‘He's got no game’: young men's stories about failed romantic and sexual experiences

Abstract

This study examined how 12 small groups of young adult male friends (N = 36 participants; ages 18–23) told stories about romantic and sexual experiences. Contrary to the expectation that male friends will boast and brag to one another about their romantic endeavors, the young men's romantic and sexual stories were often about embarrassing romantic and sexual mishaps and gaffes. Like the ‘lovable loser’ laddishness that parades itself in television shows and advertisements, these forays into non-heroic masculinity were cloaked in a knowing irony and self-reflexivity that made it difficult to determine whether their positions were complicit with or resistant to normative masculinity. Critical discursive analyses focus on how positions of failed gamesmanship function in the accomplishment of male homosociality, how a sense of conventionality or ordinariness is re-claimed, and what these processes reveal about the shifting nature of hegemonic masculinity in contemporary culture.

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