The Male in the Head: Young People, Heterosexuality and Power

Full text

Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu,
Sue Sharpe, Rachel Thomson
The Male in the Head
young people, heterosexuality
and power

the Tufnell Press,
London
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library
ISBN 1 872767 95 8
Copyright © 1998, Janet Holland, Caroline Ramazanoglu,
Sue Sharpe, Rachel Thomson
Cover painting, Les jours gigantesques, 1928, by René Magritte
© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London, 1998
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published 1998

Contents
Preface and acknowledgements ii
1 Introduction: Sex, gender and power 1
2 Positioning ourselves, representing others 14
3 The contradictions of condoms: Femininity, masculinity
and sexual risk 31
4 Learning about sex: The gendering of sexual knowledge 56
5 Languages if love: Stories, lines and secrets 84
6 When bodies come together: Power, control and desire 106
7 Empowered women 129
8 Empowered men 149
9 The-male-in-the-head 171
10 Unnatural heterosexuality: Resistance and change 192
Notes 196
Bibliography 202
Appendix I. WRAP Publications 214
Appendix II. The Women, Risk and AIDS Project;
The Men, Risk and AIDS Project 217
Appendix III. A Feminist Research Method 220
Subject index 226
Author Index 229

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION: SEX, GENDER AND
POWER
This book is about power in conventional heterosexual relationships. It is the
story of how we came to problematise the social and political nature of
heterosexuality in order to make sense of what young people say about their
sexual relations. As Tamsin Wilton (1994: 4) has commented:
‘... unequal relations of power between women and men are not simply
of academic interest. In the context of HIV/AIDS they are literally
life or death issues, for men as well as for women.’
Our view of male power has grown out of research on young people’s
accounts of their sexuality and heterosexual practices. When we began our
study in 1988, a moral panic had developed in the UK and the US over the
transmission of HIV and the prospect of an AIDS epidemic (Weeks 1989).
Once HIV/AIDS was identified as a fatal condition that could be transmitted
through sexual activity, it aroused potent fears of death which expressed
confusion and uncertainty about sexual behaviour and identities. Public
responses were part of a recurring, generalised social anxiety about sex and
deviance (see Bland 1982, 1996; Weeks 1985, 1988; Sontag 1989). The
categories of people who were initially identified as having risky sexual
identities (gay men, sex workers, Haitians, Africans, intravenous drug users)
rapidly became constituted as threats to public health. Mass media campaigns,
and many official policies, identified the supposedly socially deviant carriers
of HIV as a danger posed by the guilty to the innocent.
Ironically, in the midst of this moral panic, governments began to develop
strategies for containing the epidemic that required knowledge of how people
organise their sexual relationships, what sexuality means to them, and what
sexual practices people actually engage in. In order to be effective, official
strategies for limiting the transmission of HIV had to challenge the belief that
risks lay in the perverse natures of marginalised categories of people. As Watney
(1987) argued, the development of the AIDS epidemic showed that popular
stereotypes of deviance and guilt could not explain patterns of HIV
transmission. He suggested that AIDS exposed the reality of sexual diversity

