What makes a man? Being athletic and muscular? Being attractive to women? Liking sex and expressing natural, irrepressible sexual needs? In this fascinating study, the sociologist Florian Vörös explores the definition of masculinity through particularly fertile ground: pornographic fantasies. A highly detailed description of fantasies and sexual desires obtained through in-depth interviews with men who epitomize socially legitimate masculinity – aged between twenty and sixty, white and members of the middle classes.
Reading this book is like going into a theatre where the relationship between men and norms, domination and gender violence are played over and over.
Florian Vörös has a PhD. in sociology from the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) and is an associate professor of information and communication science at the Université de Lille. He is the editor of two collective works: Cultures pornographiques. Anthologie des Porn Studies (Pornographic cultures. An Anthology of porn studies (Amsterdam, 2015) and Matérialismes, culture et communication. Vol. 2: Cultural Studies, théories féministes et décoloniales (Presses des Mines, 2016). He has also contributed to the French translations of works by authorities in the field of Cultural Studies (Stuart Hall) and Masculinity Studies (Raewyn Connell).