by Rachel Hills
Nate spent his first two years of college “sleeping around and juggling girls,” racking up more than twenty-five partners in that time—a rate that puts him in the top 2 percent of men in his age group. It was a period of adventure that boosted his confidence and gave him a sense of social accomplishment. “Like being a really good basketball player or being the MVP of getting laid,” he jokes. He still relishes the thrill of the pickup now: last weekend, he tells me, he collected two women’s phone numbers and made out with another two women for the first time. But that was an unusually active few days, he explains. He isn’t as into the hunt as he used to be.
Last year, Nate fell in love with an American girl he met when he was studying abroad in Brazil. They hit it off the moment they met, exchanging stories about where they were from and what had taken them to South America. But it was only after Nate was injured playing basketball that their casual hookup turned into something more serious, and they continued to date for nearly a year after they returned to the United States.
Now that Nate has been in a relationship with someone whose company he enjoyed as much as her body, hooking up with other women isn’t as much fun. “It’s hard to find a girlfriend, because a lot of the people you find attractive won’t have the right personality for you,” he says.
Then there is his growing ambivalence toward bro culture. “The idea is that you get drunk a lot, you have your bros, and you all go out together and have the confidence that you are going to get laid,” Nate explains when I ask him about his attraction to the subculture. “You’re smart, you’re charming, you’re business oriented—I’m pretty sure [bro blogger] Tucker Max went to Duke for law school, so he’s real smart. He gets lots of girls, and he parties a lot. So he is kind of the ideal bro, you know.
“It all sounds pretty fucking good,” he admits. “But at the same time, the ideal bro—he treats women like shit. He’s the guy who sleeps with a woman and then automatically says, ‘All right, are you ready to leave now?’ When it comes to sex, the ‘bro culture’ often comes down to ‘be the biggest asshole in the room and get laid.’ ” It is a strategy Nate used himself, hitting on girls with boyfriends to try to get them to cheat, bailing on plans when a better option came along, and brushing off girls after he had sex with them. “But at the end of the day, is that who I want to be? Is that who I want to tell other girls I am? Or tell my parents I am? There is a fine line between being an asshole as a hookup strategy and having it become who you are.”
When I ask Nate why he engages in this kind of behavior if he doesn’t like it, he says the answer is simple: it works. He points to the “hot girls” he went to high school with, who dated guys who were “mean to their teachers, mean to their parents, and mean to the people who weren’t their friends.” And playing the role of the confident, emotionally unavailable bro has helped him to succeed with women time and time again. In his early college years, he explains, the end justified the means. “I was having sex with attractive girls and I felt good about that. The good feeling definitely outweighed the bad feeling. Nowadays my goal is not to have intermittent sex with hot girls that I don’t really enjoy being around. I’d rather have consistent sex with girls that I actually enjoy spending time with.”
Playing the “asshole” is more than just an effective route to getting laid. It is also a distancing mechanism, demonstrating that although you may have sexual relations with women, your relationships with them are not as important as your friendships with other guys—or as important as fulfilling the promise of the type of guy that you aspire to be.
University of Pennsylvania sociologist David Grazian believes that the enthusiastic pursuit of sex practiced by men like Nate is often less about physical pleasure than it is about the pleasure of bonding with their male friends. In a 2007 study drawing on the testimony of 243 young men aged between eighteen and twenty-four, Grazian observed the ways in which what he called the “girl hunt” serves as a collective social ritual: from the music the men listen to before they embark on a night out to the confidence-boosting banter they engage in about their prospects to the stories they exchange in the days, weeks, and months after.
Indeed, Nate admits that one of the things he enjoyed most about his years as a “bro” was the bank of stories he built up to share with his friends. “The story is definitely the part that is best about it, the pickup story,” he says. He tells me he’d love to have sex with a woman who models for Victoria’s Secret—not for her body, but so that he could tell his friends about it after.
But while Nate enjoys “the satisfaction of knowing that other people are attracted to what [he is] attracted to,” he tries to shy away from boasting. “Personally, my favorite stories to tell are the funny ones,” he tells me. “When something happens with a girl you never thought you’d hook up with, or the girl you thought hated you finally gives in, or you hook up with a girl you and your friends make fun of. When there is an element of humor to the story, that’s definitely the best type of story to tell.”
Andrew, twenty-four, also employs humor when talking about sex with his friends in pubs around trendy East London and Leeds, the city in the north of England where he attended university. Sex is “a massive social icebreaker,” he says. “You go into a room and sit down with your mates, and immediately within five minutes you’re talking about sex.” A lot of the guys he hangs out with talk up their conquests, comparing them to popular celebrities like Megan Fox and British glamour model Kelly Brook. Andrew, however, is more “brutally honest”—especially when there’s the possibility of getting a few laughs. “I’ll say things like, Yeah, she was ugly as sin, like Lindsay Lohan on coke.”