at the same time as destroying the organising categories with which we think
about sexuality. In the UK and the US, the efforts of social researchers and
those of political activists organising around gay men’s and sex workers’ rights
and safety, and the diverse concerns of different categories of people with
HIV/AIDS, rebutted the targeting of ‘high risk groups’ as the key social problem
in explaining and containing the AIDS epidemic.
Social researchers and political activists in the 1980s argued that sexual
risk-taking is not a question of who you are but of what you do, how, and with
whom. This assertion that risk-taking is cultural activity carrying a range of
meanings, shifted strategies for containing HIV away from moral judgements
of risky social and sexual identities towards attempts to understand risky sexual
practices and their meanings. In this shift, heterosexual identities lost their
innocence.
Although HIV/AIDS is still spreading at a tragic rate worldwide, the
threatened heterosexual epidemic in the UK has not materialised to the extent
feared in the 1980s. Prevention strategies, such as needle exchange schemes
for IV drug users, campaigns for and by gay men, outreach work with men
who do not identify as gay but who have sex with men, screening of donated
blood, and the use of condoms by sex workers, appear to have had an effect.1
This book emerges from research on social aspects of AIDS that served to
counter the moral panics of the late 1980s. Although the belief that ‘nice people
don’t get AIDS’ lingers, a number of studies have expanded our knowledge of
the conventions of sexual risk-taking in different populations. Fear of AIDS
suddenly legitimated social analyses of sexuality and offered opportunities
for studying the beliefs, practices and management of risk by gay men, IV
drug users and sex workers.2
In the early phases of research on sexuality evoked by the AIDS crisis, little
attention was paid to the sexuality of the supposedly ‘normal’ population.
Media representations of the risks posed by HIV/AIDS that dominated in the
mass media initially focused on the deviance of ‘high risk’ groups, and young
people in the 1980s generally believed that conventional heterosexual practices
were ‘normal’ and so posed no danger of infection (COI 1986; Aggleton et al.
1988; COI-DHSS 1987).
The role of women in the transmission of HIV had been scarcely considered
in the early stages of the AIDS epidemic, and the danger of heterosexual
transmission of HIV was low on the agenda with its probability strongly
contested (for example, Fitzpatrick and Milligan 1990; Fumento 1990). Young
women having sexual intercourse with ‘heterosexual’ men were not seen to be
at risk. But sexual beliefs and practices are cultural constructions and a

fundamental inequality between women and men is central to the conventions
of heterosexuality in the UK and the USA.
We intended to investigate young women’s understanding of their own
sexuality and sexual practice, considering that the sexuality and sexual practices
of women were important and might be decisive in the spread or limitation of
HIV/AIDS and crucial to understanding impediments to safer sexual practices.
Our first study, the Women, Risk and AIDS Project (WRAP) entailed
interviewing 148 young women in London and Manchester (UK) in 1988-90.
Reflections on the analysis of these interviews led to the second stage of our
study the Men, Risk and AIDS Project (MRAP) which entailed comparable
interviews with 46 young men in London in 1991-92 (see Appendix II). We
aimed in these two studies to build up a detailed picture of the sexual practices,
beliefs and understanding of young people in order to document and interpret:
their understanding of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases; their conceptions
of risk and danger in sexual activity; their approaches to relationships and
responsibility within them; and their ability to communicate effectively their
ideas on safety within sexual relationships. It was also our intention to contribute
to the development of the theory of the social construction of sexuality, by
identifying the complexity of the processes and mechanisms through which
young people construct, experience and define their sexuality, sexual practices
and identities.
Initial analysis of young women’s sexual beliefs, practices and relationships
led us to reconsider ‘the organising categories’ with which we think about
heterosexuality. Our story exposes and challenges the conventions of young
people’s sexual relations, and shows their struggles with conformity, agency
and resistance. From this study we saw that the conventions of heterosexual
masculinity and femininity powerfully contribute to sexual risk-taking and
the instability of safer sexual practices; and how sexual risk-taking and sexual
safety were being constituted in social relations of heterosexuality.
Our thinking has been framed by feminist assumptions about gender
relations, from our initial investigation of young women’s sexual identities,
beliefs and their practices with male partners, to our conclusions on male power.
Moving into the second stage of the study with young men made us reflect
critically on the assumptions about masculinity and male power with which
we started our enquiry, and led to a reconsideration of femininity. From seeing
femininity as the opposite of masculinity, we came to see women’s collusion
with male power and their difficulties in resisting male dominance. Analysis
of what had to be resisted brought us to a theory of heterosexuality as
systematically privileging masculinity.
Introduction

