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CHAPTRE - I

VIRILITY

Although Jan has grown up without hiding her "feminine side", it is difficult in the playground to cultivate her difference. For the behavioral psychologist, Nancy Chodorow, girls are associated with so-called negative values such as emotion, weakness and passivity, whereas boys are intelligent, strong and active. Above all, a boy: "doesn't cry like a girl".

Jan is a member of a company whose show "Les masculinités" challenges our notions of masculinity. He performs with his company, once a month in Paris.

Victor tells of having opened his eyes to a so-called "toxic masculinity". A notion brought by the "gender studies" which points out the effects generated by the model of a traditional masculinity. The "toxic masculinity" would cut men off from their emotions, would generate violent behaviors and risky behaviors. Victor is now trying to create his own path. In the photo, where we only see his legs, he is mentally preparing himself before the show.

Fred (from the back), boylesque stripper, confesses that after a long process of deconstruction of his masculinity, he has profoundly changed his vision of relationships between men and women, starting with his love and sexual relationships: "Before, for me, a love relationship was penetration. Of course, I was careful about foreplay, but if there was no penetration, I did not consider that we had slept together. Now, with or without, it's secondary. I don't have that performance pressure anymore, my lovemaking is more about tenderness and exchange.".

What Fred tells us is that he seems to have succeeded in getting rid of the injunctions of heteronormative sexuality. The writer Martin Page in his book "Beyond Penetration" also deconstructs this view of sexuality:

"Sexuality is the space where the two sexes intimately meet, it is also a place of reproduction of inequalities. The representation of heterosexual sexuality is that of penetration. Other practices are relegated to the rank of taboo or foreplay."

On the phone, Sam's voice sounds like a mix between Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. Sam is a sports coach and bodybuilder. When I talk to him about my project on masculinities, he says: "You'll see I'm a real macho!

Of Algerian origin, he grew up in a traditional family. The wife is in the kitchen and the father is distant, except when he hits and sometimes he hits hard. Sam is the perfect example of virility through the centuries, according to the definition of sociologist Haude Rivoal: an ideal of surpassing oneself, authority and endurance with developed physical attributes and great sexual power. Sam, who says he enjoys his aura as a big shot in the cities, admits he has stopped counting his female conquests, which have become too numerous.

This portrait of Sam was taken in the suburbs of Paris along the ring road. This is his training ground, an open-air gym where he gives his classes surrounded by men who meet there to practice bodybuilding.

Sociologist Raewyn Connell highlights three categories of masculinities in our patriarchal societies:

According to the sociologist Kevin Didier, little boys have assimilated very early the obligation to heterosexuality and the inferiorization of the feminine, just as they quickly become aware through a process of "differentiation" that they are boys and not girls.

From the earliest age, the differentiated behavior of parents through the choice of their child's name, gendered toys and clothing, is one of the first factors that forces children to adopt the gender codes of a society and culture. Jan is a survivor of this process.

This "differentiation" also implies a hierarchy. Jan might have thought that being a boy was not only "not being a girl" but being "better than a girl". Yet her parents went out of their way to give her a free hand:

"I was privileged in my childhood, I could dress as I wanted. It is thanks to the openness of my parents that I did not have too many problems to cross the adolescence. My mother even let me go to school in high heels. I was supported and then I was a fighter, which is normally very manly but I didn't put that label on it since I was lucky enough to have an upbringing that didn't put it on itself."

On the picture, Jan meets a man in a hotel where he has just done a photo shoot.

Sam could correspond to the model of the Alpha male, praised by the "seduction community", a movement that appeared in the 90's in the United States, which, against the background of the "masculinity crisis", advocates dating as a way of life. An art of living in which, according to the sociologist Mélanie Gouardier, "Women are seen as intermediaries to finally strengthen their relationships between men. However, Sam, a very sensitive man, in his conquest of women to assert himself as a man, fell in love. Older than him, she "masters" him as he says, takes the upper hand in the love relationship, takes him on trips and fills him with presents. One day, she gives him an envelope and sends it to a "friend". Sam then becomes a prostitute for the first time in his life, a victim, according to him, of the masculine representation that he conveys.

In the picture, one of Sam's students, a man in his thirties, who could be described as slightly overweight, is under Sam's injunctions to excel.

