In this section, I will outline how notions of active (hetero)sexuality are central to dominant understandings of masculinity and manhood. This is something both asexual and abstinent men have encountered and negotiated to varying degrees, but from my data, there seems to be a difference in how asexual men and
abstinent men respond to these ideas. First of all, I will discuss how a common theme in the accounts of non-male asexual participants was that asexual men have a particularly ‘difficult’ time as they must struggle with both internal and external expectations of a hyper-sexual masculinity. However, asexual men, whilst reflecting upon and critiquing these constructions of masculinity, reported
more complex and nuanced experiences wherein they recognised both their disadvantages and their privileges.
I then turn to exploring the narratives of the abstinent men in my sample. Unlike the asexual men, the abstinent men did not offer the same kind of reflexivity with regards to masculinity and where they stood in relation to it. Instead, much of their accounts can be seen in terms of the discursive work they undertake to ‘lay claim’ to a masculine identity. For these men, abstinence did seem to pose a kind of implicit threat to their masculinity that must be accounted for. The discursive work included drawing on forms of alternative masculine ‘credit’ but also re-interpreting the practice of abstinence so that it becomes a masculine practice in and of itself. I will also explore how other intersecting identities can work to mitigate the potential threat posed by abstinence to participants’ masculinities – both in participants’ own understandings, and in how they were received by others.
6.2.1. ‘It’s obviously a lot harder for a guy’
The association of masculinity with an active sexuality has been articulated by sociologists of masculinity such as Raewyn Connell (1995), Michael Kimmel (2005) and CJ Pascoe (2007). Kimmel even argues that masculinity and sexuality are so inextricably knotted together that when men face sexual problems such as erectile dysfunction, they overwhelmingly understand this as a failure of gender i.e. as not being ‘man enough’ (2005:71). Indeed, the centrality of being able to ‘function’ in sexually normative ways to some men’s sense of masculinity is such that some men are willing to risk their lives by foregoing cancer
treatment that might render them impotent or reduce their sexual desire (Cushman et al., 2010).
Asexuality researchers have given a small amount of attention to how this ‘knot’ of masculinity and sexuality comes to bear upon asexual men. As Przybylo
(2014:225) writes:
Asexual men, especially, generate in others astonishment and disbelief, as is for instance demonstrated in the 2006 interview with David Jay, founder of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network
(AVEN), on the U.S. daytime talk show The View: “I don’t get this. A guy. I could see for a woman. But you? You have to do something.” 59
The assumption that men will be interested in sex means that the presenter on The View finds Jay incomprehensible. Jay, for his part, has reflected on the difficulties of being an asexual man: ‘A lot of the images of empowerment for men are tied up with sexuality. Learning how to have an empowered gender identity without sexuality is really tricky’ (Jay as quoted in White, 2010). This indicates that for some asexual men, reconciling their asexuality and their
masculinity is a difficult and fraught process, as so much of what they have been taught to be and to value as men is bound up with ideas of an active sexuality. The three men in Przybylo’s (2014: 235) study echoed this struggle: for example one participant talked of moments of tension between ‘being a man’ and ‘being asexual’ (Przybylo, 2014:235); and an asexual man in MacNeela and Murphy (2014: 807) talked about how he felt his asexuality was a ‘weakness or a failure’ and he felt like ‘less of a man’ because of it. These themes emerged in my own research – but, crucially, were primarily expressed by asexual women and asexual non-binary (AFAB) persons rather than asexual men themselves. Almost universally, women and non-binary (AFAB) participants talked about how the experience of asexuality must be more difficult for men. This was generally prompted by my asking them if they thought their experiences as a person on the asexual spectrum would be different if they were a gender other than the one they currently identified with. The reason as to why life was imagined to be more difficult for an asexual man was tied to the idea (as discussed above) that there was more pressure on men to be actively sexual, as Frankie put it:
There’s this assumption of what guys want, that guys are meant to be wanting sex a lot more than women who are wanting more affection just in terms of pure stereotype…I think it’s obviously a lot harder for a guy.
