emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

experiences, on a small scale and for a short period of time,
what a woman permanently lives through; but he has the
security of belonging to the man class and the reassurance of
knowing that the situation will not last, that it is only a hiatus in
a sex life which he experiences as the assertion of his power.
[Man and sexuality / 57]
Beyond fear, masculine homosexuality is not necessarily what
man imagines it to be. In itself it is obviously not the
transcendance of heterosexuality and the 'man' category, nor
even of sexual fear. It can just as easily be the reproduction
among men of sexuality-appropriation, or the expression of
distress when faced with a woman's body, or the manifestation
of man's old dream of a world without women. In this sense it
sometimes appears as the valorisation of virile ideas of
rationality, strength or violence; and it was found as often
among the Athenian philosophers and the Spartan warriors as
amongst Ernst Rohm's assault squads. And yet homosexuality
can also be an opportunity for a man to get to know and love
himself through the love and the discovery of another man: a
path to retrieving his sexuality, and to realising that pleasure is
not born from the difference between the sexes, but from sex
itself and the difference between individuals.
If it were not for the social division of human beings into sexes,
the terms heterosexuality and homosexuality would lose their
meanings; each person would be able to freely experience
richer and more varied relationships than those confined within
the difference between the sexes. At present, not only do they
both have a meaning, but, in addition, sexuality itself, locked
inside the categories 'man' and 'woman', generally does not
have much to do with voluptuousness. When man pronounces
such words as pleasure, love and fulfilment, he should really be
saying revulsion, hatred and violence. Hanging on to the notion
that his penis is an instrument of power and to his perception of
the sex act as a relationship of appropriation, he struggles to
find fulfilment but usually does nothing more than flounder: he
only experiences emotional intensity through either inflicting or
undergoing violence, and, in most cases, he experiences a
frigidity which is all the more serious because he does not even
know that he is frigid.