Introduction

If you asked most people what single topic dominates the talk of adolescent males in America, a common answer would certainly be “sex.” The notion that boys’ talk is saturated with concern, curiosity, and humor related to sex is part of conventional wisdom, supported by a myriad of mass media images (e.g., Beavis & Butthead, That 70s Show, American Pie). But what do we really know about that talk? Who are boys talking to when they talk about sex? Who are they talking about and how do they talk about them? How is the importance of sex built up among boys? Are there ways of talking about sex that are more or less acceptable to other boys? How might this sex talk shape the boys’ understandings of appropriate sexual behaviors, the negotiation of sexual encounters, and themselves as sexual beings?

If we accept that boys’ perceptions, self-perceptions, and group commitments affect their behavior, finding answers to these questions–answers that are given by boys themselves, not imposed by others—is important because of the multitude of social problems to which adolescent male sexual behavior has been connected. The spread of sexually transmitted diseases and rates of teen pregnancy, for instance, are affected by what males think and do. Hence, adolescent males’ attitudes towards condoms (Murphy and Boggess 1998; Pleck et al. 1991; Sable et al. 2000) and measures of procreative responsibility (Marsiglio 1993) have emerged as relevant variables in survey research on these topics over the past several decades. In addition, adolescent male attitudes towards females and sex are central to the problems of sexual harassment (Kimmel 1993) and date and acquaintance rape (Muehlenhard and Linton 1987). Implicated in the latter is male peer culture (Boeringer et al. 1991). Newer research that discards the dichotomy of consensual versus forced sex in favor of examining girls’ first sexual experiences along a continuum of “wantedness,” carries with it an implicit critique of male attitudes and practices of sexual negotiation (Abma et al. 1998). Finally, on a broader cultural level, investigation of these questions is crucial to the deconstruction of the “boys will be boys” ideology, which is a primary support of the sexual double-standard (Eder et al. 1995: p. 5; Miller and Marshall 1987). Exploring adolescent male sex talk and the contexts that foster and shape it thus provides a means to address a number of important social problems simultaneously.

My sense is that sex talk has been addressed most profitably by research that treats language as constitutive of reality, so that attention is not just on what boys say, but what they accomplish rhetorically with what they say. Such a perspective highlights the definitions, distinctions, connections, and presumptions that the boys use to decide what is sexual and how to relate to it. It also links sex talk to the production of particular modes of masculinity. On the whole, this sociolinguistic approach remains underutilized, particularly in the United States.

Studies of this type, the majority focusing on adolescents in the United Kingdom, have documented that boys have multiple ways to construct and display both heterosexuality and masculinity. Different groups of boys in the same locale, such as a school or workplace, are, in fact, often distinguishable by their displays of masculinity and how these are linked to heterosexuality (Haywood and Mac an Ghaill 1997). A consistent finding across these works is that in instances where multiple masculinities do exist, one of them is a hypersexual, often misogynistic, masculinity defined in terms of the sexual conquest of women. Some studies indicate that this masculinity is associated with working-class groups (Mac an Ghaill 1994; Willis 1977); others have suggested that members of subordinate racial groups take it on as a strategy for coping with social powerlessness (Sewall 1997). Like all masculinities, however, it provides the rhetorical and social grounds upon which boys compete for social position. In other words, boys use the resources of their masculinity to claim its (and, therefore, their own) superiority over others.

Identity work (Holstein and Gubrium 2000) consistent with this masculinity inevitably occurs through language (Edley and Wetherell 1997). Boys categorize girls in terms of their attractiveness or desirability as sexual partners (Asencio 2002), construct girls as untrustworthy (Aarons and Jenkins 2002) or manipulative (Gilmore et al. 1996), and deride other boys who maintain relationships with girls for more than a few months (Wight 1994). Frosh et al. (2002) have shown some of these dynamics among pre-adolescents (ages 11–14) and argued that heterosexuality is rhetorically constructed through the denigration of the feminine that characterizes traditional sexualized masculinity. Boys define girls as “other” and “weak,” and then eroticize that weakness. Daniel Wight (1994:732) concludes that the role of language in the production of heterosexual masculinity is so central that “a boy’s sexual identity is largely shaped by the extent to which his peers believe his subjective version of his sexual history.”

This article seeks to build on previous work by examining an American context and focusing on a mixed-race collection of individuals, rather than competing groups or a single subordinate group. Further, instead of drawing from focus groups or observation as other studies have done, this one aims to put the emphasis squarely on talk by using data from one-on-one interviews. Data for the current analysis are from a study I conducted previously on narratives of sexual decision-making and the production of adolescent heterosexual identities through talk (Cohan 2002). The design and analysis of that study was informed by narrative practice (Gubrium and Holstein 1997), a brand of sociolinguistics that seeks to bridge discourse and narrative analysis. Consistent with previous research, one finding from the earlier analysis was that boys have several different ways of orienting to sex and their own sexuality. I identified three primary discourses of sexual decision-making: relationship, piety, and conquest (described below). In the current work, I confine the analysis to cases in which males adopt the latter discourse, an orientation to heterosexual sex that is geared towards sexual conquest, and I pay special attention to the central role that sex-segregated male friendship groups play in this context.

Methods

Study Design

I conducted semi-structured interviews with a racially and ethnically diverse sample of adolescent males between the ages of 14 and 19. The interviews were conducted in a small, Southern college town in the period between May 2001 and May 2002. A total of 21 interviews were conducted, but the first four of these included participants over the age of 19 and were later excluded. The convenience sample was recruited via an ad in a local monthly newspaper, contacts with youth ministers from local churches and high school principals, and word of mouth. It included self-proclaimed virgins (i.e., had never had vaginal intercourse), non-virgins, and one “born-again virgin,” who had had intercourse once but had since vowed to stay abstinent until marriage.

All of the 17 respondents were included in the analysis, but data ultimately came solely from a subset of eight who articulated the discourse of conquest in meaningful ways during their interview. In most cases, the use of the rhetoric of the conquest discourse indicated at least some alignment with its orientation by the respondent. However, one guy featured in this analysis (Andrew), drew on the discourse at length with the express purpose of distancing himself from it; Andrew was also the only one of the eight who identified as a virgin.

Four of the guys included in this analysis were white, three were black, and one, who I observed to be a person of color, chose not to designate his race. They represented the older end of the larger sample (ages 16–19), and they were also more likely to have been recruited from a local dropout retrieval school. Six of the respondents were recruited this way, while the other two responded to newspaper ads. All of them identified as heterosexual.

Designating the boys’ social class proved difficult because most of the boys were still minors and none were living independently, yet I did not wish to risk lowering participation rates by asking parents for financial data. I did try to get some rudimentary information by asking respondents to select one from a set of phrases describing their family’s situation in colloquial terms, and I asked if anyone in their family received government assistance. The self-reports of economic condition were all over the place. Two said they were “barely getting by”; one said the family was “taking care of the basics, but not much more”; three reported they were “not rich, but doing all right”; one reported being “fairly well off”; and one did not provide information. One respondent, who had described his family as “barely getting by,” reported that he, his mother, and her boyfriend received financial assistance. While that self-reporting data is inconclusive at best, it is worth noting that the county from which all respondents were drawn was, at the time of the interviews, poorer than the national average on a range of aggregate measures (household income, family income, individual income) and nearly 22% of individuals were below the poverty line when the national rate was 12.4% (U.S. Census Bureau 2009). The drop-out retrieval high school also served a disproportionate number of students who were poor. Given all of these factors, it is clear that the sample studied here is limited primarily to young males from the lower and lower-middle classes.