Sam used to check off all the normative boxes of the heterosexual guy, a top athlete in American soccer in Canada, handsome and virile. The privilege of being the norm is that you rarely need to question yourself, according to sociologist Francis Dupuis-Déry. What do you do when the situation is reversed and you find yourself on the other side of the fence?

Sam admits that he has changed his view of the relationship between men and women. When he hears guys in his neighborhood proudly exclaiming that they "took apart" their girl yesterday", he has the look of a man of experience: "They don't understand anything, they are poor in their sexuality. The woman has desires as present as those of the men. When we make love, it must be a dialogue between two people."

Sam portrait has been taken in his favorit place, a bar where you can smocke the shisha. There is most of the time only men in this places. There is a symbolic exclusion of women who are accepted but tolarated.

At the edge of the pier of the port of Porto, Portugal, young men jump several meters into the ocean. From the blue of the sky to the blue of the water, the athletes of the edge of beach show to all and all their sports capacities and their courage. For Thierry Terret, historian of the sport, this one is the arena of the learning of the masculinity. Its values related to tactical intelligence, control and resistance to pain, especially in team sports, allow to assert its virility in front of women but especially in front of other men.

A group of young people take the sun in Portugal on loan from the Porto harbour jetty. The young men show off and joke around. It is an opportunity to show who's the most masculine in the group. It's through the group that we exist as men at a time when we're between adolescence and adulthood.

Tiago celebrates his friend's 17th birthday with his "group of friends" on the banks of the Douro in Portugal. The bodies touch and clash with the energy of adolescence. It is the discovery of life, friendship and sexuality.

In the group, jokes are flying. They would like to be noticed by the girls on the beach. Apart from their love parade, sometimes one of them is the target of mockery. They designate him as the "paneleiro", that is to say vulgarly the "fag".

These jokes have for role, as Maurice Dumas explains it in his book "History of the misogyny", to legitimize the discrimination. The jokes between buddies represent then a field of exclusion of the female. They also have for goal to consolidate through the others, its own masculinity, constantly questioned by this same group.

KAy, in the center, is a performer, actor, sex worker, activist and co-parent. He defines himself as a non-binary trans person, "I am a masculine entity but not a guy, on the contrary, I try to give visibility to this in-between." He grew up as a child in a binary society being labeled not as a "tomboy" but as a "tomboy" (two phrases he would not use today) although he played with both genders. At puberty, with the changes in his body, the in-between is more problematic to live.

Her attraction to gay men was complicated because they perceived her as a lesbian girl while at the same time straight men identified her as a girl which was not to Kay's liking. It is, as he explains it, towards the women that he turns: "It was necessary at a time that I begin my sexual life". For years, KAy felt an anger towards himself that he invested in group sports such as rugby and later in his LGBTI+ activism. Working in the predominantly male environment of finance, he felt he was performing a form of masculinity. Now, through his roles in pornographic and classic films and his performances, KAy uses his gender as a standard bearer to give visibility to the in-between in a world mostly perceived as binary.
The "hegemonic masculinity" which corresponds to the virile norm, the "complicit masculinity" which represents the men who adhere to the hegemonic masculinity without benefiting from it and the "subordinate masculinity" perceived as inferior. The latter would refer to the conception of an "effeminate" and therefore devalued masculinity.

Jan, who in the photo is caught in his transformation from feminine to masculine, would belong to the "subordinate masculinity". Therefore, devaluing him would be taken as a way to reinforce his position in the hierarchy and to affirm his masculinity in front of other men.

In 2008 KAy began his transition, and beyond the changes in his body and mind to which he is adapting "day by day" he must face the violence of cisgender men*:

"The male world is a violent world towards women and men that they perceive as effeminate. When you're in the transition process, you have to deal with both. Afterwards, we learn the codes, we adapt. This violence is not the prerogative of heterosexuals, that's why I want to specify "cis men". The violence can be subtle, like when I am directly asked about my changes without having asked for my consent beforehand. In my way of life, I take on the role of educator but I put limits on it because it's tiring on a daily basis. Some trans people have a period when they become macho and then calm down. For my part, the male model I have taken is in the gay community where there is a greater plurality of masculine representations. Without the social construct, we're just human beings picking and choosing from an array of differences." Kay defines himself as pansexual, which means that he is romantically or sexually attracted to someone regardless of their sex or gender.

*cisgender: refers to a type of gender identity where a person's felt gender corresponds to the gender assigned at birth, so the person is cisgender or cissexual

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