Sexuality as Dominance: Male Sex Folklore as Constitutive of Masculinity

Mackinnon’s “Sexuality” presents sexuality as a social construct of male power, defined by men, forced on women, and constitutive of the meaning of gender. Using male sex folklore, I want to examine this theory of how the sexual becomes continuous with the political as dominance (masculinity) and submission (femininity) become eroticized.

The Houdini. The Eiffel Tower. The Rainbow Game. Sex bracelets. Blumpkins -- Locker-room stories shared from one man to another. Growing up in an all-male grade, middle, and high school, I have heard my fair share of these (and to be sure, they don’t end there – one acquaintance apparently ‘Houdini’d a bitch’ last weekend). Two themes connecting these examples of male sex folklore include the absolutely ludicrous nature of the act and the purported utilization and domination of a woman’s body to achieve masculinity. Since the goal of these stories is to achieve masculinity and contemporary masculinity requires displaying heterosexual prowess, these are always heterosexual sex acts.

To elaborate on some specific sex folklore:

·         The Houdini: Before ejaculating during doggy-style intercourse, the man spits on his partner’s back to trick her into thinking he has come. When she turns around, he ejaculates on her face.

·         The Eiffel Tower:  During a two-male, one-female threesome in which one male has doggy-style vaginal intercourse and the other male has oral intercourse, the two men high-five when they both ejaculate.

·         The Rainbow Game: In a dark room, girls who have applied different colored lipstick wait to perform fellatio. Guys enter the room to receive fellatio. When everyone leaves, the guy with the most colors on his penis wins.

·         Sex Bracelets: Participants wear jelly bracelets along their arm. Each color is coded a different sex act (e.g., black is intercourse, blue is fellatio, green is cunnilingus, etc). The player should perform the corresponding sex act for the individual who snapped his or her bracelet.

·         The Blumpkin: A man receives fellatio while he defecates into a toilet.  

In these examples, the woman’s body becomes something to use, to degrade, to shame, and to dominate; furthermore, through this degradation and domination, the male seems to become more masculine.  The Houdini tricks the woman into turning around so that one can spray semen upon her face instead of simply into her vagina, an act is in no one more physically pleasing to the man, yet implies a sense of pleasure from shaming the woman. Furthermore, The Blumpkin demonstrates seeming control over the woman’s body, as one has convinced her to overcome the stench and degradation of having oral sex with him during defecation, a process that we typically euphemize (e.g., “I’m going to the restroom” instead of “I am going to poop”) due to our negative perception and association of defecation with animals. In the Rainbow game, the number of different women one has fellatio with determines the male victor, signifying that masculinity is associated with frequent, casual sex where women’s bodies serve as vehicles to gain virility in the masculinity project. Furthering this concept, the Eiffel Towel shows the two males who share a sex partner congratulating each other on a job well done (with homoerotic suggestions), validating their friendship and signifying their status as men. Male bonding in this sense happens through women's bodies. These paradigms of sexual activity inform and influence the way men think about sex, so that even consensual sex may have rape culture overtones.

That these stories began at approximately the same time that puberty onsets and men are urged to mature from boys to men is no coincidence. In seventh grade, my friend began selling sex bracelets. They were especially popular before dances with the all-female school down the road, and all the males talked about how well they worked. This is the most benign example included, yet the male-male discussion about them displays how a man’s bragging about sexual conquests relates to his status as a man, where male sexuality becomes a sort of series of sexual conquests of sexual objects. Furthermore, around eighth grade was the first time I had heard three peers play the Rainbow Game.  By ninth grade, I had heard of two classmates who had ‘Eiffel Tower’d a bitch’ and another who had ‘Houdini’d a bitch.’ Blumpkins were more of a junior and senior year thing, and I have heard it a few times in college. Sexuality, especially concerning the kind that dominates women, becomes integral into constituting masculinity.  

When one discussed these stories (always among a group of male peers), it was in a gloating manner. Everyone laughed and most envied the storyteller. One could occasionally challenge the veracity of the story, especially by attacking the individual’s knowledge of sex; however, the storyteller could always bring a number of details and names to attest to his story. No one mentioned that telling these stories indicated a problem of our views of women.

(That everyone believed the story teller seems remarkable; however, no adults talked about sex, honestly speaking with your parents seemed too awkward, and sex education focused on scare tactics of STDs. Most learned what they knew about sex from each other or from pornography).

Regardless if any of these stories actually occurred, it is important to understand that these stories were told with one goal in mind: homosociality. Guys were proving to other guys that they were men, and the methodology involved using women’s bodies. Male sex folklore thus portrays Mackinnon’s dehumanization continuum of sexuality, in which objectification occupies one pole and violence occupies the other, as constitutive of the meaning of masculinity.

 This also illuminates why men feel pressured men to live up to an expectation of frequent casual sex. According to Muehlenhard and Cook’s “Men’s Self Reports of Unwanted Sexual Activity” (1988) in which 507 men and 486 women were given a questionnaire, more men (62.7%) engaged in unwanted sexual intercourse than women (46.3%).  The questionnaire revealed the following: men are three times more likely to have unwanted intercourse to gain sexual experience, want something to talk about, or to build up their confidence and four times more likely to have unwanted intercourse because they did not want to appear to be shy, afraid, or unmasculine or unfeminine than women. Furthermore, peer pressure factored into 10.9% for men and only 0.6% for women.  (I can’t link to the pdf of this study, but Rhodes students can access it through JStor. It’s in the Journal of Sex Research). Men learn that being a man means having frequent casual sex, especially that kind that dominates women.

Male sex folklore and the rituals surrounding them exemplify Mackinnon’s insistence that our common understanding of sexuality depends upon an asymmetrical power where men dominate women. Furthermore, this illustrates Ms. Maxwell’s statement that unhealthy masculinity promotes rape culture (or as she framed it,  that we can help end rape culture by educating healthy masculinity) as it shows overt dehumanization of women and dominating sexual intercourse as constitutive of masculinity.