We did not want this book to develop as an abstract discussion of theories
of power or sexualities. The analysis that follows is grounded in the sexual
politics of the everyday dangers, desires, excitements, boredom, risks and
pleasures that these young people experienced and made sense of as they
brought their bodies into intimate contact with others. But we have taken into
account criticisms of feminist theory (political, methodological and
philosophical) in order to justify our understanding of heterosexuality. Any
theory of male power is contentious, and the personal implications can also be
painful. A feminist theory of power, like any other, needs to be critically
appraised and adequately supported. We have tried to make our assumptions
about power explicit by laying out our theoretical framework in Chapter 2,
and by showing in subsequent chapters how this framework has both shaped
our reading of our data and been shaped by it.
We have tried to make sense both of theories of sexuality and of young
people’s accounts of their experiences, and to discuss the problems of doing
so. The ideas about sexuality with which we started the first study were drawn
from feminism, but we have taken criticisms of feminism seriously and have
had to struggle with these ideas in order to understand our interviews with
young people. Without feminist theory, however, we could not make sense of
our findings.
We have no party line on feminism, and we have not always agreed with
each other as a research team, but explaining ourselves to each other and arguing
through our differences has been productive. In our analysis of young people’s
accounts of their sexuality, we have attempted to work through our own
reflections on the knowledge we have produced, in relation to young people’s
accounts of their experiences. We have tried to make our concepts and
assumptions explicit, indicate our presence in the research process and explain
to the reader the ways of understanding our data that make most sense to us
and which respect the accounts young people have given us. (For discussion
of our methodology see Appendix III). We have looked at differences of class,
ethnicity, age, ablebodiedness and sexual orientation between young people
but, for reasons we explain in the course of the book, we have analysed our
data in terms of ‘women’ and ‘men’, femininity and masculinity.
Our data were collected at particular times, and in particular places and,
while we draw out themes and patterns in the data which may be more general,
we recognise the limits set by time and place. Much of the (national and
international) literature on young people’s sexuality which we have reviewed
supports our findings, but if different data collected at other times in other
places generate different conclusions, this adds to our knowledge of
heterosexuality. For ease of reading this book we do not qualify our reporting

of what the particular young people in our study have said with the specificity
of the location and timing of their interview each time, but refer to young
people, women, or men, and write of their accounts in the present tense.
A number of published papers have come out of the various stages of our
analysis since 1990, and these are numbered and listed in full in Appendix I.
From Chapter 3 onwards, we note which papers are drawn on for each chapter
through reference to the numbers used in this list. These papers give more
detail of each stage of our findings than we can provide here. In this volume
we offer the reader our conclusions on heterosexuality and male power, our
reflections on how we arrived at these conclusions, and how they can be
justified. The structure of the book parallels our intellectual journey into
knowledge of the social construction of heterosexuality.
ITINERARY: FROM SEXUAL RISK TO INSTITUTIONALISED
HETEROSEXUALITY
The journey mapped out in this chapter corresponds to the chronological and
intellectual development of our analysis of young people’s sexuality. It takes
us from an initial concern with understanding young women’s sexual behaviour
in order to promote safer sexual practices, through a critical exploration of the
social construction of femininity and masculinity, to identification of the male
power in institutionalised heterosexuality.
The start: from sexual risk to unsafe femininity
We began by looking specifically at the accounts the young women gave of
their own sexual risk-taking, and at what constrained safer sexual practices.
Most of these young women felt under some pressure to become sexually
active early. Almost a third of young women reported having intercourse before
the age of 16 (the legal age of consent to heterosexual intercourse in England)
compared to half of the young men. (A statistical description of the sample is
given in Appendix II.)
We were struck by the contradictions in the young women’s accounts:
discrepancies between expectations and experience; between intention and
practice; between different discourses of femininity. Generally the young
women were concerned about sexual health, yet fears of sexually transmitted
diseases paled in the light of their fears of pregnancy and the loss of sexual
reputation. These young women expressed powerful intentions to practice safer
sex in terms of contraception and condom use. They understood the risks and
wanted, in the words of one sex education leaflet, to ‘choose’ safer sex. Yet
they repeatedly failed to fulfil these intentions—most had at times had
unprotected vaginal intercourse whatever their plans.3
Introduction

