Desire in the masculine

Presented by Géraldine Muhlmann

Chantal Thomas, of the Académie Française

Philippe B. Grimbert, professor of nephrology

Philippe Brenot, sexologist

When desires are taken in the plural, it seems senseless to ask whether there are feminine desires and masculine desires – since every desire is invariably sealed to what a person is, to what they want to be, to what they have or wish to obtain, to what they do, what they have done, what they would like to do, what they aspire to, etc. In the singular, gendered, masculine, it refers almost certainly to sexual desire as men experience it. Paradoxically, while it is men who have spoken most about sexuality, even by defining a sexuality that would be that of women and corresponding to what they would have wanted it to be – before women themselves spoke up to topple all the stereotypes and patriarchal prejudices to which they had been assigned – the question of masculine desire has been the subject of evasions, silences and concealments. Since desire is rooted at once in the body, the heart and the brain, in molecules or neurons, physiological or neuro-biological explanations have above all been advanced, and, to account for behaviours said to be "masculine", such as self-confidence, the aptitude to lead or dominate, a certain aggressiveness sometimes, emphasised for example the role of steroid hormones, in primis testosterone, with which the brain of the little boy is bombarded from intra-uterine life onwards. But people, men or women, are not reduced to biological beings: they are "made" by relations with others, by education, by social structures and what these produce as values, as rules of behaviour, ideas, opinions, prejudices... Thus a desire in the masculine can only be conjugated with all these factors and determinations: and it is not sure, in this case, that it manifests itself as many stereotypes would want it to manifest itself: a "primitive" desire, direct, possessive, turned exclusively towards penetration and the enjoyment of ejaculation, devoid of all sentimentality, insensible to sweetness and tenderness at the moment lived... It would take a "masculine" revolution to attest to this, as powerful as that carried out by feminism. Alas, it is "masculinism" that here and there resurfaces: a backward step that declines "desire in the masculine" in the mode of dominating virility.

Robert Maggiori