If Nate is a “bro,” Andrew is his British equivalent—a lad. Like Nate, Andrew devoted his late teens and early twenties to, as he puts it, “getting [his] tally up”—whether he was attracted to the women he was sleeping with or not. Cheeky and self-deprecating, with messy, curly blond hair, Andrew had sex with thirteen women before meeting his first serious girlfriend three years ago. Eight of those encounters happened within one four-month period. The rest of the time, he admits with a smile, he didn’t have much success at all. “It was mostly getting nowhere. You know, going to house parties, going to bars; not just not having a shag, but not getting any kind of action at all. No pulling [British slang for ‘picking up’], no nothing.”
But although Andrew and his friends suffered more failures than successes in their quests for action, the ritual was nonetheless central to their bonding as a group. Back then, Andrew lived in a house with eight other guys: a three-story Edwardian building with large, elegant windows and sticky floors. In the kitchen, they kept a cork bulletin board hanging over the refrigerator, covered with photos of the housemates drinking and having a laugh. On the other side, hidden from the view of visitors, was a piece of white butcher’s paper on which they kept a chart rating the women each of them had slept with. It was a complex grading system that Andrew likens to the popular UK automotive show Top Gear, which ranks cars according to their lap times, “sex appeal,” and popularity. “We took it to an advanced level,” he laughs. The first column listed the woman’s name and Facebook URL, followed by an overall performance grade out of ten, a rating for her breasts, and one for her ass. The succeeding columns were given over to other housemates, who would add their own ratings based on pictures they found online, resulting in a “final score” for each woman, on which the housemates were ranked against each other.
Where David Grazian’s guys ranked each other according to how many women they had sex with, Andrew and his friends evaluated each other according to the “quality” of the women they slept with—with quality determined by how attractive the women were deemed by the group. One of Andrew’s friends became an object of ridicule when he slept with a string of women the rest of the group rated poorly, while another “won for, like, two months running” when he hooked up with “an absolute stonker [British slang for ‘stunner’].” Andrew was usuall
y in the bottom half of the league. “No one really took it that seriously,” he tells me. It was mostly an opportunity for them to have a laugh with each other. But with a few years’ distance from those events, he admits that the fridge “was more important to [their] house of male bonding than [they] realized.”
Pigs on a Spit: Masculinity and Sexual Violence
Taken to extremes, this kind of masculine bravado can have violent consequences, particularly in environments like sports clubs, fraternities, and the military, which bind men who fit the mold together at the expense of everyone else.
In a 2008 paper looking at how men’s relationships with other men shape their sexual interactions with women, masculinities researcher Michael Flood spoke with Tim, a twenty-one-year-old naval officer cadet at the Australian Defence Force Academy and alpha male of the most conventional variety, whose social life revolved around drinking, fighting, bedding women, and impressing his “boys.” At the time he was interviewed by Flood, Tim had a steady girlfriend who was a bartender at a local pub popular with Defence Force cadets. “I don’t like socializing with females very much, unless I’m out to pick them up or have sex with them,” he said.
Like all of the men interviewed for Flood’s study, Tim said that he would stop any sexual activity if his partner asked him to. But the stories he shared with Flood suggested that wasn’t always the case. On two occasions he described participating in a game he called “Rodeo,” in which one member of a group was assigned the task of finding the fattest woman he could and persuading her to come back with him to his hotel room, where his friends lay in wait. They would start having sex, and he would tie her to the bed with her stockings, positioning her on her hands and knees. Then, when a certain amount of time had passed, he would shout the word “rodeo.” The lights would be switched on, and his friends would emerge from their hiding places as he jumped on the woman’s back, trying to hold on for as long as possible while she struggled in humiliation. On another occasion, Tim recalled a friend bringing home a woman who was so drunk she fell asleep, after which his friend removed the woman’s underwear, retrieved some golf balls from elsewhere in the house, and the group “tried to play a hole in one.”
Tim’s stories echo similar incidents of gendered violence and humiliation in hypermasculine environments that have been reported in the news media in recent years. In 2013, a cadet at the same Australian military academy Tim attended was accused and later found guilty of using Skype to stream video of him having consensual sex with a female student to his friends. In the United States, high-profile high school rape cases in Steubenville, Ohio, and Maryville, Missouri, have raised questions about how male athletic culture enables sexual assault and allows it to go unpunished. “The jock culture/rape culture dynamic should be obvious to anyone with any connection to organized sports,” wrote sports journalist Dave Zirin at the Nation. “The fact is that too many young male athletes are taught to see women as the spoils of being a jock.” The UK National Union of Students has now produced two reports on “lad culture,” a term used to describe the daily sexual harassment experienced by female university students at the hands of their male classmates.
These incidents do not reflect the behavior of most men. While one in five American women reports having experienced sexual assault at some point in her life, research shows that the vast majority of offenses are committed by a very small proportion of men—approximately 4 to 8 percent of the population, many of whom are repeat offenders.
