Why a return to traditional masculine values will make men worse in bed
Photo (left) by Alex Vaughan
From time to time, a man will tell Cam Fraser that the way he talks about sex is ‘so gay’. Fraser is not attracted to men. He is a straight, cisgender male sex coach, and the clients he works with are straight men too. When men complain Fraser’s sessions are too gay, they are complaining about lessons in pleasure-focused, partnered sex between men and women.
You might be tempted to roll your eyes at this. I certainly was. Fraser was one of my early interviews as I reported my book, All Women Want. But the more women, men and experts I spoke to, the more I realised that the impulse to label straight sex ‘gay’ captures one of the biggest problems heterosexual couples face in their love lives – how men think about sex, and themselves.
Fraser, also rolls his eyes at men who call him gay for suggesting it might be nice to kiss women deeply, be touched slowly, or maintain eye contact during sex. But these comments don’t surprise him. Before he started training as a counsellor and then sexologist in 2017, Fraser was the captain of his high school soccer team in Western Australia. He went on to play as a college athlete, while studying in the United States. He has been in locker rooms around the world, and he knows the way men talk within them. He has participated in it too. ‘I know what that language is like, and I know the kind of bravado and the braggadocio and the machismo that goes along with that,’ he tells me over a video call.
Now, in his workshops, he will hear the exact same rhetoric coming both from young men and those years, or sometimes decades, older than your typical college athlete.
There is a wealth of social science literature investigating the ways in which boys and men police each other, from outfit choices, to how they speak, to the ways they relate to women and other men. The most popular term to describe this phenomenon is ‘the man box’.
Coined by writer and activist Paul Kivel, the man box describes the narrow, prescriptive set of expectations men must meet if they want to act like men. Think of every cliche you can about what it means to be a man – from physical and financial dominance to emotional and social suppression – and the walls of the man box will materialise in your mind. In fact, that’s how Kivel developed the term.
Running workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s, he and his fellow activists at the Oakland Men’s Project would ask rooms full of boys and men to shout out all the stereotypes they associated with men, and all the stereotypes they associated with women. One day, while they were doing this in a classroom, Kivel walked up to the board and drew a box around the male expectations. ‘And I said, “It feels like a box because 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we hear this message to act like a man,”’ he tells me over a video call. Then he asked the classroom: ‘How does it feel?’ The answers were never good.
I ask Kivel if the man box has changed much in the four and a half decades since then, and his answer is: ‘Not really.’ What sits within and outside the man box does differ from group to group, depending on the age and cultural backgrounds of the men in the room. But the core truth remains the same: to act like a man is to take power without sharing it, to receive care without giving it, and to always remain in control, of yourself and perhaps those around you too.
Men rarely reckon with the costs of the man box, Kivel says, but when they do, the price is steep. ‘We are out of touch with our bodies. We are not very capable of being in intimate relationships with other people. We can’t get the care we need, because we can’t admit we have a problem and go to the doctor to get checked out. We are pressured into being bullies and being hurtful and often violent towards those around us, who we love and care for. So at many different levels, the costs are really severe. We can’t even have an open, frank conversation with our male friends because we’re worried about how they’ll think of us … how vulnerable can we be in those situations? So we’re guarded. We’re under control. We’re not able to fully participate in the community.’
The man box makes men competitive with every other man, and because men can be unwilling to seek help, medical or otherwise, they may even lead shorter lives, Kivel says. But these costs are not just emotional and physical. There’s a spiritual price to pay too. It is ‘soul breaking’ to live inside the box. ‘It destroys our integrity as human beings to show up in the ways that we show up.’
When men call Cam Fraser girly or gay for daring to talk about caring sex, they are policing the borders of the man box. These days, the digital environment young men navigate is a man box reinforced with solid steel too. While the ideas of masculinity projected by male lifestyle and wellness influencers online may seem strong and sturdy from the outside – and may even feel empowering for the men who consume it – in all likelihood, they are also rendering men more sexually fragile.
This is because straight men are predisposed to shame. Contrary to what men are told, fantasy researcher and psychologist Dr Justin Lehmiller says that straight men are, like everyone else, more likely to fantasise about being submissive than dominant. But in his book, Tell Me What You Want, Lehmiller writes that ‘men are simply more ashamed of their sexual desires than are women’.
This is not a positive state of affairs, because sexual shame is one of the single biggest predictors of sexual function issues for both men and women. This kind of shame is associated with many other negative outcomes too, like depression and, in men, aggression. There is even evidence that women with sexually inhibited male partners have lower sexual function themselves.
A 2019 study, based on a sample of 1082 men from all over the world, found that men with higher endorsements of traditionally masculine values also had higher instances of sexual shame.
Cam Fraser says he sees the same thing with his clients. The ones who have very restrictive ideas about what they should be doing, who they should be sexually, and what it means to be a man tend to have the biggest struggles in the bedroom.
Extract from All Women Want (2025) by Alyx Gorman, out now via HarperCollins.
All Women Want with author Alyx Gorman and sexologist Georgia Grace
🗓️ Monday 2 June 2025
⏱️ 7pm AEST
🖥️ Virtual in-conversation event
🎟️ Free, registration essential
Alyx Gorman’s groundbreaking book, All Women Want, exposes the ‘pleasure gap’, why so many straight women aren’t satisfied in the bedroom, and what to do about it. Joining her is celebrated sexologist Georgia Grace, author of The Modern Guide to Sex, for a frank and insightful discussion about pleasure, equality, and how we can all demand more.
Everyone who registers by 7pm Monday 2 June, 2025 will go in the draw to win a copy of Alyx Gorman’s book, All Women Want, and The Modern Guide to Sex (2024) by Georgia Grace.