Renne Nunes

The history of virility does not begin with strength. It begins with dread. It starts the moment a man discovers that he does not have full control over even his own body. For the masculine ideal, there is something deeply unsettling in the realization that what has been elevated to the status of a symbol of power can also fail, falter, go soft, age, escape his command, and expose him to ridicule. As Gazalé (2017) points out, what was symbolically invested as a sign of potency carries within it, at the very same time, the possibility of failure and humiliation. What was supposed to guarantee sovereignty carries, from the very beginning, the threat of its own downfall.

Thus, virility ceases to be a mere trait and becomes an exhausting task. It is not enough to just be a man. One must look like a man, sustain an image, confirm it before other men, and reiterate it through the body, the voice, gestures, posture, desire, and performance. It is as if masculinity, on its own, were never enough, constantly requiring witnesses, signals, and public displays just to hold itself together.

From this perspective, virility appears less as an essence than as a defensive performance. The more fragile the ground beneath it, the more theatrical the display of firmness. The greater the risk of faltering, the more rigid the character becomes. Perhaps this is why virility so often organizes itself not only as an exhibition of power, but as a fierce rejection of anything that might evoke vulnerability, passivity, delicacy, dependence, and above all, the feminine. As if, in order to remain in the position of the one who dominates, a man first had to expel from himself any trait that might bring him closer to what culture, for centuries, has treated as inferior, ridiculous, or submissive.

The Costumes of Virility

It takes only a slight shift in perspective for the supposed naturalness of virility to start losing its consistency. At a certain point in history, for instance, men wore high heels. Not as a fringe extravagance, nor as an act of transgression, but as a badge of distinction, power, and prestige. What today, in the current popular imagination, has been rigidly coded as feminine once belonged seamlessly to the masculine repertoire. This fact, anecdotal at first glance, holds theoretical weight: it shows that the outward signs of masculinity have never been stable, natural, or eternal. They have been constructed, displaced, contested, and reorganized over time.

This is precisely where the reflection becomes more uncomfortable. If the emblems of masculinity change, then virility does not rest upon an essence, but on historical conventions masquerading as nature. What seems too obvious to be questioned is often the most successful trick of culture. As Bourdieu (2020) observes, male domination operates so effectively precisely because it transforms historical constructs into seemingly obvious, self-evident truths, inscribing them into bodies, gestures, habits, and perceptions.

Therefore, this is not just about fashion, clothing, or appearance. What is at stake is the way a society distributes values, hierarchies, and permissions based on signs that dictate what should be read as strength, authority, elegance, or weakness. The high heel, in this context, transcends being a mere historical curiosity and functions as a symptom: it reveals that the border between masculine and feminine is far less solid than the pedagogies of virility would like to admit. And perhaps this explains why certain shifts in societal codes cause such profound discomfort. When a sign escapes its usual framework, what falters is not just a custom; it is the fantasy that a pure, coherent, and naturally given masculinity even exists.

This instability helps us understand why virility demands constant vigilance. If it were a tangible substance, it would simply exist. But because it relies on codes, signals, and societal validation, it must be constantly reiterated, policed, and defended. The fact that it changes historically does not eliminate this requirement; it merely alters its wardrobe. In every era, hegemonic masculinity chooses its own props, its legitimate postures, its authorized ways of occupying the body and space. What remains, underneath the new outfits, is the underlying anxiety of upholding an image that never feels completely secure.

Feminizing to Humiliate

If so many interactions between men seem driven by a need to prove their virility, it is because the stakes are incredibly high. It is not just about looking weak; it is about being symbolically demoted to a historically devalued position: that of the feminine. This is where Bourdieu’s analysis becomes especially incisive. In discussing the logic of male domination, the author notes that the traditional symbolic order is organized around a deeply hierarchical opposition between masculine and feminine, where the former is associated with the active, the dominant, the erect, the penetrating, and the possessing, while the latter is pushed toward the passive, the submissive, the penetrable, and the possessed (Bourdieu, 2020).

This means that emasculating humiliation is not limited to a loss of individual prestige. It involves a symbolic reclassification. As Gazalé (2017) notes, virility is never established peacefully: it must be constantly proven because it carries, at its very core, the threat of failure, of faltering, and of losing control. Perhaps this is also why feminization operates, in so many contexts, as the ultimate tool for humiliating men. In this framework, to degrade a man is frequently to liken him to what culture itself has sought to make inferior. The insult directed at him almost never targets just him as an individual. It feminizes him. And by feminizing him, it reinforces the old grammar that dictates that the most degrading thing that can happen to a man is to be mistaken for what the patriarchal imagination has learned to despise. The immediate target might be a specific man, but the foundation of the insult remains the disparagement of the feminine.