Nor do the values that facilitate them reflect the majority of young men’s attitudes and aspirations for their lives. In his book Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male, psychology professor Andrew Smiler reports that only a quarter of guys say they’d prefer to hook up than be in a relationship, and most rate their partner’s physical attractiveness a lower priority than “being funny, nice, outgoing, understanding of others, able to make decisions, and reasonably self-confident.” Similarly, only one-fifth of the students that University of Pennsylvania sociologist David Grazian surveyed talked about “girl-hunting” as a key component of their social lives. The rest, presumably, went out to drink, dance, and spend time with friends—or avoided nightclubs altogether.
But incidents like the ones Tim describes do represent the worst excesses of a culture that teaches men that their power and success are directly linked to their ability to conquer women and impress their male friends. And while the majority of young men might not be trying to be “the MVP of getting laid,” the idea that assuming the role of the player is the route to masculine triumph is hard to escape entirely.
Caleb, whom we met in chapter 4, is one jock who pursues the “progressive track” of masculinity that Max described at the beginning of this chapter. Tall and classically handsome with broad shoulders, Caleb could hook up on a regular basis if he wanted to. And he does from time to time, making out with girls he meets at parties and out at bars. But at twenty-four, Caleb is still a virgin—partly by choice, and partly because the right woman hasn’t come along yet.
Until recently, Caleb played cricket on a semiprofessional level, for a competitive team in his hometown of Melbourne, Australia. But Caleb’s attitudes toward women set him apart from his teammates and meant that no matter how well he played the game, he was always on the outside of the group. “It was a high-grade team, so you got a lot of egos,” he says. Not to mention a lot of bragging. In warm-ups, the team would play a game they called “roots and pulls,” in which they’d go around the circle and discuss who had had sex, who had jerked off, and who had done nothing sexual at all the previous week.
One of Caleb’s teammates kept a topless photo of every woman he’d had sex with on his phone, while another claimed to have bedded forty-five people when he traveled through Canada for three months. “You’re in an environment that encourages high performance,” Caleb explains. “Who can run the fastest? Who can do the most sit-ups or the most push-ups? It’s a very competitive kind of masculinity, and that competition is applied to sex as well.” And like Nate’s and Andrew’s sexual banter, those competitive exchanges serve as a bonding agent. Caleb recalls an incident in the UK when a couple of his teammates “got a girl on a ‘spit roast,’ ” a slang term used to describe group sex in which a woman is orally and vaginally penetrated by two men at the same time. “That story was being talked about for three or four weeks. You get this extraordinary amount of detail about it,” he says. “But why do I need to know how much hair she had down there? It turns sex into this club bonding experience.”
Caleb never bought into that culture of one-upmanship, preferring to stay silent when the subject of sex was raised, which made him “pretty much the resident gay bloke” in his teammates’ eyes. “You could be the biggest player going around, but if you don’t talk about it, they immediately assume that nothing happened. It’s a bizarre environment.” Eventually, he decided to switch to a lower grade of cricket. “You play a sport because you love it, but in a team sport, so much of your enjoyment comes down to getting along with your teammates.” In Caleb’s new club, the players are of a wider range of ages and skill sets, which he thinks fosters a more respectful environment. “The younger guys still talk a lot about women, sex, and relationships, but once the older guys show up, it comes back to the actual sport you’re playing. You know, instead of the number of people you bedded over the weekend.”
I ask Caleb why he thinks he is more able to resist that culture than some of his guy friends. He puts it down to his emotional reserve. A lot of young men are very concerned with what other guys think of them, he says, but he is more concerned with what he thinks of himself. “A lot of people use that pickup environment as a form of self-validation,” he explains. “Even if they’re not attracted to the girl, it’s going to make a good story, and they can put her underwear in their cricket bag and bring it with them on the weekend. Whereas for me, I’m a very insular person. My first instinct is to withdraw until I’m su
re of where I stand.”
But even the men he knows who draw most on their sex lives for validation turn that side of themselves off when you remove them from the group. “If you get the jocks alone you can have a good conversation with them. And then one of the other jocks walks around the corner and they start talking about how their cock is ten inches long. I try to engage with the individual,” Caleb says. “It might only be a two-second question, but there’s got to be something more interesting to talk about than Did you sleep with that girl over the weekend? Because ultimately, who gives a fuck?”
“Dirty Little Bottoms” and “Very Straight Gays”
Being vocal about your attraction to and success with women serves another purpose in the pursuit of masculinity as well. It “proves” that you are not gay, a quality that has historically been considered antithetical to true manhood. If “real men” are strong, dominant, and powerful, gay men have often been portrayed as the opposite: weak, submissive, and powerless. As a result, as much as men have sought to prove that they are “not women,” they have also sought to prove that they are “not gay.”
This has not been the case in all times and all places. For the ancient Greeks, what separated the “real men” from the fakes was not the gender of the people they had sex with, but how they had sex with them—that is to say, whether they were the penetrator or the penetrated. In the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Africa, men walk down the streets holding hands without anyone batting an eyelid, not because of an absence of homophobia so much as because affection between people of the same sex has no sexual connotation.