It all began with an observation I could not stop seeing — and for which the available language had no name. For those reading me for the first time: what I have been developing has several layers. The first is that male homosociality is not a peripheral cultural phenomenon but the central structure of patriarchy. That claim has theoretical support, but for me it goes further. The second — and perhaps where I take the greatest risk — is that male desire is constitutively oriented toward other men as subjects, and toward women only as functional objects within that system. This is not a thesis about individual sexual preference. It is a thesis about the economy of desire under patriarchy. The third, which may be the most contemporary, is that the current crisis of the heterosexual contract — male loneliness, the rise of incel movements, the violent backlash against feminism — are symptoms of a system beginning to lose the coercion that sustained it.
In 2021, I said this publicly in Instagram stories, when a heavily muscled man — potentially chemically enhanced to appear even more imposing — was attacking feminists over the trans law debate in Spain. The energy this man devoted to his appearance, his Instagram account, his public presence, was directed entirely toward other men. There was not a single woman in his feed. His contact with us lasted exactly as long as it took him to attack us.
I did not say it as an insult. I said it as analysis.
That man’s account looked like a gay porn catalogue: the same aesthetic, the same mode of male comparison I had always encountered in lesbian social spaces. Because almost no lesbian-only bars exist anymore, we are forced to share spaces with gay men and their dynamics, some more palatable than others. That exposure is precisely what I believe allows me to recognize several of the amorous metamessages of gay male culture. Extremely sexualized photographs, bodies displayed like meat on a grill — golden, oiled, ready to be consumed by other men. What I asked myself then, and keep asking, is structural: who is male desire really directed at?
The context was not arbitrary. It was the pandemic. The gender self-identification law was being debated in Spain and elsewhere, and men like him — misogynists barely coated in progressive vocabulary — were attacking feminists. That law, analyzed through a radical feminist lens, is not a rights law: it is an extension of male prerogative into the domain of women’s bodies and legal identity. It allows men to access women’s spaces through an administrative declaration, with no medical, legal, or social verification: a man’s word will suffice, like the word of God. Sheila Jeffreys documents this extensively in Gender Hurts (2014): self-identification as a woman does not erase male socialization or the access to privilege that socialization confers. What it does erase is women’s capacity to name their own oppression using sex-based categories — among other things.
I was told everything when I said it. Accused of homophobia, as though naming the structure of male desire and its political function were the same as attacking men for their sexuality. But precisely: if men’s sexuality is political, naming it is feminism, not insult.
The force of their desire and love for other men brought us here. And I mean that in the most structural sense possible.
Adrienne Rich wrote in 1980, in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, that heterosexuality is not a spontaneous orientation of women but a political institution imposed through force, economic coercion, violence, and disinformation. Rich argues that the bond between men — in sport, the military, politics, the economy — is deeper and more determinative than any loving relationship men sustain with women. The system of power between men is stronger than any love toward women. That is not individual psychology: it is social architecture.
What I call all men desire other men is not a claim about any individual man’s intimate life. It is a description of the system. Male desire, in its socially organized and politically functional form, is directed toward other men: toward their recognition, approval, hierarchy, and company. Women function, in that system, as currency of exchange. Gayle Rubin formulated this in 1975 in The Traffic in Women: women are the object that circulates between men to consolidate their alliances. We are not the destination of male desire. We are its vehicle.
Male homosociality is not simply friendship between men. It is the glue of patriarchy. It is the network of loyalties, alliances, and mutual recognitions that organizes power in the economy, politics, the military, culture. Monique Wittig saw this clearly: the heterosexual contract does not exist to satisfy women. It exists to guarantee the functioning of the system between men. Marilyn Frye adds that male attention toward women is instrumentally necessary for the system, not affectively genuine: men need us available, not present.
If men’s sexual desire has this much power over our reality, their sexuality is political. Not in the sense that their intimate preferences are public business, but in the sense that the structure of that desire organizes the world we live in. Every time I encounter that pattern, what I find is that the energy driving the system is not neutral, not abstract — it has a direction, and that direction excludes us as subjects while including us as objects.
The heterosexual system, then, is not a description of what men feel. It is an institution of control over what women do. Women give birth, organize domestic space, emotionally sustain men, while men dissociate and seek elsewhere — in other women, or in other men — what they know the heterosexual framework cannot give them. The blame for that dissatisfaction always falls on us: we are not beautiful enough, thin enough, intelligent enough, available enough. The problem is not structural, according to the story the system tells about itself. The problem is always María, Estela, Julieta: the concrete woman who was not the perfect woman.
Having many women sustains that story. What would happen to their systems if it were finally accepted that men love and desire other men? One answer already exists: bodies have become things men can rent for reproduction. It is called surrogacy, presented as altruism, introduced to the world through two or three emotionally compelling cases that normalized a model in which the poorest women feel they are winning against their fate by selling the only resource the system left them. And there is an older answer: prostitution, the perfect arena for punishing women for not being men and therefore not being worth enough, while demonstrating power through absolute contempt.
The so-called epidemic of male loneliness, which media outlets have begun documenting with growing alarm, has an explanation none of those outlets formulates clearly: women, to the extent that we have gained even partial access to our own resources, have begun to understand that rape is not love, that torture is not desire, that manipulation is not attention. When women stop participating in the forced heterosexual contract — even partially — the system enters crisis and male violence and its institutions intensify. Male loneliness is not a historical accident. It is the first visible symptom of a contract breaking down from the side that was always most fragile: ours, because it was held in place by coercion rather than choice, because what happens to one of us happens to the others, because we are more.
As Rich wrote: heterosexuality is compulsory for women. What we are living now is the consequence of some of us — a growing number — beginning to disobey that compulsion. Like every sick system sustained by coercion rather than consent, its only real vulnerability is the withdrawal of those who sustain it despite the reprisals.
Inspired by women who thought and wrote before me — Rich, Jeffreys, Wittig, Frye, Rubin, among others — I am developing, researching, and writing about male sexuality and how its sexual energy demands our submission, our dehumanization, and our erasure. If male sexual desire has this much power, then their sexuality is political and structural. And if it is political, it can be analyzed, named, and resisted. Perhaps that is what I am attempting.
What is homosociality?
The term was popularized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men (1985), although the concept was already implicit in Rich, Wittig, and Rubin. The basic idea is that men organize themselves, recognize each other, protect each other, and amplify one another through relationships among themselves — and that this system of alliances is the foundation of patriarchy. Not a byproduct, but the central structure.
In practice it is visible in the military, clubs, parliaments, boards of directors, football teams, fraternities, and informal power networks. It is not that men are friends with each other — it is that this network of male loyalties organizes who has access to power, who maintains it, and who inherits it.
This essay seeks to connect that homosociality to desire. Not merely men prefer each other socially, but that this preference has a libidinal dimension — the energy, attention, and recognition that men dedicate to one another is qualitatively distinct from what they direct toward women. And women, within that schema, function as currency of exchange inside the system between men, not as the real addressees of their desire or attention.
* Homosociality: the social bonds formed between people of the same sex, particularly men, that organize systems of power and privilege. The term was developed by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), building on earlier feminist theory.
Deja una respuesta