Informed consent was obtained for interviews with all of the males older than 17. The minor adolescents gave their assent after informed consent was obtained from a parent or guardian. Participants were paid $10 for a single interview that was not to last more than 2 h. Interviews took place in various offices on the university campus and in an office at the dropout retrieval school, and were audio taped for later transcription. I transcribed the audio tapes of all but two of the interviews, and I reviewed and corrected the transcripts that were done by an outside source. Interviews typically lasted between 30 and 120 min. In one case where additional time was needed, a second interview session was scheduled and the participant received another payment.

Interviews were conducted using the “active interview” model described by Holstein and Gubrium (1995). This approach does not so much proscribe techniques for interviewing as advance an epistemology of the interview. The interview is seen as an unique, collaborative context for meaning-making, rather than a situation in which an interviewer seeks to extract information from a respondent, who is understood to be a “passive vessel of answers” (Gubrium and Holstein 2002, p. 13; emphasis in original). Engaging these young men as co-constructors of the interview was a tricky prospect, however, given the social distance between us created by age (I was approximately twice the age of the average respondent); race, in some cases; and the fact that I was an outsider to the organizations and local environments from which they were recruited. This last factor, coupled with the small financial incentive given to participants, had the potential to position me, from their perspective, as an authority figure whose interests they needed to discern and satisfy. Mindful of these “anchors” on my subjectivity, I tried to work within them. I sought to portray myself as an older but friendly and interested person who was forthright about his ignorance of the language and dynamics of their sexual lives. When they proposed terminology or perspectives I paraphrased them and adopted them, but I did not presume to speak as one of these boys. I did not purposively divulge my own sexual history or sexual ethics at the start of the interview; my interest was framed solely in terms of research and gaining insight into the lives of young men. However, I gave respondents opportunities to ask questions about me and the research, and I did not shy away from answering more personal inquiries. Thus, by the end of the interview, some respondents knew me as a man in his thirties who had been a virgin (defined in terms of heterosexual intercourse), against his desires, into his early twenties.

Over the course of each interview, I directed the respondent to describe his experiences with respect to dating and sex and explain the rationale for the decisions he had made. Regardless of his virginity status, I questioned with an aim towards discovering the meanings he attached to virginity, virgins, virginity loss, sex, dating, and relationships, and I explored how these meanings intersected with his understandings of females, masculinity, religion, and the significant others in his life, be they peers, parents, clergy, or others. In presenting excerpts from the boys’ narratives in this report, I have protected their anonymity by creating pseudonyms for them and any places to which they refer.

The coding process proceeded along two tracks. One set of codes captured the different constructions that respondents expressed for key concerns addressed in the interview guide, which included virgins, non-virgins, women/girls, girlfriends, important figures (e.g., mentors, parents, clergy), masculinities, sex, sex talk among friends, and male friends. A second set of codes focused on what respondents were doing with language. These codes captured the production of stories, contrasts, ways of presenting selves, categorizations, and cases where respondents spoke for someone else. All coding was done by the author/interviewer. The qualitative data analysis software package NVivo was used to manage and organize the codes and to facilitate thinking about the data across cases, but none of the software’s analytical tools were used to develop the analysis.

Theoretical Foundations: The Three Discourses

In an earlier analysis, I argued that the young men drew primarily on three discourses of sexual decision-making to make sense of their sexual behavior and construct their sexual selves (Cohan 2002). The existence of these distinct discourses was substantiated by patterned variations in how respondents talked about ideas targeted in the interviews and the narrative linkages made between them. In other words, I saw that the boys had three primary ways of talking about things like self, sex, negotiating sex, women/girls, virgins, virginity, relationships, and masculinity, and that the meanings made of these concepts tended to hang together in a way that suggested a more or less singular orientation, a discourse. Thus, the presence of the discourses was not presumed, it emerged from the respondents’ own narrative work, considered collectively rather than individually.

The three primary discourses of sexual decision-making I have identified among this sample of heterosexual adolescents are piety, relationship, and conquest. The piety discourse identifies an orientation to sexual meanings and actions that is predicated on religious or spiritual belief. Among the devoutly Christian boys I talked to, this standpoint often manifest as a desire to remain virgin, or resist potential sexual contacts altogether, until marriage.

When boys articulate the relationship discourse, they advance the notion that questions about if and when to engage in sexual acts, leading up to and including intercourse, should be decided based on the nature and quality of one’s relationship with the woman. Great variation exists, however, in the sort of relationship seen as suitable for sexual encounters, typically (but not always) presumed to involve intercourse. A boy may insist that a relationship appropriate for sex must be committed and long-term, involve an almost spiritual connection, or include the expectation that it will lead to marriage. Articulated that way, the discourse has commonalities with the piety discourse. Alternatively, the boy’s idea of what constitutes a suitable relationship for sex—or a relationship at all—may be much more liberal. The simple acknowledgement of the girl as a girlfriend or someone he has more than a passing knowledge of and attachment to can provide defensible grounds for trying to make the relationship sexual.

In the latter case, the boy’s articulation of the relationship discourse is largely inconsistent with the discourse of piety and is more consistent with the third discourse, conquest. The discourse of conquest, which is the primary focus of this analysis, treats sexual activity for boys as an accomplishment. Sex is pursued like a commodity to be collected and hoarded, with evidence of one’s successes proudly demonstrated to significant others, usually male peers. From this orientation, decisions about the who, what, and when of sexual involvement are answered according to the degree to which they advance the boy’s sense of accomplishment. Attention thus focuses on the desire for sexual experience and gratification, where and when sex is available, how to negotiate for sex, and the reception particular sexual activities and partners will receive from others. The female sex partner is largely a means to an end in this context, often rendered all but invisible in the boys’ talk of their exploits.

Theoretical Foundations: Identity Agendas

The current analysis of the data is predicated on some fundamental assumptions about identity, the life course, and the intersection of masculinity and the life course. With respect to identity, I take the perspective that our sense of who we are is an on-going social construction, affected by social interaction and context. Further, my work emerges from a theoretical tradition that treats language as central to the social construction of reality, and thus identity itself is, at least in part, a narrative accomplishment. In examining the talk of my respondents, I focus on how they use language to construct and present a sense of themselves, particularly in relation to sexual matters.

My assumptions about the life course relate to the context it provides for identity construction. Specifically, I assume that adolescence (defined in this case as the ages from 14 to 19) is constructed in contemporary American culture as a time during which young people struggle to convince themselves and others that they both belong among their peers and are independent, the latter quality often displayed most vigorously in relation to parents and other authority figures. A rich collection of popular depictions and the academic literature support this depiction (see, for example: Blos 1962; Shireman 2003; Tropiano 2006).

In the interviews it was apparent that the boys’ constructions of their sexual selves were intimately linked to these concerns of demonstrating belonging and independence. They repeatedly returned to these challenges while responding to seemingly unrelated questions. I came to see belonging and independence as identity agendas, critical challenges of self-definition that structured their depictions of themselves as sexual actors.

