Grammaire essentielle du francais

This is a book about men who love women. But it is not a collection of love stories. It is a study of the secret, erotic fantasies that men have always kept hidden, a taboo-shattering investigation that reveals the deepest, most conflicting feelings that men have about women, men and their own sexuality.

Men in Love goes beyond the socio-sexual cliché of woman seen as either madonna or whore to reveal the conflict of love and rage at the centre of men’s emotions and erotic desires. Based on thousands of candid responses from men ranging from their teens to their sixties, Men in Love – startling and shocking – will change men’s deepest feelings about their sexuality and make the women who care about them understand them as never before.

In this book Paul Willis, a renowned sociologist and ethnographer, aims to renew and develop the ethnographic craft across the disciplines. Drawing from numerous examples of his own past and current work, he shows that ethnographic practice and the ethnographic imagination are vital to understanding the creativity and irreducibility of experience in all aspects of social and cultural practice.

Willis argues that ethnography plays a vital role in constituting ‘sensuousness’ in textual, methodological, and substantive ways, but it can do this only through the deployment of an associated theoretical imagination which cannot be found simply there in the field. He presents a bold and incisive ethnographically oriented view of the world, emphasizing the need for a deep-running social but also aesthetic sensibility. In doing so he brings new insights to the understanding of human action and its dialectical relation to social and symbolic structures. He makes original contributions to the understanding of the contemporary human uses of objects, artefacts and communicative forms, presenting a new analysis of commodity fetishism as central to consumption and to the wider social relations of contemporary societies. He also utilizes his perspective to further the understanding of the contemporary crisis in masculinity and to cast new light on various lived everyday cultures – at school, on the dole, on the street, in the Mall, in front of TV, in the dance club.

This book will be essential reading for all those involved in planning or contemplating ethnographic fieldwork and for those interested in the contributions it can make to the social sciences and humanities.