‘I help her, she helps me:’ Mexican men performing masculinity through transactional sex

Abstract

Prior research shows that people assert diverse, context-dependent identities through ‘transactional sex’. Focusing on an urban Mexican setting where both companionate partnering and virility are valued, I examine how older, working-class men experiencing erectile difficulty performed masculinity through exchange-mediated liaisons they viewed as friendships dependent on charitable giving rather than prostitution. Contextualizing their experiences with comparative data from a broader study of men’s experiences with erectile difficulty, I argue that the nature of these relationships enabled men to perform the responsibility and virility locally identified with good masculinity, despite life and health problems that threatened their abilities to do so.