Chasing Masculinity by Alicia M. Walker

Author:Alicia M. Walker
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030498184
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

This certainly doesn’t read as descriptive of a loving, passionate encounter. Aside from the wife’s orgasm, this description wasn’t uncommon among these men. While reading this, it’s easy to imagine our own response to such a dynamic: we’d be left wanting. So were these men.

Our primary partners stand as the person who loves us the most, our confidant, and our other half. If we’ve legally bound ourselves, this person stood in front of witnesses and vowed to love us above all others. Thus, when the sexual dynamics within the relationship function in the manner described, hurt feelings result. Our cultural tendency is to dismiss men’s motivations for infidelity with statements like “men are dogs” and “men are so stupid they’ll throw away a good woman for anyone willing to spread their legs,” but these men’s narratives describe real hurt and feelings of rejection. Men described sexual dynamics lacking connection and caring going back years and decades. We can surely put ourselves in these men’s place and imagine our own hurt and upset. Thus, we can certainly understand what these men are going through. We, too, want our partners to want us.

Further, some researchers have posited that as a historically gendered and patriarchal institution, marriage itself remains built on men’s “privilege and entitlement to women’s labor, sexuality, and emotions” (Lorber, 2005, p. 159). In other words, men expect women to provide sexual access and emotional expression, including expressing desire. In fact, sex persists as a “signifier of love and marital bliss” (Elliott & Umberson, 2008, p. 394). In order to maintain that, the expectation remains that women perform the labor required to keep intimate relationships going, including the sexual aspect (Duncombe & Marsden, 1993; Hockey, Meah, & Robinson, 2012; Lodge & Umberson, 2012). Women remain culturally responsible for relationship management, including maintaining a satisfying sex life, within heterosexual relationships. This includes the performance of sexual desire and managing our own feelings about sex as well as our partners (Elliott & Umberson, 2008), something for which both partners feel responsible. We do this to “reduce marital conflict, enhance intimacy, help a spouse feel better about himself or herself, or all three” (Elliott & Umberson, 2008, p. 404). Further, Gabb (2019) found that relationship work (her term for the work required to maintain an ongoing sexual life within long-term partnerships) is required in heterosexual partnerships in order to “manage differences in sexual desire through ‘accommodation’ and ‘compromise’” (Gabb, 2019). Thus, in these partnerships, men clearly feel that while they are performing desire, managing their own feelings about the sexual dynamics, and doing relationship work, their primary partners fail to do their part. Research shows that heterosexual men tend to struggle with discrepancies in sexual desire within their long-term intimate partnerships (Gabb, 2019). Thus, the feelings and responses reported by the men in this study bear out previous research on long-term heterosexual pairings. While it may be tempting to write off these men’s concerns, they represent the feelings of many in these situations.

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