This is why so many everyday jokes, mockeries, and aggressions between men revolve around gestures, ways of speaking, vocal pitches, colors, clothing, delicate manners, hesitations, or affections that might be read as feminine. The core issue is not the trait itself, but what it threatens to disrupt within the economy of virility. When a man shows himself to be too sensitive, too restrained, too vain, too delicate, or too vulnerable, it often provokes disproportionate reactions, as if he had betrayed a silent pact. The violence of the response reveals the sheer magnitude of the fragility it is trying to cover up.

Bourdieu (2020) takes this point further by showing that, in various traditions, penetration was not thought of solely in sexual terms, but also in political and symbolic ones: to penetrate could equate to dominating, whereas being penetrated implied a loss of status, a symbolic surrender of power. It is a brutal logic, but an extremely clarifying one. It allows us to understand why, in many cultural formations, male sexual passivity has been shrouded in shame, dishonor, and stigma. Not because the issue was the act itself, but because it shook the hierarchical fiction that equates masculinity with invulnerability, activity, and command.

We can see, then, that misogyny is not merely a side effect of the virile regime. It is one of its operating conditions. For the masculine to remain elevated as a position of prestige, the feminine must remain associated with what is lesser, weaker, laughable, or subordinate. Mocking a man for appearing feminine is not just correcting his behavior; it is reaffirming, once again, that the feminine still occupies the space of that which can and should be despised. The mundane cruelty of these scenes stems not only from hostility between men but from the persistence of a symbolic order where becoming a woman—or simply resembling what has been culturally coded as feminine—is still framed as a threat, a downfall, and a humiliation.

The Man Forbidden to Be Human

One of the most violent consequences of the regime of virility lies right here: it does not merely demand that a man appear strong, active, and confident; it also demands that he reject anything that might make him readable as vulnerable. Sensitivity, fear, hesitation, care, delicacy, dependency, the desire for comfort, the fragility in the face of loss, the narcissistic blow, emotional exposure. To a greater or lesser extent, all of this tends to be treated as a threat to masculine intelligibility. It is as if being a man implied a permanent obligation to amputate crucial parts of the human experience.

It is in this sense that many jokes among men seem to function as little pedagogies of desensitization. They teach, from an early age, what must be contained, hidden, or hardened. It is not just about learning to speak with a deep voice, take up space, or endure pain. It is about learning not to look emotionally affected, not to show fragility, not to falter, not to get too close to any trait that could be interpreted as feminine. In Foucault’s terms, it is also about recognizing that masculinity is not sustained purely by explicit prohibitions, but by a diffuse network of norms, corrections, and surveillance that produce readable bodies and authorized ways of existing (Foucault, 1994). The price of this learning process is usually steep. To preserve the virile persona, many men have to distance themselves from fundamental parts of their own being.

The brutality of virility is not only revealed in the aggression directed at others. It is also inflicted upon the very man who embodies it. Trained never to fail in front of his peers and never to feminize himself under the watchful eye of society, he often ends up subjected to incessant internal policing. He corrects his posture, modulates his voice, measures his gestures, hardens his expression, controls his emotions, represses his tenderness, and turns his own psychological life into a containment zone. Virility, then, ceases to be just an external ideal and begins to function as an internal police force.

The paradox is glaring: in the name of strength, subjective impoverishment is produced. In the name of potency, the fear of appearing weak multiplies. In the name of autonomy, the foundational dependency of every human bond is rejected. And thus the man, summoned to embody an ideal of dominance, is quietly forbidden from showing up as someone shaped by ambivalences, shortcomings, limits, and needs. As if, to be recognized as a man, he had to first renounce his basic right to be human.

Sex, Power, and Narcissistic Defense

This grammar of virility, which equates masculinity with performance, dominance, and invulnerability, is not confined to the realm of highly visible social interactions. It can also infiltrate the economy of desire, blurring the lines between eroticism, narcissistic validation, and the need for power. Instead of presenting itself as a space for connection, risk, surrender, or ambivalence, sexuality can be drafted to serve another purpose: to repeatedly guarantee to the man that he is still potent, desirable, active, and virile. In these cases, sex stops being merely an experience and starts operating as a verification process.

It was in this context that, while rereading Vincent Estellon (2023)—especially his reflections on the psychopathologies of attachment and the terror of loving and being loved—I was reminded of an acquaintance from many years ago. He described himself as a sex addict and even asked me to recommend a psychotherapist. It would make no sense to retrospectively turn this memory into a diagnosis; that would be intellectually lazy and clinically inappropriate. But today, a more interesting hypothesis comes to mind: perhaps that excess was not simply an expression of instinctual freedom or a massive erotic appetite, but an attempt to sustain, through sexual repetition, an image of power that was being threatened on another level.