Concerns about belonging and independence are certainly present for girls and boys, but for boys, an additional identity agenda is to acquire and convey a sense of emerging masculinity. Boys must show that they “have what it takes” to become men. Becoming is the operative word here because, as Coltrane (1994) points out, masculinity is not given or acquired and kept, it must be continually demonstrated or proven. In essence, once a boy becomes a man, he must keep on becoming one. Kimmel (1994) and Stoltenberg (1993) offer the important addition that, for many men, the need to provide proof of one’s masculinity is most urgent around other men, as it is men who police gender presentation and gender boundaries most vigilantly. Where heterosexual masculinities are being constructed, homophobia is often the most powerful force of boundary maintenance (Kimmel 1994; but see Anderson (2005, 2008) for a glimpse of how this may be changing).

The premise of this analysis is that different discourses of sexuality guide the boys who articulate them to address these identity agendas—masculinity, belonging, and independence in different ways. Although respondents are not “cultural dopes” (Garfinkel 1967/1984)—blindly adopting a particular discourse and defining their sexual selves in complete accord with it—the discourses represent the limited range of strategies for meaning-making that adolescent boys encounter as they try to make sense of themselves as sexual beings. Faced with a sense that successfully addressing identity agendas is a matter of social and psychological importance, the discourses provide attractive, pre-paved paths to their solution. Articulation of each discourse has real-world consequences, however, for who and what the boys value, how they act, and what their social worlds look like. In this paper, I focus on these implications with respect to the conquest discourse, particularly as the boys, in their talk, relate them to their male friendship groups.

Results

Seen at the individual level, it is tempting to reduce the conquest discourse to the simple notion that those who follow it seek personal gratification. Certainly this idea is consistent with the notion of sex as an accomplishment. In some cases, the accomplishment amounts to the satisfaction of curiosity:

Oh, whenever I was younger, I just wanted to play around and stuff. I didn’t really even think about sex and stuff like that. And then as I started getting older, I started hearin’ people talkin’ about it and everything. I was like, “Hey, I gotta try this out” or somethin’. So I got with a girl and, yeah, I guess I was 15. Fifteen, yeah, I guess, I lost my virginity.

(James, 16-year-old, White, non-virgin)

In other instances, the accomplishment is the satisfaction of a seemingly unyielding, primal urge:

Well, like sometimes I’ll, like, I’ll just be really fuckin’ horny, and I’ll want to have sex. So I’ll go out with that, like, that is my sole purpose for the night. My mission tonight is to find someone to have sex with.

(Drew, 18-year-old, White, non-virgin)

But it is clear from the entirety of the respondents’ comments that the conquest discourse is not an orientation that points solely towards individual gratification. Rather, it encourages those who articulate it to locate their sexuality within a broader social frame, one that is dominated by a male peer group, or what I call the male fraternity. I choose this seemingly redundant name to highlight the special nature of these groups. As with any fraternity, they emphasize the importance of bonds between males and the maintenance of a gender-segregated environment, but they do these things in a unique way that places at the fore gender and, more specifically, the development and demonstration of a rather traditional, heterosexual masculinity. They are quite literally groups in which the “pledges” come in as boys and seek to “graduate” as masculine men. Thus, in the context of the male fraternity, having sex is as much of, if not more than, a social accomplishment, than an individual one. Although I find the metaphor of the fraternity to be a useful way of articulating how male peer groups privilege homosocial bonds and male interests, it is worth reiterating that the boys discussed here did not indicate that they were members of actual fraternal organizations of any kind.

In the pages that follow, I explore the social nature and consequences of male fraternities, as expressed in these boys’ narratives. I pay particular attention to the: (1) ways in which they satisfy the identity agendas of adolescent boys; (2) attitudes and beliefs about females (particularly potential sex partners) that they encourage; and (3) rhetorical mechanisms by which they foster compliance with a conquest discourse and thus produce the “right” kind of man. As these issues are illuminated by the comments of the respondents, it is important not to assume that the boy speaking consistently articulates the discourse of conquest or even seeks to construct a masculinity consistent with the discourse. In the same way that a person may struggle with certain aspects of an ideology or develop intimate knowledge of it precisely because they oppose it, the boys sometimes speak from ambivalent or oppositional positions that shed light on the dynamics of male fraternities.

Satisfying Identity Agendas

Belonging

The identity agendas that are addressed most directly in male fraternities are belonging and masculinity. The fundamental mechanism through which this occurs is the construction of heterosexual sex, particularly virginity loss through intercourse, as a rite of passage. Many boys report being part or being aware of male peer groups in which a core membership credential is losing one’s virginity. Being a virgin does not mean a boy is excluded from membership, but it does place him in a kind of junior status. He moves into full membership (really belongs) when he loses his virginity, as is evident in this comment from Grady:

  • I: Did having sex for the first time change, in any way, how you felt about yourself?

  • R: Yeah, it make me feel like more of a person, more, I can, like, really talk to my homeboys and stuff. We laugh and joke or whatever, instead of me just bein’ quiet all the time and just, sittin’ by while they talk about havin’, doin’ whatever.

  • (Grady, 18-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Implicit in this passage is the notion that sex is a recurring interest (a horizon of meaning [Gubrium 1993], in fact) within male fraternities, one strong enough to stratify the group. For Grady, full membership takes the form of becoming an active participant in the male fraternity, instead of a passive observer. Having lost his virginity, he is able to engage in a core ritual of these groups, talking and joking about sex. (In a later section, I will provide evidence that trying to engage in this talk while one is still a virgin carries significant risk of a stigmatizing exposure.)

The significance of virginity loss is not limited, however, to what it offers the individual—that is, a greater sense of belonging. As with all rites of passage, the ritual of virginity loss sustains the group as much as it bolsters the individual. Put simply, virginity is not just a “problem” for the individual, but one for the entire group. Thus, faced with a group member who has the junior status of a virgin, moving him to full membership (“getting him laid”) may become a pervasive concern of the group. In a story Drew tells about his high school friends, for instance, there is a clear representation of how one’s sexual status acts as a token of belonging and commitment to the male fraternity:

  • R: Like, there’s a group a guys that I hang out with that I’ve hung out with for like 4 years, they go to [local high school], and it was— I used to know, like the order in, like the order it was that we all lost our virginity. I don’t remember anymore, but there’s still one guy that hasn’t had sex outta that group. We will all know when he has sex. [Int: Okay.] There will be phone calls made. Print it into the newspaper when this guy finally gets laid.

  • I: So, so you know because, because—How do you know?

  • R: ‘Cause it’s something we’re open about.

  • I: Okay.

  • R: Just, like, yeah.

  • I: And does he get—How do the other guys treat him?

  • R: Well they don’t treat him bad. It’s like, they try to find girls that will have sex with him so that he can finally have sex [Int laughs] because it’s something that we all feel he needs to do, just because he’s the only one that hasn’t. [Int: Okay.] Like if you’re the only one that hasn’t done something, then everybody puts a lot of effort into making sure that you do that.