Reeta also suggested ‘it’s harder for men in general to be asexual’, since ‘being a man involves having sex’, linking this to ‘conquests and rites of passage’ that men are expected to undertake. Sam also discussed the ‘pressure from the
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This might be seen as an instance of epistemic injustice in that the interviewer is doubting the veracity of Jay’s claims (‘you have to do something’). However, as discussed in Chapter Five, he, like the asexual men in my research, was still being positioned as an active sexual subject in a way that asexual women and non-binary (AFAB) people were not.
environment to be sexual and heterosexual’ that asexual men were subjected to, and how they imagined this would be ‘really alienating’ if they were an asexual man and felt that having sex was ‘something that I needed to do, to be, to fit in’. Both Reeta and Sam allude to how an asexual man’s very personhood might be under threat due to his asexuality, when being a man is so inextricably tied up with being sexual.
Some participants, as well as hypothesising asexual men’s internal struggles and alienation from peers, also spoke about how asexuality in men is much more pathologised than it is in women, and that people would generally have a stronger and more negative reaction to an asexual man. Frankie discussed how an asexual women is assumed to be ‘just one who is waiting’; but with asexual men it is assumed that ‘there’s something wrong with him because he’s not interested’. Gillian echoed this in a wonderful turn of phrase: ‘With a young man…people would be ‘oh my god it’s the end of the world, what is wrong with you, get thee to a prostitute’ you know, that sort of thing’. As will be discussed in the section on femininity later in the chapter, it is imagined that there is space available within the construction of femininity for asexuality, but no such equivalent space within masculinity. Indeed, we can see this idea in The View interview quoted above (‘I could see this for a woman. But you?’). This leads to participants hypothesising that asexual men, upon disclosing their asexuality, would be met with accusations of ‘wrongness’, pathology, and a sense of urgency in putting things ‘right’.
However hypotheses about asexual men having a particularly difficult time were not fully borne out in the narratives of asexual men and non-binary (AMAB) people in my study. There was indeed an acknowledgement that masculinity was tied up with sexuality, as Nathaniel put it:
If you haven’t lost your virginity by the time you’re, I don’t know, what, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, there’s something wrong with you…What’s wrong with you man? Come on. And it’s both genders in a sense, but I think there’s this extra pressure on a man to perform in, in that sense. So much of masculinity is tied up with sex.
On what makes a man: he takes great pride in his sexual prowess and his ability to ‘please’ a woman; he’ll wince if you mention castration to him; and God forbid that he should be thought of as effeminate!
And Nathaniel went on to talk about how these cultural associations mean ‘you learn to lie your way through it’ because if you ‘admit’ to never having had sex, ‘you’ll be seen as something wrong with you’. Whilst there was pressure with regards to ‘the whole bloke thing about being able to be a man, be a sexualised man’, Nathaniel also said ‘I can imagine it’s very similar, well similar in some senses, for a woman’.
There was no sense of a great internal struggle in the narratives of Nathaniel and Jeffrey, although they do reflect upon these uncomfortable social situations. Jeffrey talked about how being male was different from being a man – the first he saw as a biological category, the second as a set of cultural and social understandings, effectively expressing the idea of the sex/gender distinction (Oakley, 1972). He saw himself as an asexual male rather than an asexual man – in this way he was able to reconcile his asexuality with his male bodied-ness by articulating masculinity as something separate from having a male body.
Nathaniel too also articulated his identity in terms of a sex/gender split, in that he saw the construction of masculinity as something separate to ‘biological’ sex. However, whilst Jeffrey disengaged entirely with masculinity and manhood, and was content to just occupy the space of ‘biological’ maleness, Nathaniel did claim the identity of ‘man’. He did so by arguing for the necessity of expanding what is included under the aegis of ‘man’ and ‘masculinity’:
Any concept or construct of gender to me is separate to the sexual organs that you possess, to the sex that you have. We have chosen to construct these gender norms in society and I am comfortable now saying ‘well that’s your norm, it’s not my norm in society’, and I will challenge it.
