act of infidelity, but rather associated failure to provide that made one irresponsible. While the idea that men have biologically uncontrollable sexual urges is related to the concept of machismo, men who value companionate intimacy may also see male virility as positive and a high libido as innate (Gutmann, 2007). Thus, many participants saw extramarital sex as compatible with responsibility if it did not disrupt financial and emotional provision. For example, a 71-year-old salesman said, ‘it’s important to be faithful, but I don’t know who could do it.’ He defined a good husband as someone who ‘Strongly establishes the bases of the family, raising the children well.’ Similarly, an 80-year-old retired construction worker said that since he had never separated from his wife because of his infidelity, ‘I’ve always been responsible.’ When I asked him to define what this meant, he answered, ‘Be compliant with expectations [ser cumplido] in the house, so that there isn’t a lack of food; raise the children and send them to school.’ Along these lines, Elias said that his wife forgave his infidelity because he had never stopped providing for their family. He explained, ‘she was always a housewife. I never abandoned her. So, she accepted it.’

Extending this logic, some participants framed extramarital encounters as fora for demonstrating responsibility. Some saw protecting their wives from the pain of learning about affairs as a way of being responsible. For example, a 64-year-old retired mechanic said that he had been careful to only meet other women during the workday when his wife would not notice, because ‘I love my wife very much, and I don’t want to leave her.’ Casting fidelity as a state of mind rather than actually refraining from extramarital sex, he explained, ‘Being faithful is more than anything being caring toward a woman. Infidelity is more like a release.’ Summing up these ideas, a 72-year-old retired engineer explained that: ‘If the eyes don’t see, the heart doesn’t feel.’

Other men enacted responsibility by providing for their multiple partners financially. Participants described extramarital sex as expensive, given the costs of gifts of money and items like clothing, as well as room rental at a ‘love hotel.’ For example, a widowed 48-year-old taxi driver, with a main girlfriend and two more casual partners, said that since they all lived with their children or grandchildren, he had to spend $225 pesos (approximately $22 USD) each time for hotel rental, making ‘economics’ a limiting factor on their sex lives. Given the demographics of the study population in a context where older men often find it difficult to find work, many men enacted responsibility by providing both gifts for extramarital partners and resources for their families as young men, but curbing their extramarital activity to save money in later, leaner years. The 71-year-old salesman quoted earlier on the impossibility of fidelity noted that while he once frequently saw other women, ‘Now I’m not, because there isn’t the money. It doesn’t stretch to cover everything.’

In addition to financial provision, men often saw providing their sexual partners with physical pleasure as key to manly responsibility. A 72-year-old engineer said that he sleeps with extramarital partners ‘only sporadically, but it’s an important part of my life. This exchange, I do it with a lot of tenderness. They’re not objects; it’s emotional. More emotional, more human, than sexual… Love it isn’t, but it’s basic humanity.’ Similarly, a 64-year old retired mechanic framed his extramarital behavior in opposition to machismo, saying ‘It’s machista to get on the woman, that’s it. I try to satisfy them.’

Many men also believed they demonstrated responsibility and care for their wives by avoiding sexually transmitted infections. While some men became faithful because, as a 66-year-old mechanic put it, now ‘there are so many diseases,’ more commonly participants sought to avoid these risks by choosing partners they perceived to be ‘safe’ and ‘clean.’ This approach was exemplified by a 70-year-old retired government worker who cast seeking extramarital sex as a way to care for his wife. He said that since she was sick with diabetes, ‘I don’t have sexual relations with her… I have the desire to, but I check myself, I put on the brakes.’ Instead, he sought sex with another woman with whom ‘there is security and hygiene.’ I asked him to explain what he meant by hygiene, and he said ‘she must be totally clean and not have diseases,’ adding that you know someone is clean ‘If with real trustworthiness [confianza autentica], she tells you that she acts hygienically.’