  • (Drew, 18-year-old, White, non-virgin)

A number of elements in this excerpt reveal how sex and belonging are linked in the male fraternity: First is the fact that all of the members are aware of the others’ sexual status; second is the sense that the virgin is lagging behind his peers; third is the dramatization of the day when the virgin has sex (it will be “big news”); and fourth is their active efforts to help him. Whether they have undergone the rite of passage or not, the young men are linked by their abiding concern with having sex. However, in this excerpt the importance of having sex emerges not from a desire to satisfy sexual urges, but from a social need to demonstrate commitment to male friends and their ideals. The virgin shares in the camaraderie of the group, but with the understanding that he needs to pursue sex for the sake of the group. As Drew says, “it’s something we all feel he needs to do.”

Masculinity

Just as virginity loss provides proof that a boy belongs in his male fraternity, it can also be taken as proof of his emerging manhood. Many of the respondents who articulated a discourse of conquest rejected the suggestion that having sex increased their sense of their own masculinity, but many also believed that sex had that implication for other boys. It is impossible to determine why this disparity existed, but it suggests that this distinction was one guys found useful for separating themselves from their peers. It is worth noting, however, that it was common for boys to define masculinity in terms of confidence, responsibility, and efficacy, regardless of which of the three discourses they oriented to most strongly.

A few boys did, nevertheless, indicate that having sex helped them address the masculinity identity agenda, and they further suggested that the male fraternity provided the grounds and support for their belief in their changed status. Alvin, whose male fraternity is composed of his uncles and others who seem to be older than him, provides one example. He describes how his uncles urge him to lose his virginity: “talkin’ ‘bout, ‘Just go head. Go head. Go head.’ Talkin’ ‘bout, ‘Be a man,’ basically.” And then, after he has sex, his new status as “the little man” is honored, in practical terms, by greater access to the activities of the group:

  • R: Well, they just took me around more often with them. I went about everywhere wit ‘em. I was always wit ‘em. I was just like the little, little man with them.

  • I: So you went from being a boy to being a little man?

  • R: Mmm-hm. In they case, yeah.

  • (Alvin: 19-year-old, African-American male)

Whatever subjective feelings of masculinity Alvin acquires for having had sex, the social consequences of virginity loss within the male fraternity reinforce the connection. Alvin experiences a noticeable transformation of his relationship to his male fraternity as a result of becoming sexually experienced. It might be argued that this change is merely an increase in belonging, but Alvin specifically makes a reference to masculinity. Certainly he feels more like he belongs, now that he has had sex, but he asserts that this new acceptance occurs because he has moved closer to the status of a man than a boy. It should also be noted that because the members of Alvin’s male fraternity are mostly older relatives, rather than same-age peers, it is possible that concerns about belonging and masculinity are heightened for him.

The Cost: Hierarchy and Homophobia

The preceding discussion suggests that, from a purely practical standpoint, male fraternities are sites in which boys can effectively address two identity agendas—masculinity, and, especially, belonging—that adolescence thrusts upon them. But it is relevant to mention briefly here how members may be affected negatively by the very structure of these groups. While there are any number of unintended consequences that might be cited, I confine myself to two: hierarchy and homophobia.

The interview excerpts I have already presented, particularly Drew’s and Alvin’s, make it clear that male fraternities are constructed around and reinforce hierarchy. Some respondents suggested that wealth was an important determiner of position within the fraternity, but there was near-universal agreement that perceived or actual sexual prowess was a critical factor. In practice, this circumstance does not just mean that virginity loss functions as a rite of passage into full membership, it also means that members draw on sexual achievement to jockey for position within the fraternity. As Grady indicates, these efforts can be normalized within the group and be quite competitive:

  • R: …If they like ride to [the city] like one night, they’ll just have a competition of how many girls they talked to or whatever, how many numbers they get sometimes. [Int: Uhm-hm.] Well, if a dude get some, he’ll be talkin’ junk to the other dude[s], they’ll be gettin’ made and stuff.

  • I: So what’s more important, just getting the phone numbers or actually having sex with the—?

  • R: Havin’ sex. [laughs] That’s the most important thing, I guess.

  • (Grady, 18-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Comments by other respondents confirm that a by-product of the centrality of sex to the male fraternity is a competitive approach to sex, in which sexual accomplishment derives a notable portion of its value from the relevance it has to male friends.

Given the importance of heterosexual sex to the male fraternity, it should be no surprise that these groups can provide an environment for the expression of homophobia. In my interviews, homophobia, while never rampant, was expressed most often in relation to virginity. The boys distinguished—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly—between good and bad virginity. Good virginity was the type that emerged from conscious conviction, such as boys articulating the discourse of piety and choosing to avoid sex on religious grounds. Bad virginity was the result of not having “game,” the ability to talk to girls and make sexual connections with them.

In the context of male fraternities, where good virginity is inconsistent with the groups’ purpose, homophobia can arise when there is suspicion that someone may be afflicted with the “bad virginity,” which might, in turn, raise fears of homosexuality. As Alvin tells it, homophobia among the members of his male fraternity was a motivating force in his first exposure to sex and how he approached his first experience:

Well, when [Alvin’s uncle] was here, him and his friends always came over, watched pornos and stuff. [Made] me sit down in front of the TV talking ‘bout, “You ain’t finna grow up to be gay.” So then he sat me right there. So then, just by rememberin’ some stuff like that, went on ahead and did it. Pretty much worked out.

(Alvin, 19-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Alvin’s experience seems to represent an extreme case. Not only did the members of his male fraternity expose him to pornography with the express intent of warding off homosexuality, they arranged a first sexual encounter for him on his 13th birthday. Despite its exceptionality, however, Alvin’s experience represents the logical flipside of the treatment of virginity loss as a rite of passage. If sexual accomplishment is a kind of “mission” for the fraternity, failure—or worse, disinterest—in that mission opens one to charges of disloyalty to the group and, by extension, the heterosexual masculinity that is its cornerstone. In this sense, male fraternities represent a social structure designed to ward off homosexuality. Thus, the confluence of the loyalty demanded by the group and its emphasis on heterosexual conquest may enable homophobic expressions or at least inhibit acceptance of homosexuality.

“Knowing” Females

A unique and complex perspective on women and girls is one of the foundations of the conquest discourse. Women are categorized, objectified, demonized, and marginalized rhetorically. There is a considerable amount of myth, oversimplification, and outright misogyny in the way they are presented and understood. In linking the conquest “take” on women to male fraternities, I want to be clear that my argument is not that males gathering in sex-segregated groups necessarily produces misogyny. It is simply that the conquest discourse, by virtue of its construction of sex in terms of accomplishment, fosters a goal-oriented view of women. Since male fraternities are gatherings of males who articulate the discourse of conquest, they function as venues within which these views are supported and amplified. In this section, I highlight general features of the conquest understanding of women and provide evidence that male fraternities are active purveyors of this “knowledge.”

