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This paper explores how women think about men's bodies as objects of desire. It reports on one part of a larger qualitative study on men's bodywork practices in contemporary Australia. Drawing on material from three focus groups with 24 Australian women of varying ages, sexual orientations and backgrounds, the paper considers how women experience, understand and reflect on their desire for men and men's bodies. It also explores themes such as the connection women draw between what a man's body looks like and what it can do, how attraction is experienced, the meaning making women engage in as they think about men and men's bodies, and the broader politics of sexuality and objectification that inform their perceptions and ideas. These experiences are set against ideas in post-feminist thinking on women's sexual desire and debates on their sexual empowerment. The paper argues that these women are grappling with tensions between their personal experiences of sexual objectification and a feminist ethics relating to their active and reflexive projects of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse interview data on how alcohol policy stakeholders in Australia, Canada and Sweden understand the relationship between men, masculinities, alcohol and violence. Using influential feminist scholarship on public policy and liberal political theory to analyse interviews with 42 alcohol policy stakeholders, we argue that while these stakeholders view men's violence as a key issue for intervention, masculinities are backgrounded in proposed responses and men positioned as unamenable to intervention. Instead, policy stakeholders prioritise generic interventions understood to protect all from the harms of men's drinking and violence without marking men for special attention. Shared across the data is a prioritisation of interventions that focus on harms recognised as relating to men's drinking but apply equally to all people and, as such, avoid naming men and masculinities as central to alcohol-related violence. We argue that this process works to background the role of masculinities in violence, leaving men unmarked and many possible targeted responses unthinkable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have explored how young gay men negotiate opportunities for rethinking sexual and relationship life associated with gay sexual cultures upon coming out. Drawing on qualitative interview data with Australian gay men aged 18–30, this article explores a tension these participants described between a desire for monogamy as the basis to a committed, enduring and mature relationship on one hand, and sexual opportunities associated with ‘the gay scene’ on the other. We analyse these men's negotiation of this tension in the context of wider political shifts in the social status of gay men's relationships, encapsulated in a debate between those who see ‘homonormativity’ and those who see transformation in the contemporary relationship practices of gay men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The certainties that characterized modern intimate life, and supported a hegemonic male sexuality defined by action and virility, are less present in contemporary men's intimate lives. In-depth interviews with ten heterosexual and gay men were conducted to explore how they organize their sexual and relational lives in contemporary Australia. Participants were committed to a "late" modern notion of intimacy characterized by reciprocity, and placed emphasis on committed relationships where opportunities to disclose vulnerability and relinquish the burden of responsibility for sexual activity were present. However, casual sex appeared to be ordered by more conventional discourses related to male sexuality. These men reveal the importance of particular definitions of sexual intimacy to a meaningful sense of self in late modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Psychological and health science research has identified a disparate experience of body image dissatisfaction among gay men (particularly in relation to heterosexual men), and have theorised that this reflects an emphasis placed on physical appearance in gay male settings. However, these studies largely fail to reflect upon the centrality of the body in securing a visible gay identity, or upon discourses of the nature, appearance and expression of gay identity in a historical and social context. Similarly, sociologically informed work has tended to emphasise gay men's paradoxical relationship—dependant upon and desirous of—heterosexual masculinity as the foundation for this emphasis. Drawing on a concept of "reflective embodiment," interviews with four gay men are conducted to demonstrate how each negotiates an athletic, muscular body ideal with reference to understandings of masculinity, pride, and gay sexuality as a way of complicating these theorizations and injecting a discussion of subjectivity into this issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]