ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 addresses the enduring problem of love and violence. Drawing on single sex male focus group discussions, the chapter explores teenage boys’ knowledge of and complicity in masculine domination within heterosexual relationships. The chapter focuses on love-as-force to illustrate the paradoxical position through which desire for comfort and companionship sits uncomfortably with male violence and female subordination. Teenage boys construct meaning in relationships while negotiating wider social conditions that make them vulnerable. These vulnerabilities shape and inform destructive relationship dynamics as, for example, through whoonga boys. Drug use by whoonga boys is connected to socio-economic marginalisation, chronic unemployment and male weakness. Violent heterosexual relationships are a means for disempowered men to claim power. However, while teenage boys accommodate some dominant forms of masculinity, they resist the construction of love-as-force. Resistant masculinity, where teenage boys articulate the importance of caring in relationships, thus emerges from the very social conditions that create vulnerability in gender relations. Their ideals of love are based on girls’ freedom and agency. These alternate pathways to creating their notions of masculinity are juxtaposed and situated in a vision of love where resistant masculinity is only imaginable through ideals of income security, family stability and middle-class values.