Within the conquest discourse, women are judged and valued first and foremost on the basis of their perceived suitability as sex partners. Categorization and objectification serve to sort them and document their value in this regard. While some boys clearly had more complex categorization schemes than others, and terminology varied from person to person, there was general consensus that a core distinction to be made was between what might be called “nice girls” and “nasty girls.” “Nice girls” are suitable sex partners because they are believed to be clean or pure, meaning they have a limited sexual appetite and, therefore, are presumed to carry a low risk of transmitting an STD. In fact, they are often presumed to be virgins. The boys believe that nice girls can be identified by their physical attractiveness and their demur self-presentation and dress. The “nasty girl” designation, on the other hand, refers to girls believed to be overly interested in sex, sexually adventurous, or promiscuous. Often referred to by other terms, such as freak, scummy girl, or trashy girl, boys believe they can discern these girls by their reputations, provocative dress, and a certain brashness in the way they carry themselves. James makes this point and elaborates on his earlier suggestion that ways of dressing can serve as an indicator. However, he also hints at inconsistencies across these indicators:

  • R: You just can’t go around school yellin’ and acting like you’re somethin’ all special like and everything. You gotta just carry yourself like a lady. You can’t just be—Like, it’s alright to be a girl that’s like got a loud mouth and talks a lot and looks good. But at the same time isn’t like really sexually active a whole lot. It’s alright, but.

  • I: What about the way they dress?

  • R: Oh. That tells a lot, but at the same time you can’t judge somebody by how they dress. Like the more skin they show, the dudes are gonna think like, “Oh, she’s havin’ sex a lot,” and stuff like that right there. But the girls that wear jeans and stuff like that right there, they’re gonna think like, “Oh, she’s not havin’ sex.” Like, er, if she’s wearing jeans and they know her and they like see her and they done talked to her in the past, they’ll tell everybody, they’ll be like, “Oh, that’s a freak right there.” ‘Cause they’ll just—‘Cause they don’t—You can just tell. I don’t know.

  • (James, 16-year-old, White, non-virgin)

The equivocations in James’ statement were paralleled in several other boys’ comments on this topic. They suggest that the boys accept that girls can be effectively categorized on these bases, even as contradictions between reputation and self-presentation would argue otherwise. And although James distances himself somewhat from what the “dudes” think, his comments provide some evidence that male fraternities play a central role in enforcing this scheme.

The fraternities are certainly sites that foster the objectification of girls. Indeed, if the comments of Andrew (a virgin who now distances himself from male fraternities) and Grady are any indication, the tendency to objectify is ever-present when boys talk amongst themselves:

And then outside a school all my friends, you know, they were male. And, you know, the whole conversations we’d ever have about girls are, “Oh, yeah, she was fine.” You know, “Nice set a tits on that girl. Oh Geez.” You know, that’s the guys talkin’ that I’ve always been with.

(Andrew, 17-year-old, White, virgin)

They compare, like, sex and the face, the attitude, all that. They just all compare it together. Is this girl doin’ it better than this one did, and does she have a better booty, titties or whatever.

(Grady, 18-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Girls are reduced to parts, mostly breasts and rear ends, as the guys use their ability to objectify girls much as they do verbal assertions of sexual experience—as a means of relating to one another. The interactions, as described here, have much in common with the practice of “girl watching” in the adult workplace (Quinn 2002).

Both inside and outside of male fraternities, the categorization and objectification is sometimes combined with talk of sexual behavior, resulting in the reduction of girls to their part in male sexual conquest. Speaking about the sex talk that occurs among his friends, James provides an example of how male fraternities foster this kind of misogynistic rhetoric:

See ‘cause most people whenever they talk about girls, they say ‘whoes.’ They be like, “Man, that whoe’s fine.” And then somebody be like, “Man, I’ll fuck that whoe,” or somethin’ like that right there. And then you gotta—That’s basically how everybody talks.

(James, 16-year-old, White, non-virgin)

In this hypothetical scenario, the boys convey attraction toward a girl by demeaning her and intimating a desire to dominate her sexually. Describing a girl as a “whore” who is to be “fucked” goes a long way to reducing her to mere flesh, yet James attributes this way of talking to “everybody.” Among the guys I interviewed, James was not alone in his unabashed assurance that the sex talk that pervades his male fraternity was common adolescent parlance with respect to girls. Such evidence dramatizes the power of the conquest discourse in general and the male fraternity in particular to normalize language that demeans women. There is little incentive or means to look beyond this discourse, if the consensus of one’s peer group is “everybody does it.”

Finally, in the context of male fraternities, boys also produce, share, and sustain their conviction that, as partners, girls are morally suspect, even dangerous. This notion is most commonly conveyed through the assertion that girls cannot not be trusted. Jerry makes the point in a way that highlights the role his male fraternity plays in promoting this perspective:

Yeah, my cousins, well, they told me. I learned from them, like, stuff like, a lotta stuff like girl’s parts and stuff. Then I was looking at TV so you know of course, TV, you know. And I learned from my cousins is like certain things about women, like they deceiving. They this and that, they whores. You know what I’m saying? You know, you know how males get around and start talking. They whores. Certain ones is whores.

(Jerry, 19-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Consistently throughout the passage, Jerry notes that these attitudes are things he learned from his cousins, not products of his own experience. Notice, too, that until the end of the excerpt, the condemnation of girls is universal. It is not that some girls are deceptive or promiscuous; girls as a whole are. While Jerry ultimately backs off of this global declaration (“Certain ones is whores.” [emphasis mine]), it is still notable that all of the characteristics (i.e., deceptive) and categories of women (i.e., whores) he learned from his cousins are negative ones. Sexism is thus fostered in male fraternities as communal agreement about negative depictions of girls is forged. Whether the charge is that girls cheat or, as in other cases, that they date to get material possessions or use pregnancy to trap boys, the message is clear. Girls are liars, users, and manipulators. For individual boys, the fact that others agree helps to make it so.

In sum, males who articulate a conquest discourse come to know four basic lessons about girls with the help of their male fraternities. The first is that girls can be divided into ones to be pursued sexually and ones to be avoided. Second is that girls are notable based on specific physical attributes, particularly as those are sexualized. Third, girls’ primary value comes from their relevance to sexual conquest. And fourth, girls are morally corrupt and inherently a threat to male interests. So the costs of satisfying adolescent male identity agendas through this discourse reach far beyond the difficulties faced by boys who experience homophobia because they are saddled with “bad virginity,” or those who are lower on the hierarchy of their male fraternity. Obviously, females suffer to the extent that sexist attitudes towards them are aired and influence them socially or psychologically. More concretely, however, interactions between the sexes are impacted enormously. When boys articulate this discourse they are inclined to relate to girls through a haze of negative, sexual preconceptions, even when those expectations cannot be supported in particular instances. It seems to me that girls, for their part, would frequently be handicapped in their relations with these boys by cultural constructions that demean them and subject their behaviors to the least flattering interpretations.

Fostering Compliance

In an earlier section, I showed how the construction of virginity loss as a rite of passage helped to stratify the membership of male fraternities. While this discussion established the ways in which fraternity members are encouraged to focus on sexual conquest, it does not provide the full story of how male fraternities promote their values within and outside of their membership. The emphasis in that section was positive persuasion, for the most part. Boys develop a friendship circle in which the discourse of conquest dominates their orientation to sexual matters, and a collegial sexual competition ensues. There are, however, less benign strategies by which male fraternities advance their interests. Within the group, the focus is on responding to members who stray from the fold. Beyond the group, the aim is to perpetuate the importance of virginity status, a move which carries an implicit endorsement of the discourse of conquest.

