Tori Amos once sang, "But virgins always get backstage, no matter what they've got to say."
As a disclaimer that I should have made from the beginning, all my claims speak to a larger, systemic structuring of society and should not be taken to explain each individual male experience. I am still learning and may unintentionally ignore — and probably have — other masculinities while focusing solely on a concept of white masculinity instead.
A gender identity can be a precarious position to occupy, and, for the purposes of this column, we can say that it is an unstable facet of the self, specifically for men. Even after conventional phenotypic expressions of XY succeed in asserting maleness, masculinity must still be proven and stabilized by being taken from the realm of construction and abstraction and subsequently being grounded in performance and concrete behavior. Males prove their possession of a penis in various ways, which brings us to the focus of today's column: sexual prowess and conquest.
Jack & Jones, a European menswear company, has a new advertisement in which a man complains about being used by women only for sex, calling them pigs at the end. It is amusing in its subversion but lacking in its transgressive impact. It does, however, aptly point out the gendered divide in sex/romance and the power of the male/genderless narrator. (Seen as standard, men can escape being gendered.) The commercial may be taken as lighthearted, amusing and even heartwarming to a limited degree, simply due to the male narration. Were a woman to narrate, the effect would without a doubt be different.
Additionally, the commercial, of course, only casts white people. Were the man a person of color — say Asian, black or Latino — the story couldn't continue as envisioned. The man would represent too much of a threat or would result in a lack of credibility. Generally, black and Latino men are hyper-sexualized, while Asians are desexualized. In this spectrum of sexual appetite, white men occupy the middle "just right" space; their penises are neither too "hung" nor too miniscule — size does matter, right? In this way, within the context of the commercial, the white male effectively navigates the narrative to express the intended message.
According to our social codes, men should want sex, be ready for it at any moment and never fail to rise to the occasion. Even the suggestion of "getting some" boosts male status and reifies masculinity. Any slip from the "no homo" realm can immediately undo any work put into the performance of masculinity, much in the same way that the failure to get an erection destabilizes and questions maleness. Good thing we have Viagra to ensure performance like the Energizer Bunny, so we can keep going and going.
The one-minute man often features as the punch line for jokes among men and women. However, the discourse surrounding these magic-man pills focuses excessively on getting and maintaining the erection, because performance is key and pleasure is nothing but a nice corollary. Viagra and other similar products are not there for the purposes of reproduction or pleasure; they exist to help men live up to the societal expectations of masculinity.
The measure of man should involve more than the insistence on sexual conquests and the need to surpass the one-minute man or any behavior that distances him from effeminacy and queerness.
The Atlantic problematically reported in its summer issue that "The End of Men" is here. If that means a goodbye to the constructions of old and the welcoming of "Men's Lib[eration]" from a normative construction of masculinity, as Newsweek suggested in September, we're on the way to reframing virility and maleness in a positive way.
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Elisha Sum is a senior majoring in English and French. He can be reached at Elisha.Sum@tufts.edu.