He said ‘I am shaped like a man, I act like a man, I think like a man’. These statements do not refer to Nathaniel according with the stereotype of what a man is or is like, but about Nathaniel claiming the space of ‘man’ so that how he looks, acts, and thinks become what a man is, simply by virtue of him being a man and doing these things. In this way, asexuality can fit perfectly with Nathaniel’s sense of manhood (if not society’s), because manhood is expanded
to encompass whatever he – as a man – does or is. Manhood is established a priori, and thus nothing can negate this manhood (aside from he himself, by no longer identifying as a man). Nathaniel’s understanding of gender perhaps stems in part from his community work with transgender organisations (although he himself is not transgender), where the separateness of sex and gender may be emphasised, and one’s self-identity is accorded priority (i.e. if you identify as a man, then you are a man, regardless of what society says men must be like). These might be seen in some way as assertions of agency: whilst the non-male asexual participants spoke almost of the intractable nature of the norm that real men must be sexual, the emphasis in the asexual men’s accounts was more on how they negotiate the idea of masculinity.
Not only then did the asexual men in my study relate no profound conflict between their asexuality and gender identities (even if they did have
uncomfortable experiences), but they were also keen to stress the difficulties that asexual women faced. For example, Nathaniel suggested some difficulties that asexual women might encounter that he would not: for example, he feels that people tend to ask him less prying questions about his asexuality because men are not perceived as available as women are in this way. Oran, who was an asexual non-binary (agender, AMAB) person, also talked at length about how asexual women are particularly disadvantaged by still having to live under patriarchy. The idea of ‘asexual male disadvantage’ was therefore much less emphatic than that hypothesised and expressed by non-male participants. And whilst non-male participants tended to focus on how asexuality would be a barrier in the lives of asexual men (i.e. in preventing asexual men from fitting in), asexual men (and non-binary persons) themselves were more keen to
problematise masculinity, and discuss how it was masculinity that got in the way of them living fully authentic asexual lives. The concern was less about being denied access to masculinity (since none of them wanted access to masculinity, commonly understood) and more about how constructions of masculinity
presented barriers in their everyday lives. For example, Jeffrey alluded to how the trope of the sexually predatory male meant that he, as an asexual man, was prevented from even talking to women in a platonic sense:
I might be seen to be typically male, to be acting like a bloke, you know, chatting up and stuff like that when actually I’m not…it’s that
old phrase, men are only after one thing when in fact it’s the last thing I want – it’s not what I want at all.
Oran echoes this, but is also keen not to blame women for making assumptions about the motivations of men, given the long historical precedent of male sexual aggression:
I also get really paranoid about like being a creep and like, I feel like as somebody who’s like male-bodied as well like you really have to recognise that like you have a certain amount of privilege in pretty much every situation and that, like, you know, there’s a whole culture surrounding like that macho sort of male dominant thing…even if, you know, I just want to get to know a person
sometimes it’s like well I’m not going to go over and start talking to them because they’re going to think I’m hitting on them and I would feel like a sleazebag.
Thus, whilst recognising the personal barriers faced, Oran is able to situate this disadvantage within structures of hetero-patriarchy, whilst still recognising their privilege in being male-bodied and being ‘read’ as a man.