This conflation of cleanliness, trustworthiness, and reduced disease risk was common, and led even men who described patronizing women they identified as prostitutes to cast them as risky and undesirable partners. For example, a 64-year-old retired mechanic, who had his first sexual experience as a young man with a woman he identified as a prostitute, had contracted gonorrhea at age 15 and called the penile injection he received as treatment ‘horrible.’ Associating sexually transmitted infection with use of prostitution, he said that during his marriage, ‘I was always very careful with sexual relations,’ noting that the most significant precaution that he took was to have sex ‘Not with women from the bar [mujeres de la cantina], but with friends [amigas].’

Participants frequently drew a clear line between prostitutes, who they identified as ‘bar women’ or ‘street women’ (mujeres de la calle), and partners they defined as friends or neighbors. In addition to framing the latter as non-risky, men often incorporated providing pleasure and gifts for these women into responsible male identities. While they saw prostitutes as motivated by financial gain, men who saw ‘friends’ for sex invariably described them as deserving single mothers, who worked hard to support their families but benefited from additional support. Since motherhood and the suffering that women endure to be good mothers are highly valued in Mexico, these women’s status as single mothers granted them social legitimacy for seeking relationships that provided financial support; this has also been a way that Mexican women formally employed as prostitutes justify their work (Kelly, 2008). Seeing single mothers as women who needed tenderness, attention, and often financial gifts, but who would not make demands on men for marriage or money, participants were able to see sex with ‘friends’ as a way to care for both partners and wives. For example, Elias said that because ‘I never look for problems,’ he chose to start a secondary relationship with a single mother because she understood and respected his marriage and simply appreciated his company and support. By making such choices, participants followed a cultural tradition of married men choosing extramarital partners who might pose the least social disruption (Hirsch et al., 2007).

In addition, men expected single mothers to be particularly empathetic in ways that would enhance the practice of extramarital sex. In some cases, this meant that ‘friends’ would understand the need for discretion. For example, when the 48-year-old taxi driver quoted earlier described his relationships to me, he said that his girlfriend did not know about his two ‘amiguitas,’ but they knew about her. He explained that he had sought them out because ‘they’re single mothers, so they don’t want commitment.’ Men experiencing health difficulties also saw single mothers as likely to be understanding and kind. Thus, while most participants in the broader study rejected medical treatment for erectile dysfunction (ED) (Wentzell, 2013), some sought out understanding extramarital partners with whom to use ED treatments. The same taxi driver explained that just as his amiguitas were supportive of his relationship, they were caring and considerate when he experienced erectile difficulty. He felt that he could openly discuss the issue with them because, ‘They don’t criticize me. They console me. They say, don’t worry about it, be calm.’ He said that because of their attitude, he could openly use ED drugs to enhance his erections with them, which led to more satisfying sex for all.

Overall, many study participants rejected sex with women they saw as prostitutes, in favor of relationships with needy and deserving amiguitas, with whom they could enact virility and provision for partners (by providing tenderness and gifts), as well as wives (by avoiding infection and assuring discretion). While men frequently engaged in transactional sex with ‘friends,’ they saw the exchange as supportive or charitable rather than as payment for sex because of the women’s identities as single mothers. I investigate this dynamic in the following case studies of men whose decreasing erectile function, together with other unwanted physical and life changes, might compromise their abilities to live out their ideals of manhood. I analyze how these men’s relationships with amiguitas, which depended on ‘gifts’ or ‘charity’ but which they explicitly defined as not prostitution, supported their attempts to perform responsible masculinities.

Pepe’s case

Pepe, a 68-year old barber, was a gregarious man with an expansive manner that belied his physical frailty. Over the course of three interviews, he discussed deep love for his wife and great enthusiasm for frequent extramarital liaisons, in terms that framed both as interactions where he provided for women’s needs as they helped him to meet his own. He told me that he had been ‘fortunately’ married for 43 years, with two grown sons and 12 grandchildren whom he sees frequently. He said that he and his wife ‘get along well,’ and that he was devoted to caring for her since she suffered from diabetes. He explained that due to illness and age, she was ‘almost never in the mood,’ and so they only had sex ‘sporadically, because it doesn’t appeal to her.’ While Pepe showed pride in being an understanding husband, he was also keen to assert a more youthful identity than his wife. Framing sex as an essential need of vigorous male bodies, Pepe said that, ‘I’m active,’ and thus in order to respect his wife’s need for marital abstinence, ‘you have to find a little friend [amiguita]’ for extramarital liaisons.

