Balthazar and Grégoire exchange on familiar ground, leaning on the small bar of the first Parisian apartment. On the terrace or on the sofa of one or the other, the subject of virility and its codes often comes up in their discussions. “We are failures of the patriarchy”, having fun, not unhappy, Grégoire, 25-year-old weakling. “Whereas if we are merged, we have all the characteristics of a very virile man, adds Balthazar, a year younger. Me, the beefy guy but gay, and you, the straight soccer fanatic. » A way of making fun of a model that is too fixed for their taste.
Around the age of 12, in Lyon, Grégoire had nevertheless taken on the role of “manly guy”, he remembers. Popular, he played for “to dominate” in the college’s yard. Then, a little slow growth took it out of the ranks of “real guys”. Today, talking so much about ” advantages “ conferred on them by the fact of being born boys than by their discrepancy with what society expects, “it’s saying that, instead of trying to return to the virilist norm, we can invent other models”, explains Gregory. And it’s ” joyful “, abounds Balthazar.
Entering adulthood in the #metoo era, young men decide to rethink their masculinity and question the codes of a dominating form of virility. They intend to invent new ways of being human, far from a normative scheme associated with strength and performance. If the phenomenon is impossible to quantify, signs attest to a change of time: in a survey published on February 3 by the Montaigne Institute, carried out among 8,000 young people aged 18 to 24, nearly one man in deux considers that the differences between the sexes are essentially a matter of social construction – this proportion is even higher among those with higher education. Also questioned on this subject, the generations of their parents and the baby-boomers adhere much less to this idea, according to this study.
“Physically, there is this requirement of muscle, of having a deep voice, of playing football… I didn’t play sports, I was a bit chubby and people told me that I was mannered. » Remy, 21 years old
“There is a growing awareness of gender stereotypes and their alienating dimension,” observes Olivia Gazalé, author of myth of manhood (Robert Laffont, 2017). For the essayist, if the virile ideal established the domination of women, it also constitutes a ” trap “ for men, enclosing them in coercive injunctions that pave the way for harmful behavior. “Man must constantly prove and confirm, by his strength, his courage and his sexual vigor, that he is indeed a man, a real one”, she writes.
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