Exploring these episodes of sexual risk-taking opened up accounts of
inequalities of gender, and the extent of men’s dominance of the young women’s
sexual relationships. We saw young women’s ability to choose safer sexual
practices, or to refuse unsafe (or any other) sexual activity, not as an issue of
free choice between equals, but as one of negotiation within structurally unequal
social relationships. We develop this interpretation in Chapter 3.
Young women spoke, for example, of having unprotected sexual intercourse;
of not using condoms even when they were to hand; of making no protest at
rape; of accepting violence; of coming under pressure to have unwanted vaginal
penetrative intercourse rather than non-penetrative sex. The majority were
able to practice safer sex at times but, whatever they intended or expected,
they tended to be unable to do so consistently.
Dissemination of knowledge on safer sex clearly did not ensure that young
people would put what they knew into practice or think that it concerned them.
Accounts of their sexual relations were shaped by the definition of ‘proper
sex’ as penetrative vaginal intercourse that starts when the man is aroused and
stops after his orgasm—making her orgasm his production—a notion of sex
that privileges male needs and desires in a sexual division of labour in which
he is the sexual actor while she is acted upon.
The dominant discourse of femininity as the opposite of masculinity through
which these young women made sense of their sexual selves stood in direct
contradiction to their sexual safety. The overwhelming conclusion that came
from the interviews was that femininity constituted an unsafe sexual identity,
and that conventionally feminine behaviour was putting young women at risk,
an observation that has subsequently been confirmed in other studies (for
example: Kippax et al. 1990; Miles 1993; Stewart 1995). To be conventionally
feminine is to appear sexually unknowing, to aspire to a relationship, to let
sex ‘happen’, to trust to love, and to make men happy. Safer sex is not just a
question of using protection, avoiding penetration, or being chaste, it brings
questions of power, trust and female agency into sexual relationships. Our
reflections on these issues, and comparison of the young women’s accounts
with those of young men, are explored in Chapter 3 through analysis of the
young people’s condom use.
The extent of the sexual risks facing young women began to make more
sense when we could see that both accepting conventional femininity and
resisting it can be risky sexual strategies. The question of how young people
develop understandings of sex that privilege masculinity led us to consider
how young people learn about sex, which we take up in Chapter 4.

From unsafe femininity to learning unsafe sex
The formal sources of sex education recounted by the young women showed
that sex education at school and from parents tended to constitute a ‘protective
discourse’. This alerted them to the dangers of sex and, by default, the dangers
of men. In particular the warning that ‘men are only after one thing’
communicated a strong message to young women about the power of male
sexuality and, through its silence, the passivity or vulnerability of their
femininity.
While young women heard a great deal about their reproductive capacity,
they reported almost no formal or informal education about the physical
pleasures of sex or the potential of their own desire. We concluded that the
language and the silences through which young women had learned about
sexuality and sexual conduct put them at a distinct disadvantage when it came
to controlling or enjoying sexual encounters. Unless women actively resist
the norms of femininity, they are caught in conventions of female acquiescence
in a male activity: the point of sexual encounters is meeting men’s needs and
desires.
The contrast with how young men learned about sex was striking. Where
young women were being educated to guard their reputations and protect
themselves from danger, young men were learning that real men were knowing
agents in pursuit of sexual pleasure. The gendering of learning about sex was
connected to differing and gendered languages of sex, love and romance.
From learning unsafe sex to gendered languages of love
In the texts of the interviews, the language available for communication about
sexuality was both limited and gendered. Distinctions between sex, love and
romance had different resonance for male and female reputations. Men could
access a public language of instrumental sexuality which was inappropriate
for women, while women could access a respectable language of romance
that did not enable them to communicate practical sexual issues or their own
pain or pleasure in bodily contact. Much of the feminine language of sex was
constituted in silences.
Young people talked about transgressing appropriate languages (with women
seeking sexual gratification, and men falling in love) and of diversity,
confusions and contradictions in communicating about sexuality. It is not
possible to fully disentangle the meanings of the language used, but we argue
in Chapter 5 that the way young people talk about sex, love, romance, and the
differences between these, indicate access to a discourse through which the
gendered subject positions of heterosexuality are reproduced.
Introduction