He framed the way he conducted these affairs as an act of care for his sick wife. Strong negative emotions are commonly viewed as a cause of diabetes in Mexico (Everett, 2011), and Pepe believed that his wife’s much earlier discovery of an infidelity had caused her illness. While his understanding of ‘active’ men’s innate sexual needs led him to see extramarital sex as a ‘necessity,’ he viewed himself as a good husband because he ‘care[d] for my wife and sons’ by practicing discretion, including meeting amiguitas at distant hotels and calling them only from work. In general, he said, ‘I don’t exhibit myself with them.’ He noted that concealing infidelity enabled him to meet his family’s expectations, which was important because ‘I love my kids a lot, and they see me in a different way.’ Finally, he cast his choice of partners as an act of self- and thus familial care. By choosing ‘working women, single mothers’ whom he met on public transit or at work rather than ‘meeting women at clubs or bars’ he believed that he ‘avoid[ed] getting involved with public women, so I don’t get STDs or AIDS.’

Pepe also described himself as caring for his amiguitas. In contrast to paying for sex, he saw exchange of money in these relationships as a form of charity. He said ‘If I see a young, pretty woman, a working single mother, she has needs. So, I give – but voluntarily. A little help.’ While his liaisons were financially mediated, he described the exchange as ‘little presents [regalitos], a little bit of help.’ Emphasizing that this was donation rather than prostitution, Pepe noted ‘It’s not required … It is not an obligation. It’s beautiful – we both help.’ He saw this transactional sex as an exchange that met needs on both sides, and this understanding enabled him to perform responsible masculinity through charitable provision.

Pepe also saw himself as providing sexually for his partners. He described pleasing them as crucial, saying, ‘I ask what they like, because we’re going to work together [cooperar], so that both of us enjoy it … That way the experience is more complete, more mutual.’ Bragging that he once gave a woman six orgasms, he said that if his partners don’t climax, ‘I don’t feel complete. I feel bad, unsatisfied.’ This focus on giving pleasure enabled Pepe to perform not only responsibility but also the virility that might have been compromised by age and illness. Twelve years earlier, Pepe had a prostate operation that he said ‘lowered my potency.’ After the surgery, a narrowing of his urethra required dilation that led to scarring, which left him with pain upon urination and slight incontinence that sometimes made him feel ‘very bad, depressed.’ This ailment threatened his self-image as ‘active’ and vigorous, and it appears that sex with amiguitas was a way to assert virility despite bodily change.

Sex with amiguitas provided a chance for Pepe to use ED drugs to perform virility. He hid his Viagra use from his wife but used it with extramarital partners, expecting that, as single mothers he assumed to be both patient and needy, they would be supportive through his sexual difficulties. He also saw them as ideal for eliciting a good response to the medication, since these younger women were more ‘exciting’ than older partners, who ‘don’t stimulate me.’ In the context of these relationships, Pepe was able to understand Viagra use not as a threat to manhood, but aid for pleasing his partners and thus providing for them sexually. He noted that with Viagra, ‘My partner is more satisfied.’ Overall, he characterized their relationships as mutual aid, explaining that ‘I help her, she helps me with my problem.’ Despite aging, illness, and even recent financial difficulties that led him to ‘dedicate myself to [only] one [amiguita], because my work pays badly,’ Pepe was able to perform masculine responsibility and virility through transactional sexual relationships.