Compelling Adherence from Outsiders: Virginity Status Tests

Given that sex is the linchpin of the conquest discourse, it follows that determining who has and has not had sex (and, even, when males are being truthful about their sexual exploits) are much more important issues with this discourse than with the others. As I have demonstrated, male fraternities appear to be relatively safe places for virgins to disclose their status, presumably because the assumption is that those who are virgins do not want to be. Outside of the fraternities, however, the dominance of a conquest perspective is not a given. For boys who primarily orient to sex in religious or relationship terms, the necessity of losing one’s virginity is by no means an accepted truth. Playing up the importance of virginity status thus serves the articulation of the conquest perspective in two ways. First, it is a necessary step in elevating sexual experience and denigrating sexual innocence. Second, it preserves the rhetorical and social value of sexual conquest for those who pursue it. If boys cannot convince themselves that they can determine who is sexually experienced, the fact of their own experience becomes equivalent to the fiction someone else purveys. They address this boundary issue by giving each other what I call virginity status tests. In much the same way that Eder et al. (1995) found adolescents using teasing rituals to negotiate romance and sexuality amongst themselves, the boys I talked to say they tease, taunt, and interrogate one another in an effort to establish the truth of sexual tales and, most importantly, who has and has not had sex. Given that virginity status tests operate across the boundary between virgins and non-virgins, most of the tests occur without the direct involvement of the male fraternity, even as they are used by individual members to advance a conquest orientation to sex.

The tests vary according to tactics and the type of claim that is contested. Some tests challenge a guy’s claim that he is a virgin, others question the veracity of claims to sexual experience. Strategically, some tests are aggressive, confronting claims directly. They put the “accused” through a rhetorical gauntlet, the experience of which they believe will expose his “true” status. Morgan describes a particularly viscous version of this gauntlet that he uses with boys who claim to be committed virgins. In this case, teasing degenerates into a kind of shaming ritual:

  • I: So a guy who says he doesn’t wanna have sex till he’s married is lying?

  • R: Oh, most definitely. You know for a fact they’re a liar. We both know they’ll lie. Let’s put it that way. I mean, come on, you know he’s gonna lie.

  • I: So what do you think of a guy that does that?

  • R: I call him a liar, until he’ll admit it. And if he don’t admit it, and you keep sayin’ it. Alright. And then he finally cries and breaks down and says, “Yeah, Man, I’m still a virgin.” Then I’ll believe him. Till he cries and proves to me he’s not, you’re a liar.

  • (Morgan: 17-year-old, White, non-virgin)

Morgan’s strategy is undoubtedly cruel, but it is this cruelty that simultaneously demonstrates and reinforces virginity status as a crucial category for adolescent males. All things being equal, boys who want their claims to virginity to be believed may have no difficulty distancing themselves from the discourse of conquest, but Morgan’s gambit raises the stakes. Being accepted as a virgin means not just committing to a different discourse of sexual decision-making, but also being compelled to abdicate their claims to a privileged masculinity by crying. In the starkest terms, the choice is: You can be a man, or you can be a virgin.

Other tests are more subtle, reading between the lines of a guy’s talk, but they share the basic philosophy that the more guys talk, the more the truth will come out. Jerry makes this point in an hypothetical narrative he tells about how boys scrutinize other boys’ claims to sexual experience:

Yeah, it’s like this male thing like man. Yeah. Coming like a bunch of males, “Yeah. All right. You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Had sex with this girl last night. Man, whoa! She was the bomb! Whoa! Man, she had some good pussy,” like that. You know, and then he could say the same thing but different to the next guy. Like say for instance, like this guy come over, he talkin’ bout, “Yeah I just had sex with this girl.” There’s like four guys there. And then, the guy that was there that he was talking to and telling about it and the other two guys that was there, then the next guy might be there with a new crowd and he telling the story, but differently. And the guy’s witnessing that. “Wait a minute. Hold up. But he said he just had sex with—What? He’s lying!” You know what I’m saying? And that’s bad! It’s bad to lie on your penis like that. It’s bad. It’s very bad.

(Jerry: 19-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

In this instance, the boy purporting to have had sex is not challenged by anyone in particular, but his lie is exposed as he is caught telling the story differently to different audiences.

I should point out that virtually all of the boys who use some sort of virginity status test or align themselves with a male fraternity take pains to assert that they do not denigrate virgins or give one’s virginity status any credence. The fact remains, however, that boys take note of one another’s status, and this action, in and of itself, helps to construct virginity loss as a vital rite of passage. The assumption that losing one’s virginity is important then becomes an unquestioned truth within male fraternities, and it helps to support a goal-oriented approach to sex. Interestingly, this assumption is also taken as fact within the piety discourse, but for different reasons and with different outcomes.

Policing Internal Adherence

Up to this point, the image of the male fraternity I have presented is one in which camaraderie among members holds the group together and makes commitment to common values, such as the devaluation of women, relatively unproblematic. Individual group members are not without agency, however, and they may intentionally or unintentionally challenge the prevailing discourse as they pursue their own interests. Fear of this type of defection was evident in the case of Alvin, whose fraternity members arranged his first sexual experience. Sexual interest in men is not the only threat to the ideals of the male fraternity, however, and homophobic taunts are not the only means by which group members try to reign in renegades.

Ironically, what appears to be a much more common menace to male fraternities are relationships with females. While the sexual conquest of females is revered within the fraternities, on-going intimate relationships with girls are likely to be seen as a challenge to group loyalty and the hyper-sexual, misogynistic masculinity on which it is based. A boy who in any way “gets serious” with a girl violates the implicit agreement that group members are supposed to have sex with girls but be social with “the guys.”

The group response to this threat is encapsulated in the colorful and revealing term “pussy-whipped.” It takes little imagination to see both the misogyny the word expresses and how it uses that misogyny to induce compliance. The label is applied to males who are so enthralled with a girl because she gives him sex that she is able to draw him away from his male friends and have him do her bidding. While I have, in different locations, provided evidence that, within the conquest discourse, girls are manipulators and boys owe their loyalty to the male fraternity, L.J. brings the two notions together under the rubric of “pussy-whipping” in a particularly compelling fashion. His comments also clearly demonstrate how the term is used to bring wayward fraternity members back into line.

With a clear tone of exasperation, L.J. describes the case of one of “his boys” who claimed to be in love with his girlfriend but was, in L.J.’s estimation, whipped. First, he notes how the boy has pulled away from his male friends:

Man, it’s like this cat he don’t wanna keep with the boys no more, Man. He be like at the girl’s house all day, all night. [Us two (?)] he ain’t wanna spend time with. But, Man, your boys were here before your girl. Know what I’m sayin’? Keep it real. Hang with your boys. He was just gettin’ pussy-whipped and wanna go walk to the girl’s.

(L.J., 17-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Later, L.J. describes struggling to get the boy to see that he is being used:

And the girl be like, “Buy me somethin’ to eat.” He’ll do it. I’m like, “Man, don’t you got a job?” ‘Cause I was in the car one night and she was tryin’ to put that talk to him. Like, “Man, damn. What you is, pussy-whipped, Man?” I like, “Man, girl don’t you got a damn job? Don’t you got money?” The homeboy looked at me. I said, “Nigger, don’t give me that damn look, nigger.” I said, “You know I read in between the lines, Man.” I said, “Man, this girl tryin’ to pussy-whoop you, Man. Tryin’ to put the thing on. Use you.” Him, caught up in sex, getting’ used…. Be like, “Man, I know, but I love her.” “You don’t love her, Man. You just met her.”

