Coming to be a man. Pleasure in the construction of Italian men’s sexuality

Little research has challenged a naturalized conception of male (hetero) sexuality by looking at the multiple ways in which heterosexual men experience and make sense of sexuality in their everyday lives. In this article, after outlining the forms that such a conception has taken in recent Italian history, we explore how men and women deal with the issue of male pleasure. The analysis is based on interviews with seventy-one Italian men and women aged fifty to seventy. These cohorts were socialized in a highly mechanistic model of male pleasure as coinciding with orgasm and ejaculation. Some of the interviewees’ biographies hint at subsequent changes in the definitions of what is pleasurable for men. These changes can be traced to the challenges of emerging new experiences and representations of women’s sexuality. However, such changes do not question fully the mechanistic image of man as a sexual machine.