This hypothesis matters because it touches on a sensitive nerve in contemporary masculinity. Not all intense sexual activity is a compulsion, and not all excess functions as a defense mechanism. There are, however, situations where the repetition seems to respond less to desire than to a need for confirmation. What is being sought, then, is not exactly the other person in their distinct otherness, but the narcissistic high of continuing to be able to conquer, penetrate, and prove oneself. The partner runs the risk of being reduced to the status of a mirror, an audience, or a piece of evidence. Under this logic, sex stops operating as the language of desire and begins functioning as a ritual for subjective stabilization.

This is where Estellon’s reading becomes particularly enlightening. If loving implies accepting dependency, exposure, uncertainty, and vulnerability, then the intensification of sexual activity can, in certain cases, act as a defense against the most disorganizing aspect of romantic attachment: the possibility of being emotionally affected, of needing the other, of not entirely controlling the scene. Sexuality experienced as an exercise in dominance can protect—however precariously—against the risk of narcissistic collapse inherent in romantic encounters. Instead of allowing himself to be touched, the subject occupies, conquers, consumes. Instead of embracing the otherness of his partner, he manages bodies. Instead of loving, he performs potency.

Viewed through this lens, sexual excess does not necessarily appear as a sign of strength, but as an indication of precariousness. The more compulsive the need to prove virility, the less solid its internal foundation might be. The man who needs to endlessly confirm his power to seduce, penetrate, or dominate may be less engaged in celebrating his potency than in trying to run away from a breakdown. Not running from sex itself, but from what it might reveal: that the body fails, that desire wavers, that the other slips away, that love disarms, and that virility, when it has to be permanently demonstrated, might already be secretly in crisis.

The Terror of Faltering

For much of its history, virility has been less the serene expression of power and more the obsessive management of fear. The fear of failing, of not measuring up, of not getting hard, of not desiring the way one is supposed to, of not performing the role correctly. Above all, the fear of being pushed over to the side of what the patriarchal order itself has taught him to despise: the feminine, passivity, dependency, fragility, and emotional exposure to the other. From this angle, the virile man does not always equate to the strong man. Often, he is simply the one who has learned to organize his own defenses best.

The script is old, and it changes costumes depending on the era. The props change, the authorized gestures change, the codes of elegance, the rituals of affirmation, the discourses on sex, power, and desire—they all change. But something persists: the need to make masculinity a continuous test, a relentless performance, a form of surveillance over oneself and others. A man must keep up the appearance of the one who dominates, even when his body fails him, even when his desire wavers, even when emotional bonds disorganize him, even when life reminds him, at every turn, that absolute psychological sovereignty is impossible. Virility, in this sense, is not just an ideal. It is also an exhaustion.

Much of masculine brutality is born not from an excess of strength, but from the inability to cope with one’s own fragility. The other is mocked to keep the threat at a distance. A delicate gesture, a softer voice, a more exposed sensitivity are ridiculed because all of these things shake the imaginary boundary between the legitimate man and the suspect man. Whatever is read as feminine is humiliated to restore, even if just for a moment, the fiction of superiority that anchors the masculine pact. Sex, performance, and the exhibition of power are exaggerated to drown out what insists on coming back: the inadequacy, the dependency, the fear of not being enough.

The problem is that any identity built at the expense of rejecting one’s own humanity extracts a heavy toll. When masculinity demands of a man that he never go soft, never be afraid, never depend on anyone, never expose himself, and never let himself be deeply touched, it condemns him to an impoverished form of existence. It forces him to confuse hardness with substance, control with value, and dominance with desire. And, as a byproduct, it perpetuates the misogynistic logic that continues to make the feminine the name for what must be degraded so that the masculine can go on imagining itself as whole.

The crucial question, in the end, is not what makes a virile man, but what a man has to repress, humiliate, or destroy—within himself and in others—just to keep looking virile. When virility relies so heavily on proof, surveillance, mockery, exhibition, and control, what emerges is no longer the image of strength, but the symptom of a crisis. Perhaps one of the most urgent tasks of our present time is to liberate the masculine from this narcissistic and historical prison that has, for so long, prevented men from recognizing in others and in themselves something infinitely harder than dominating: the condition of being vulnerable.

References

• Bourdieu, P. (1998). La domination masculine. Seuil.
• Estellon, V. (2020). Terreur d’aimer et d’être aimé: Psychopathologie du lien et de la vie amoureuse. Érès.
• Foucault, M. (1994). Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir. Gallimard.
• Gazalé, O. (2017). Le mythe de la virilité: Un piège pour les deux sexes. Robert Laffont.