Masculinity is often treated as an identity men naturally possess.

Emmanuel Reynaud instead approaches it as an institution: a system of bodily discipline, emotional amputation and social reward through which boys are produced as men. “Virility” becomes holy because society shields it from examination, treating dominance, heterosexuality, aggression and bodily hardness not as learned demands but as evidence of an underlying male nature.

Reynaud moves through religion, sexuality, labour, military culture, clothing and the male relationship to the body, arguing that masculinity depends upon a mutilating division of human capacities. Men are cut off from qualities assigned to women, then encouraged to desire, possess or punish women as embodiments of what they have been taught to disown. Its analysis of clothing, bodily shame and the instability of sex categories gives the book an unusual reach for work first published in 1981: it understands masculinity not merely as privilege, but as a precarious performance maintained through prohibition.

Compact, polemical and strikingly early within masculinity studies, Holy Virility belongs to the radical feminist tradition that examined patriarchy as a structure reproduced through ordinary habits rather than simply individual prejudice. Translated from the French by Ros Schwartz, it remains valuable both as a historical document and as a severe account of the violence required to make gender appear natural. 

First English edition, Pluto Press, 1983. Paperback; moderate cover wear and rubbing, with lightly marked and toned pages. Sound copy.