It is difficult to account for exactly why non-male asexual participants felt that asexual men were at a disadvantage when asexual men (and non-binary AMAB people) did not necessarily experience it in the same way. It may be due to people’s tendency to downplay their own struggles, and instead compare
themselves to those who have it ‘worse’ (we saw both groups of participants do this, referring to each other). This may have been a way of asexual men and asexual non-binary (AMAB) participants to retain a sense of agency in the face of pervasive and powerful constructions of masculinity and sexuality (although there was no real sense that these participants were ‘doing masculinity’ by drawing on a masculinist discourse of agency, as did the abstinent men in my sample, as we will see below). Concurrently, the asexual women and asexual non-binary (AFAB) participants may have put greater emphasis on ‘male asexual disadvantage’ because the ways in which women are systematically
disadvantaged under patriarchy are so commonplace and quotidian that
participants are perhaps less able to distinctly ‘see’ the ways in which asexual women (especially in relation to themselves) are affected by these structures and instead are drawn to the ostensibly ‘dissonant’ image of the asexual man. Or (and) it may be that the asexual men and non-binary AMAB people in my
study were equipped with the hermeneutical resources to deconstruct the idea of masculinity, and because of this, found themselves less caught up with the idea of how they as men should be. This is perhaps not the ‘asexual man’ that Gillian, Reeta, Frankie et al. had in mind when discussing the plight of asexual men (nor Przybylo or MacNeela and Murphy in their research). However, as I will discuss in the next chapter on subjectivities and embodiment, there was often a sense in which coming to identify as asexual meant becoming more aware of gender as a social construct (the ‘Judith Butler Experience’ as described in Chapter Five), due to the nature of the asexual online community, and its proximity to LGBTQ+ cultures.
6.2.2. Discursive work to affirm masculinity
Having discussed how asexual men and non-binary (AMAB) persons negotiated this knot of masculinity and active (hetero)sexuality, I now turn to the accounts of abstinent men. However, before delving into the empirical data, I will map out the conceptual framework I am using to understand these narratives. Compared with asexual men and non-binary (AMAB) persons, in the interviews with abstinent men there was less direct talk of masculinity, despite my efforts to encourage participants to reflect on the concept and its relation to
abstinence. Rather, I felt that masculinity was something that was being actively ‘done’ and accomplished in the interview space through the ways in which
participants spoke about themselves, their abstinence, and their relationships. Here I found it useful to draw on the work of Schwalbe and Wolkomir (2001) in conceptualising the interview not only as an exchange of information but as an ‘opportunity for signifying masculinity’ (p91) on the part of participants.
In all interviews with abstinent men, I experienced a sense in which masculinity was being affirmed or laid claim to, as if to ‘compensate’ for the potentially emasculating stigma of abstinence.60 This was something that I also subsequently
60 My own positioning must also be taken into account here. If we think about the interview as an
opportunity for signifying masculinity, the ‘audience’ to whom this is directed is also key. Whilst I can never be sure of how participants ‘read’ me, the interview dynamics may have been affected by their perception of me as a woman, and their ‘compensatory manhood acts’ at least partially carried out in that context.
discerned in my analysis of the transcripts. I suggest that we understand this as examples of ‘compensatory manhood acts’ which Sumerau (2012: 462) defines as the ways in which ‘subordinated men signify masculine selves by emphasising elements of hegemonic masculinity’. Whilst the status of my abstinent male participants as ‘subordinated’ is debatable (given their many other privileges), abstinence nevertheless presents a level of threat to masculinity (if we
understand an active sexuality to be a core element of masculinity) and
therefore has to be ‘compensated’ for. This compensation usually takes the form of emphasising some other aspect of masculinity, which researchers have
referred to as drawing upon ‘masculine credit’, ‘masculine insurance’ or
‘masculine capital’ (Anderson, 2002; de Visser and Smith, 2006; de Visser et al., 2009). Empirical evidence of such acts in varying contexts abound: e.g. Hennen (2008) discusses gay men’s cultivation of larger bodies and adoption of symbols of masculinity; Barnes (2014) documents how infertile men talk about the masculinising effect that (in)fertility treatment was having on them (for
example, increased testosterone promoting hair growth); Ward (2015) discusses how straight men who have sex with other men emphasise their heterosexuality through drawing on aesthetic and discursive tropes of fraternity ‘bros’ and ‘chill’; and Gough et al (2014) discuss how men who wore make-up would account for this in terms of the admiration and attention they received from