(L.J., 17-year-old, African-American, non-virgin)

Notice how, in this second passage, L.J. quickly dismisses the boy’s assertion that he has real feelings for the girl, suggesting instead that it is mere infatuation.

The use of the term pussy-whipped is hardly unique to L.J., but his comments put the constructions of gender implicit in it into stark relief. Reflecting the objectification and moral suspicion that characterizes a conquest orientation to girls, the girl (rhetorically reduced to her genitalia) is the active, destructive agent. She has a materialistic agenda that is antithetical to that of the male fraternity, and she exploits her sexuality to pursue it. The male “victim,” on the other hand, is emasculated because he has aligned himself with the female and because his weakness has been revealed in the fact that he let her manipulate him.

The implications of these constructions are powerful and extend far beyond particular instances in which the application of this heuristic frame may be more or less accurate. Seen through this lens, heterosexual relationships—as distinct from heterosexual sexual encounters—are a priori dangerous. They threaten the primacy of the male fraternity because they require a time commitment to one’s partner, and they contradict the conquest construction of girls because objectification may give way to emotion and sentiment. In the context of the male fraternity, “real” men are supposed to have sex with girls, but they are not supposed to want to be with them or have feelings for them. Fraternity members use ideas like “pussy-whipping” to encourage their peers to adhere to this notion of masculinity. In this way, the male fraternity, for all the bonding and camaraderie it offers boys, also becomes a prison within which they are kept from recognizing girls as equals, pursuing honest, fulfilling relationships, and expressing certain emotions.

Relevance of Girls’ Social Status and Peer Groups

One question worth raising in the context of this discussion of male status and peer-group influence is: What about females? If “male fraternities” are social sites where a male’s social standing is, to some degree, predicated on adoption of a conquest orientation to sex, with its concomitant objectification of women, it is reasonable to wonder about the relevance of female status and peer groups to males’ sexual decision-making. Do boys attend to the social status of girls in identifying potential targets of sexual “conquest”? Or, on the contrary, do girls’ groups provide a site of collective resistance to male objectification?

Unfortunately, my data and the existing literature do little to offer answers to these important questions. In my interviews, I did not specifically ask about boys’ perceptions of girls peer groups, and it did not come up in any interviews. Given that we talked extensively about girls, how they define them, and what they mean to the boys, particularly as potential sex partners, I am inclined to suggest that the boys’ lack of comment on girls’ peer groups is an indication of their irrelevance to boys.

The literature on adolescent female peer groups offers some indirect support for this position; it provides no indication that girls strategize collectively to resist boys’ advances or their constructions of girls. Instead, female preadolescent and adolescent peer culture seems focused primarily on the dissemination and enforcement of norms of female heterosexual behavior (Kehily 2002; Rapoport 1992; Simon et al. 2006). Boys who seek particular girls can get caught up in this dynamic, as Kehily (2002) shows in recounting how female peer group members actively sought to help a girl “manage” the competing advances of two boys. But the groups’ focus here, as elsewhere, is the rightness or fairness of the girl’s actions as judged against shared relationship norms—in this case, a norm of exclusivity. Still, in the absence of deliberate research attention to this point, definitive conclusions cannot be drawn, and the question is one that warrants investigation.

The relevance of a girls’ social status to guys’ sexual decision-making was also not something I inquired about directly in my interviews. However, it could certainly have been raised when I asked, “How do you decide whether or not to have sex with someone you’re dating?” In most cases, it seems the guys defined girls’ status exclusively in sexual terms. This tendency is evident, for example, when Grady distinguishes between nasty girls, who are promiscuous, and his recent girlfriend, who he described as “a little church girl” because, sexually speaking, “She did somethin’. But she wasn’t that serious.”

One case does, however, speak directly, if obliquely, to the social status of a girl impacting a guy’s decision about her as a sexual partner. Because Drew had indicated that he and his male friends were close and that the group had an important influence on its members, including working to ensure that each guy lost his virginity, I asked if he wondered about the reaction his friends would have to particular sex partners. Drew’s response was both telling and evasive.

  • R: There are some girls that I just refuse to have sex with because if someone ever found out I had sex with them, no good would could come from that. [Int laughs]

  • I: Tell me more about that.

  • R: There’s this one girl. [pause] And, I mean, she’s the kinda girl that I would, like, I would have sex with her, but then the next day I’d realize what I did, and I would feel bad about it and hope no one ever found out ‘cause they would make fun of me.

  • I: Okay. Why? What’s—?

  • R: I don’t know what it is about her that people don’t like, but she just isn’t the kind of girl that you can hook up with and go tell everybody about.

  • I: Is it something about the way she looks, the way she acts, the—?

  • R: Well, I mean, she’s alright lookin’. But, I mean, I don’t go to school with her, so I don’t know how people at that school feel about her. I don’t know why it is that it’s not okay to have sex with her. I just know it’s not something you do.

  • (Drew, 18-year-old, white, non-virgin)

Drew’s response indicates clearly that his ties to his peer group put this young woman off limits as a sexual partner, but he seems unable or unwilling to articulate exactly why. He asserts that the problem is not her physical appearance and makes allusions to her social standing, but he offers no details. Like the question of female peer group influence, then, we are left with a suggestion that this issue may be important, but also with a relative absence of data from which to draw conclusions.

Discussion and Conclusions

It is certainly part of conventional wisdom that boys talk and brag to each other about sexual exploits with girls. Two things that these data and analysis offer that conventional wisdom does not are: (1) empirical evidence that contributes to theoretical debates about the cultural production of sexuality among adolescents; and (2) a means of contextualizing boys’ sex talk in relation to the challenges of selfhood that many young men face.

One the first score, this study contributes uniquely in a number of ways. First, to my knowledge, it constitutes the first empirical examination of the sex talk of American boys. The two prior studies that examined boys’ sexual identity through their talk (Frosh et al. 2002; Wight 1994) focused on boys from the United Kingdom. While none of these studies can claim to be representative of adolescent populations in their countries, taken together they suggest that there may be some consistency across age groups (pre-adolescents and adolescents) and cultures in how some boys construct their heterosexual masculinity at the expense of girls and notions of the feminine.

The results described here also contribute substantively to the conversation about orientations to sexuality that has been occurring since the emergence of the scripting perspective of sexuality (Gagnon and Simon 1973). Decades ago, DeLamater (1987) theorized the existence of a number of cultural scenarios or orientations to sexuality, shaped by social institutions, each of which privileged certain sexual scripts over others. In their seminal work, The Social Organization of Sexuality (1994) Laumann and colleagues found empirical support for three of these “normative orientations”—the procreational, relational, and recreational—in their survey results. For instance, agreement with statements like, “My religious beliefs have guided my sexual behavior” and “Same-gender sex is always wrong,” was identified as support for the procreational (or traditional) orientation.

