On Wanting and Being Wanted: Sexual Desirability and Its Effects on Men Who Have Sex with Men
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2025
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Melbourne Authors
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Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences
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PhD thesis
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Open Access
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© 2025 Wesley Saint Grey
Abstract
Our sexual desires are purported to be an arena where social forces should not penetrate. Yet who and what we want – what we find sexually desirable – are already influenced by coercive powers. In this thesis, I analyze sexual desirability, its relationship to systems of power, dominance, and discrimination, and three effects that desirability versus undesirability has on men who have sex with men. After introducing sexual desire and desirability in Chapter 1, I show how men who have sex with men (N = 24) define sexual desirability in Chapter 2. Sexual desirability consists of appearance, affect, and behavior, and is shaped distally via systemic, institutional, and interpersonal discrimination, and proximally, via the internalization of these discriminatory sexual logics. In Chapter 3, I analyze how the Melbourne bear community socially constructs sexual desirability. Bears, as fat, hairy, and older men, are sexually marginalized within the gay community, but produce sexual contexts where they are the objects of sexual desire. I show how bears eroticize one another through spectacles of desire which redefine the bear body as sexy. In Chapters 4, 5, and 6, I demonstrate some of the consequences of sexual (un)desirability. In Chapter 4, among Grindr users in Australia (N = 264, T = 13,679), I use experiencing sampling to show that feeling more sexually desirable relates to feeling more satisfied with one’s body, and vice versa. In Chapter 5, also among Grindr users (N = 234, T = 12,162), I show that feeling more masculine (but not more or less feminine) is associated with feeling more sexually desirable, and vice versa. In Chapter 6, I show that feeling sexually undesirable relates to greater concerns about rejecting condomless sex, and that partner desirability predicts greater intentions to have condomless sex, across three experiments (N = 1,459). I find that sexual desirability is both personal and political for men who have sex with men. Hegemonic desirability reproduces social oppression within our sexual desires, which has consequences for the psychological and sexual health of those deemed undesirable. I suggest that sexual desirability is performative rather than a natural, prediscursive trait inherent in some bodies. Undesirability is socially and historically contingent, and functions to make life less liveable. I offer revisions to theories on the social organization of sexuality and pathways for future work on sexual desirability.
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Sexual desirability, Sexual desire, Sexual field theory, Men who have sex with men