Tomás’s case

While Pepe felt able to successfully enact responsibility with his family and extended this performance to include virility with amiguitas, 71-year-old semi-retired businessman Tomás described difficulty in romantic relationships. His two unsuccessful marriages had produced five children with whom he reported strained relationships. He attributed much of this ill-will to his past infidelities, but believed they had been justified by his decision to stay in his 20-year second marriage ‘out of responsibility’ to support his family. While he said that his wife eventually sought divorce, he stressed that he had always been ‘a good father, if not a good husband,’ noting that he had always worked hard to provide financially. He felt it unfair that his older children failed to appreciate this, and so focused emotionally on a sixth, youngest child from a four-year relationship that followed his marriages, noting ‘I live for my little son.’ He said that he arranged his life around being the boy’s primary caregiver, including only seeing sexual partners late at night in his home so he could be present while his son slept. Thus, while Tomás described all his romantic and most familial relationships as unsuccessful, he asserted positive responsibility by parenting his youngest child.

However, he believed that his recent romantic problems had compromised his virility, which he sought to re-attain through transactional sex. After his second marriage, he began a 4-year relationship with a ‘concubina’ (he noted that in English this would mean ‘lover’), that produced his beloved son but ended stormily when she left him for another man. He said that ‘this depressed me,’ and caused him to have what he defined as erectile dysfunction ever since; he said sex with other women is ‘not like before.’ He viewed his ED as a ‘psychological’ issue related to this romantic failure, which was then worsened by his fear of not achieving ‘a correct erection.’ In response, he had recently purchased a vacuum pump, the exterior suction of which pulls blood into the penis to enhance erection. He told me that in ‘trying to accustom myself’ to this device, he had sought out sexual partners with whom to test it.

Tomás described a history of sexual relationships with younger women that included transactional exchange. He stressed that these were ‘little neighbor women’ (vecinitas) who were all ‘decent’ people, and often mothers. Checking my written notes to ensure that I’d correctly characterized his partners, he stressed that he was ‘Never with street women, I don’t like that.’ He also voiced disgust for women who feigned affection but wanted only money. For example, he said that he was wary of trying to find a serious girlfriend because ‘they all seek me out to give them the good life [Todas me buscan por la comodidad].’ He contrasted his transactional relationships with such gold digging, referring to the exchange that mediated these relationships as ‘gifts’ and ‘help,’ rather than payment or a response to women’s selfish demands. This was despite the fact that Tomás’s financial relationships with transactional partners were quite regularized; they visited him twice weekly and he gifted them $500 pesos (about $50 USD) per week.

While he discussed prior experiences with very young women, he sought out a more experienced 30-year-old single mother to help him deal with his ED. He said that they knew each other for a year before their sexual relationship, since their children are friends. One day he told her, ‘I have a vacuum pump. I want to try it with someone, and I’ll give you some money.’ When I asked whether she was surprised by his request, he said that she was not, because they already knew and trusted each other. He further explained that because ‘she’s divorced,’ (implying that she is both sexually experienced and in need of financial assistance), she was happy to help him, and that ‘she understands’ and is patient with his erectile difficulty. He expected their sexual relationship to last for some time, because of the mutual support it provided. He explained, ‘I give a little gift of money’ each week, and because she has two children to feed, ‘she appreciates the help that I give her.’

Tomás thus characterized their relationship as one of mutual assistance, in which he was able to provide for her family while in turn receiving sexual aid that enabled him to perform the penetrative sexuality that had been compromised by masculinity-threatening romantic and physical failures. While he saw exchanging financial gifts for sex as emphatically not prostitution, he did nevertheless understand these encounters in transactional terms. He said that given his age, he knew that the women he sought out ‘to satisfy myself’ would eventually stop seeing him as they formed lasting relationships with younger men. He explained, ‘because of age, I’ve been disarmed [sexually]… So, they go out with me, but only for a time.’ Yet, he said that both parties got what they wanted. He received ‘a little bit of tenderness’ to keep him from ‘feeling bad;’ but not so much that he would become embroiled in a potentially painful or financially exploitative relationship. He also attained a forum for performing responsibility and virility by sleeping with and financially ‘helping’ his ‘decent’ partners.