The discourses of sexual decision-making I identified in adolescent males’ talk—piety, relationship, and conquest—clearly have a kinship with these “normative orientations,” but, in my estimation, they offer a productive extension and reframing of the earlier formulation. Whereas Laumann and colleagues used their survey results to provide deductive support for DeLamater’s theorized orientations, I identified the three discourses inductively in the talk of my respondents. Thus, where the normative orientations are abstract and idealistic, targeting expectations related to sexuality that respondents have for themselves and others, the discourses are more experiential. They describe patterned ways of orienting to sexuality articulated in relation to boys’ immediate experience and environments.

This focus on reported lived experience and self-reported attitudes, reaffirms the basic notion that orientations to sex can be fruitfully divided among those informed by religion, by commitment to relationships, and by a notion of sex stripped of religiosity or sentimentality. However, it also suggests that we must recognize that at the micro-social level, these divisions may be framed idiosyncratically. Thus, among the adolescent males with which I spoke, particularly the ones for whom male fraternities appeared influential, the language and meanings they attributed to sex, women, and relationships convinced me that what might otherwise be defined as a “recreational” orientation to sex was better described by the word “conquest.”

In terms of the relationship between “conquest” talk and adolescent identity work, the picture that emerges is not that all boys engage in this sort of bravado all of the time, but that some of them do some of the time. Those who commonly draw on a discourse of sexual decision-making that defines sex in terms of accomplishment find support for this view in friendship groups of like-minded males. These “fraternities” provide a sense of belonging and become a site where boys instruct and encourage one another in the performance of a sexualized masculinity that is often seen as the hegemonic mode among adolescents. In the process, they promote a perspective on females that is sexist, sometimes to the point of misogyny. In addition, they use homophobia and fear of feminization to denigrate those inside and outside of their group who would challenge their particular understandings of sex and manhood.

An obvious limitation of the current study is that I cannot provide documentation of the young men’s friendship groups. I did not have them map their friendship circles or talk about the gender composition of their friendship groups. This omission creates some constraints. I cannot say for certain, for instance, that the guys only talk about sex to other guys they way they talked to me. Some of them may share this sort of talk with female acquaintances or even sex partners. Some may have other groups of male friends in which the sex talk is minimal or of a different sort.

In a strange way, however, this limitation is also one of the study’s strengths, for it offers a reminder of the unique nature of the analysis. The larger project from which this paper emerges is not and never was meant to be a descriptive study of adolescent males’ friendships. It is, instead, a discourse and narrative analysis of adolescent males’ talk. As such, the relevant question is not, “What is the real nature of the male fraternity?” but “How does my respondents’ talk about their friendships relate to their understandings of and professed approaches to sexuality?” From this perspective, the term “male fraternity” describes a complex of rhetorical maneuvers whereby some boys articulate the role of male friendship in their acceptance, sharing, and promotion of a conquest orientation to sex. As has been shown, these boys reference male friends (e.g., “your boys,” “the guys,” “homeboys”)—not mixed-sex groups—and thereby locate both their behaviors and their identities within a supportive, masculine environment. In this way, the fraternities provide a context for other rhetorical moves that advance a conquest orientation, such as objectifying talk about women, the verbal gauntlet of virginity status tests, and the taunt “pussy-whipped.”

The study also is also limited in other ways. The sample is small and, in part because a dropout retrieval high school was a significant source of the convenience sample, youth from lower-income families are over-represented. The sample is too small to support meaningful generalizations about boys’ particular experiences, but the focus of the analysis is talk, not experiences. Given the collective, learned nature of language, I contend that even a small sample can provide insights into the shared rhetorical frames groups use to make meaning. I would not argue, for example, that Alvin’s experience of being provided a prostitute on his 13th birthday is reflective of the experience of many American adolescents. I would assert, however, that where boys’ language around sex has the hallmarks of the conquest orientation, male peer groups are likely to be prominent and likely to shape and constrain boys’ sexual decision-making with rhetorical maneuvers like virginity status tests and concerns about “pussy-whipping.”

All that said, this examination of talk raises important questions about adolescent male heterosexuality because it is first and foremost about the meanings young men attribute to it. Perhaps the most pervasive piece of conventional wisdom relating to male sexuality—adolescent and adult—is that it is a sort of primal force, a drive that is difficult for males themselves, much less anyone else, to stunt or control. In this account, culture is absent; biology rules the day. But the boys speaking here paint a different picture. Theirs is an image of sexuality that is highly—in some cases, even exclusively—social. The competitions for conquests (recalling the Spur Posse” scandal of the early 1990sFootnote 1; Mydans 1993), the insistence that sexuality only be expressed within circumscribed relationships, the collective efforts to “assist” virgins, and the (presumably) extreme case of Alvin, whose cousins essentially made him have sex for the first time, all suggest powerful social forces directing or perhaps supplanting sexual drives. In this way, the move towards heterosexuality looks much less inevitable and much more socially constructed for boys, just as others have argued it may be for girls (Demasi 2003; Martin 2002).

One danger in making this claim, however, is that the pendulum swings completely in the opposite direction and gets stuck. If boys are not motivated to sexuality by primal urges, they must be hapless puppets to the social forces—in this case, particularly, peer pressure—in which they are immersed. While I believe these data support a radically constructionist notion of sexuality, it does not follow that the boys are at the mercy of the discourse they articulate. As much as, say, a conquest orientation may appeal to a young man because he sees sex as means to prove his manhood, he may find himself at odds with other attitudes or ideas advanced by the discourse. For instance, he may have no real relationship with the girl to whom he loses his virginity, yet he may believe that the best context for sex is a loving relationship. A boy in this circumstance will work to reconcile two competing discourses (conquest and relationship) as he constructs a hybrid mode of sexual decision-making (Cohan 2002).

Recognizing that guys have some agency in the face of these discourses, however, does not alter the fact that in many local cultures (Gubrium and Holstein 1997; e.g., high schools) the conquest discourse is dominant and carries with it an association with adult hegemonic masculinity. It also represents a way of orienting to sexuality that contributes to social problems, both directly and indirectly. The current analysis implicates the discourse directly, for instance, in the production of homophobia (in relation to “bad virginity”) and the denigration and sexual subordination of women. A number of indirect connections to social ills may also be posited. To the extent that articulating the discourse reduces males’ sense of investment in the consequences of sex, it may indirectly facilitate unsafe sex or the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. And, to the extent that the discourse provides justifications for sexual competitions between males and renders the female marginal to or unimportant in the sexual “transaction,” it may contribute to coercive or unwanted sexual encounters.

Still, a desire to address the anti-social implications of male fraternities must be tempered, I think, by a recognition that male fraternities provide a context in which boys cope with pressing identity issues. Perhaps the challenge is to explore how male peer groups can be disengaged from the discourse of conquest, so that the positive camaraderie and support are not predicated on sexism and exclusion. Alternatively, it would be helpful to understand how boys distance themselves from male fraternities without being stigmatized or emasculated. Power dynamics within the groups would likely be a key focus of such research, which might follow in the tradition of Donna Eder’s work on language games among adolescents (Eder et al. 1995).

An additional strategy, I think, is to acknowledge the limited range of discourses that young men have available to them. If boys could articulate other discourses of sexual decision-making besides one that threatens to place them in the role of oppressor (conquest), one that seems to condemn them to asceticism (piety) and one that has loose bounds and for which they have few social tools (relationship), they might be more inclined to reject the conquest discourse.