Our initial investigation of young people’s ideas of romance and love led
us to look for female power and women’s agency, and for resistance to
conventional femininity. The rarity of such resistance was striking. We had to
search through silences, hesitations, hints, and draw our own implications
from these. The differences between female talk of engagement in feelings,
and men’s talk of distancing the self from emotion brought us to contrary
accounts of male embodiment and female disembodiment.
From languages of love to embodiment/disembodiment.
In Chapter 6 we compare the disembodied femininity that we found in the
young women’s interviews with the much more embodied masculinity of the
young men. Our feminist view of the language of unsafe femininity shifted
the direction of our efforts towards trying to explain why so many young
women knowingly put their bodies at risk despite their romantic expectations
of sexual relationships, and hopes of love.
When women did have a critical consciousness of the embodiment of their
sexuality, and were comfortable with their own desires, manifesting such desire
could be experienced as directly threatening men’s power to define the nature
of the relationship. The intrusion of her body into his desires (rather than his
desire into her body) could contribute to fears of ending the relationship, or
could reinforce men’s control. Much individual resistance appeared to be
dependent on a specific context or relationship and could not be sustained
outside this.
The absence of effective empowerment was linked to the absence of bodily
pleasure in the accounts of most of the young women. This led us to reflect on
the connections between an absence of female desire and the disembodied
femininity that emerged from the interviews. While sexuality and aspects of
embodiment are clearly socially constructed, the bodily contact entailed in
unsafe sex has a material grounding which requires practical management.
Although the body which engages in sexual activity is always socially
constituted and managed, it is also always material, hairy, discharging, emitting
noises, susceptible to pleasure and pain. This materiality is in danger of erupting
into men’s space and so has to be carefully regulated.
Men’s acceptance of the masculinity of the male body was markedly different
from women’s distancing of their femininity from their bodies. Despite their
doubts, apprehensions and uncertainties, young men appeared to be much more
comfortable with their bodies than young women, and found the intrusion of
the male body into the intimate social relationship unproblematic. It was male
sexual performance that constituted the point of the bodily encounter. Men

were simply required to act as men, while women, much more problematically
had to discipline their unruly bodies into conformity with male desires.
From disembodied femininity to disempowered young women
The silencing and disembodiment of female desire appeared to have been so
effective that it was difficult to find expressions of a positive heterosexual
feminine identity in the young women’s interviews. Accounts of particular
relationships showed that individual men could be educated out of conventional
expectations in the privacy of close relationships or even one-night stands,
and that men valued loving, communicative relationships. But the social
construction of disembodied femininity, and the silencing of female desire
brought us up against the force and ubiquity of male power and this is what
we have needed to explain and justify.
Few young women had managed to identify and resist conventional
femininity sufficiently to become openly and effectively empowered in
controlling their sexual encounters safely, and expressing their own desires.
Many showed the dangers of conformity to femininity as they related
experiences of unwanted sexual intercourse under pressure or violence from
men. In Chapter 7 we identify strategies of resistance, but we found these
strategies to be limited and had great difficulty in finding empowered young
women.
The young women’s accounts show their active engagement in the
construction of their femininity, but in our interpretation, and to some extent
in theirs, young women are drawn into their own disempowerment through
their conceptions of what sexual encounters are about. The masculinity of
their partners contributes to the dangers young women encounter in their sexual
relationships and, in understanding this, and through closer examination of
how both men and women can contribute to male dominance and female
subordination, we began to question the notion of masculinity and femininity
as opposites in collision.
In making sense of the limits of resistance and empowerment, we distinguish
between empowerment at the level of ideas (intellectual empowerment—
identifying the changes and intending to make them) and empowerment at the
level of practical efficacy (experiential empowerment—the ability to act on
intentions). Intellectual empowerment was more common in the women’s
interviews than experiential empowerment, but neither alone was a sufficient
condition to ensure the consistent practice of sexual safety. One of the keys to
linking intellectual and experiential empowerment for young women lies in
their ability to conceptualise female desire and value their own sexual pleasure.
Through this understanding of empowerment, we are able to trace connections
Introduction