Conclusion

Both Pepe and Tomás used transactional sexual relationships as fora for enacting responsible and virile masculinity despite illness, romantic difficulties, financial hardship and other situations that might have compromised their ability to perform their desired ways of being men. Rather than defining transactional sex or infidelity as macho or problematic practices, they instead framed their commission of these liaisons as forms of familial care. By practicing discretion, prioritizing financial and emotional care for family members, and choosing partners whom they believed to be healthy, they asserted responsibility by minimizing the impact of these trysts on their families. They further lived out desired masculinities through their conduct with transactional sexual partners, framing partners as good and deserving single mothers for whom they were able to responsibly provide through charitable gift giving and the provision of sexual pleasure.

Both men were aware that these relationships would not exist without economic exchange. However, they defined these interactions not as financial transactions but as mutual provision of help. By characterizing their encounters as reciprocal gift- and aid-giving rather than exchange, they were able to frame them as radically different from prostitution. This definition was crucial to their ability to perform desired forms of masculinity through these interactions. Feeling that they had to pay for sex would likely undermine their performances of virility, making their provision of pleasure irrelevant (and possibly unwanted, since formal sex workers might seek to keep encounters brief), and suggesting they were unable to attract partners on their own merits. Seeing their encounters as prostitution would also force them to redefine their partners as street or bar women or gold diggers rather than worthy single mothers, exposing them to the disease and social risks that they believed such women posed. Both men’s willingness to share their stories in great detail (in a sense, to provide a younger female researcher with data just as they provided amiguitas with gifts and pleasure), and especially Tomás’s habit of checking my notes to ensure that I was correctly recording his statements, highlight the centrality of their transactional sexual experiences to their senses of gendered selfhood.

Pepe and Tomás’s narratives were collected within a broader study of Cuernavacan men’s experiences of masculinity in the context of changing erectile function, rather than a study of transactional sex per se. They were the only men in the study to discuss transactional sex in such detail, meaning that the present findings, while provocative, are not comprehensive or generalizable. Even within the study context, they were fairly typical but somewhat more financially stable than many participants, meaning that they were more able to give money to sexual partners without compromising financial provision to their families. Future research could productively focus on a broader sample of both Mexican men’s and women’s experiences of transactional relationships that partners decline to define as sex work, including same-sex relationships and encounters between partners of different ages and class positions than the present study participants, in order to elucidate how participants may incorporate these relationships into specific performances of gender. Since the narratives here reflect and contribute to the stigmatization of sex work in Cuernavaca, research in Mexican sites where governmentally regulated prostitution is more visible and mainstream would also provide useful comparative data. Here, in order to reveal how transactional sense made sense to particular heterosexual men in the Cuernavacan context, I have contextualized Pepe and Tomás’s experiences with those of other study participants who did not describe identical sexual practices, but who discussed a range of experiences relating to specific aspects of these narratives, from debates about ideal masculinity to common local notions about the correct comportment of extramarital sex.

In short, the findings presented here illustrate the ways that two men performed masculinity through transactional sex. They extend insights regarding how transactional sex links social and structural contexts with individual practices of gender to a Mexican setting in which men may feel great pressure to exhibit ideal manhood through performances of responsibility and virility, but also find their ability to do so threatened by physical, social and financial difficulties. Pepe and Tomás’s experiences highlight the utility of separating out concepts of transactional sex and prostitution in research on sex and economic exchange, in order to elucidate how elements of local context – such as local changes in ideals of masculinity and the prevalence and availability of medical treatments that can facilitate penetrative sex despite aging or illness – influence the ways participants use transactional sexual relationships to perform gender in locally desirable ways. This analytic move would enable research to be more faithful to many participants’ understandings of their own actions, and facilitate further study of the interlinked social and economic consequences of transactional sex practices like those described here.