ABSTRACT
The virility of the “male” is perceived as that by which it is possible to measure up to each other “man to man”. People with disabilities are often placed in an intermediate status between children and adults, as if we expected them to recognise their inability to have a “serious” form of sexuality, marking their sexual identity. Masculinity–virility intervenes therein not in the sense of sex, as a descriptive concept, but in the sense of gender, which is an evaluative and prescriptive notion: “being a man” means having to show muscle power, strength, daring, or even aggressiveness. Virility places individual masculine identity within the dimension of social gender and its attributes. This issue can thus be seen to affect all men, not just physically disabled man, supposedly devoid of virility. Virility, as an attribute of one’s personal identity and in its power of seduction, is not based, as some common misrepresentations would have it, on a bodily condition.