between women’s disembodiment and disempowerment, the management of
safer sexual practices, and the empowerment of young men.
From embodied masculinity to empowered young men
Men’s access to positive conceptions of an active, pleasure-seeking, embodied,
masculine sexuality, put particular pressures on them to become ‘real men’
from their first sexual relationships with women, and to seek opportunities for
intercourse. We found variations in the ways the young men experienced their
sexuality and their masculinity, but the interviews support our view that
becoming a ‘normal’ man implies the exercise of power over women, whether
or not this is recognised, acknowledged or desired by an individual man. In
Chapter 8, we consider why the young men, in spite of their differences,
weaknesses and vulnerability, exercise such extensive power over their female
partners. We argue that young men have considerable power that is not available
to young women and the constitution and practice of institutionalised male
power needs to be explained. Explanation is needed in particular of the
operation of the male peer group, the normality of male violence and the
difficulties young men face in resisting the pressures of masculinity.
In contrast to the young women, young men were more clearly empowered
through their masculinity. They were aware that in entering into the negotiation
of sexual encounters they were laying themselves open to the possibility of
failure, but their strategies for dealing with vulnerability, which we explore in
Chapter 8, reproduce and reinforce the exercise of male power over women.
The young men’s struggles to be successfully masculine define their sexuality
in terms of male needs, desires and satisfactions, rather than in ways that might
acknowledge and engage with female sexuality and their own emotions. The
way in which this competition for masculinity is played out, protects men
from acknowledging fears of an independent female sexuality, and draws
women into servicing men’s vulnerability.
Young men are caught in a contradiction in which they suffer pressure to
conform to a narrow and constraining conception of masculine sexuality but,
through acquiring this version of masculinity, can take advantage of social
arrangements which systematically privilege the male over the female.
From male empowerment to the-male-in-the-head
We initially saw adolescent sexual cultures as two separate worlds of
masculinity and femininity, brought into collision in sexual encounters. The
understandings of sexual meaning and practice expressed by the young men
contrasted with those offered by the young women: embodied where femininity
was disembodied; instrumental where being a woman was relational; positive

where the women were negative. Many of the young people commented on
this contrast between the worlds of masculinity and femininity, and in particular
on a ‘double standard’ of sexual reputation. Behaviour that made him
successfully masculine, a real man, caused her to lose her reputation—to be
seen as loose, slack, a slag—a reputation policed just as forcefully by women
as by men. When we looked more closely at the ways women and men managed
the differences in their sexual reputations the image of two worlds in collision
shifted to one in which women colluded with their sexual partners in the
reproduction of male power. Young women could be seen as playing an active
role in constituting and reproducing male dominance.
In Chapter 9 we move from the idea of femininity and masculinity in
collision to that of young people’s collusion in promoting the masculinity of
heterosexuality; we pass, as it were, through the looking glass that reflects our
conventional visions of gender, to see young men and women jointly engaged
in constituting a single standard of heterosexuality and being regulated by it
in differing ways. We take the ‘male-in-the-head’ to indicate the surveillance
power of this male-dominated and institutionalised heterosexuality, as distinct
from the-man-in-the-bed of everyday experience.4
Individual men may reject, resist or ignore the demands and constraints of
dominant masculinity. Yet in their first sexual relationships they and their
partners continue to be aware of, and subject to, the exercise of its surveillance
power, articulated through the male peer group and the efficacy of sexual
reputation. In Chapter 9 we see how the conventions of heterosexuality privilege
masculine meanings and desires. Both young men and young women must
live by these rules or take the personal and social consequences of social
transgression.
Having reached this point, we can no longer see masculine and feminine as
oppositional categories. Femininity is constructed from within heterosexuality
and on male territory, yet this territory can only exist with female consent and
collusion. However hard we tried, we could not find a ‘female-in-the-head’ to
correspond to the male. Young men are not responding to the surveillance
power of femininity; they are clearly living heterosexual masculine identities
under a male gaze. Young women are living feminine identities, but in relation
to a male audience—measuring themselves through the gaze of the ‘male-in-
the-head’.
Heterosexuality is not, as it appears to be, masculinity-and-femininity in
opposition: it is masculinity. Within this masculine heterosexuality, women’s
desires and the possibility of female resistance are potentially unruly forces to
be disciplined and controlled, if necessary by violence.
Introduction

The young people’s accounts of safer sex support our claim that early
heterosexual encounters put a young woman under pressure: first, to consent
to the constitution of adult heterosexuality as the construction of masculinity;
then, to fit herself to this construction. Men are routinely accessing male power
over women, whether or not they know this, or want, or intend to exercise
such power, but they are also constrained by the construction of adult
heterosexuality as masculinity. We argue that sexually young people are all in
the same boat, in that heterosexuality is masculinity only thinly disguised but,
that from a feminist perspective, they are not in the same boat, in that resistance
is possible and heterosexuality could be otherwise.
Resistance to heterosexuality and the possibilities of change
We understand heterosexuality as more than a pattern of sexual practices, since
it anchors a set of sexual and gender relations that include lesbian and gay
identities. Resisting heterosexuality is not only a question of how young people
choose their sexual partners; resistance includes a critical exploration and
disruption of desire, embodiment and gender. Although very few of the young
people in our studies identified themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual, such
identities, while not freeing them from the gender relations of heterosexuality,
can afford them a degree of freedom in the invention and negotiation of their
sexual relationships.
To ensure consistency in safer sexual practice, both men and women need
to resist the sexual conventions of femininity/masculinity, and to see how these
identities are regulated by the ‘male-in-the-head’. Some young people are
clearly resisting the pressures of heterosexuality and searching for other ways
of being sexual. Within the privacy of individual relationships, the rules of
male domination/female collusion can be negotiated and disrupted. Levels of
trust and mistrust can be managed to enable safer rather than riskier encounters.
Yet these private negotiations remain exceptions to the rules of heterosexuality,
or can become a form of accommodation to it.
Making heterosexuality visible is difficult, since its power as ‘the natural
order of things’ hinders both its actors and the social theorist in extricating
contested meanings from the apparent certainties of ‘boy meets girl’. While
young people’s resistance to heterosexuality can be socially constructed in
varying ways (differentiated, for example, by class, ethnicity, age, style) the
potential for young people to have a subversive or transformative effect on
sexual relationships appears to be limited. Analysis of the strategies of resistance
that emerged in the interviews, how far they could succeed, and the extent to
which they reinforce or transgress normative understandings, became important
in our understanding of the location of male power in heterosexuality. Our

analysis indicates the necessity of transforming social and sexual relationships,
and in particular transforming masculinity. Clarifying what this might mean
was the most challenging stage of our journey and the point we reach in our
concluding chapter.
Conclusion
Our journey has brought us to questions of envisaging exactly what is needed
to make strategies of change effective: how heterosexuality is constructed and
reproduced, and why it privileges men. This has meant thinking critically about
notions of male power, what we mean by heterosexuality and so about the
politics of safer sex. In Chapter 2 we lay out our working definitions of key
concepts and consider some of the theoretical problems raised by making sense
of the interviews. For those who are impatient to hear the voices of the young
people, this chapter can be skipped!
We have raised more problems than we can solve in this book, but we
consider that by grounding abstract problems of the nature of heterosexuality
in these young people’s often vivid and moving accounts, we can usefully
clarify the hidden power relations that young men and women meet as they
move into adult sexual relationships. The subtleties of the disappearance of
social aspects of sexuality into conventional assumptions of what is ‘naturally’
male and female, go some way towards accounting for the strength and
resilience of male power. Individual efforts to subvert or transform
institutionalised heterosexuality are constrained both by the social construction
of heterosexual subjectivities, identities and discourses, and also by the social
structures and practices of dominant masculinity. This book is intended as a
contribution to making the power of heterosexuality-as-masculinity visible,
and showing the relevance of this power to young people’s management of
sexual safety.
Introduction