Where the boys go: Alix Boirot

An anthropological look at the construction of masculinity in summer

Alix Boirot, Où vont les garçons ? Enquête sur les masculinités en vacances (Editions Les Léonides, 2026)

There's a phrase that anthropologist Alix Boirot claims to have heard thousands of times during her fieldwork on the Costa Brava, in every conceivable tone, from hesitant to boastful: "Are there any girls?" It's uttered almost as soon as the club—its floors, the rooftop, the electronic music—has been described to a group of young men, and it's uttered with the unwavering certainty of someone who knows what's important in life. It took Boirot five years and sixteen months, including three summers working as a tout for a nightclub, to understand a phenomenon that one of her interviewees aptly summarized on the first evening: "We're here to have a drink and some fun, it's not that complicated." The crux of her research is that it is, in fact, complicated—precisely to the extent that it presents itself as simple.

The field researcher as trafficker, or: the unease with one's own subject

Let's begin with the method, because it's part of the findings. For three summers, Boirot worked as a "rabatteuse"—the figure who stands on the sidewalk at night, intercepts groups, makes them laugh, and guides them into a specific club. It is, we learn, the only position in the nightlife industry that combines constant contact, mobility between the street and the club, and a day off for observation. Bartenders don't talk to anyone in the noise of the dance floor; bouncers are meant to be feared, not trusted. The tout, on the other hand, is... is The club's external image – a social position that, as it turns out, is ideally suited for participant observation because it forces the researcher to learn the codes herself. Because to participate, one must know the rules of the game.

Boirot describes with remarkable candor how she initially disliked her subject. She came from the backpacker camp, an identity that, as she knows, is largely constructed through a disdain for package tourism. This aversion, she emphasizes, was not a professional quirk, but a threat to her ability to understand—and it is precisely here that her reflection becomes productive. Following Martina Avanza, who researched the xenophobic Lega Nord without sharing its ideas, and Didier Fassin, who argues that researchers should not conceal their moral judgments but objectify them, Boirot transforms her distance into a tool for understanding. Those who love their subject too much see it poorly; those who despise it too much, see it not at all. The note from the summer of 2017, in which she suddenly finds herself defending a place against young French people who—just as she herself had once done—prematurely judged it, is one of the most honest sentences in the book. Her perspective had shifted, almost without her conscious effort.

And something else shaped the survey: that Boirot was a young woman in a male-dominated party environment. Alone, female, presumed to be heterosexual – that was enough to categorize her as a "sexually available" woman, a category the young tourists readily projected onto all the women present. Their conversations often began with an inquiry into her relationship status, and mentioning her "second hat," that of an anthropologist, was of little help: she was considered not entirely sincere, having come seeking adventure. From this predicament, she drew the most beautiful possible conclusion and began her participant observation of seduction by being observed and seduced herself.

The Factory of Expectation

Before the party becomes an experience, it is a promise. For those arriving, Lloret initially exists only in the imagination—as that "tourist imaginary" described by Rachid Amirou: a bundle of ideas about space, inhabitants, atmosphere, and expected practices, fed by the stories of peers, by marketing, and by amateur videos on social media. This imaginary not only creates the desire for a place, it also shapes subsequent behavior: one goes there to rediscover the images one already had in mind before leaving. The overarching reference point is American Spring Break—a practice that, despite media attention, only affects about ten percent of US college students, but whose visual language, disseminated by MTV in the 1980s, became the international grammar of party tourism.

This grammar is gender-specific from the outset. Boirot analyzes the advertising material of specialized travel agencies using the concept of the "male gaze," which Laura Mulvey introduced into film theory in 1975: women appear not as acting characters, but as icons, cropped for the aesthetic pleasure of a presumed male viewer. John Berger had formulated this a few years earlier, and it applies literally here—men act, women appear; the man looks, the woman observes herself being observed. The posters and promotional videos display precisely this asymmetry: seascapes, crowds—and young women, or at least parts of their bodies. Male figures appear less frequently, almost always in groups, and, unlike the women, almost always as whole persons. The fragmentation of the female body into breast, buttocks, and abdomen is not a stylistic device, but, to use Martha Nussbaum's vocabulary of objectification, the pictorial reduction of a person to instrumentally available parts. A poster that Boirot describes encapsulates the genre: A young man lifts his diving goggles to get a better look at the bikini-clad woman in the foreground; another woman is pulling herself out of the pool from behind. The man in the picture is not merely present; he shapes the gaze—he is the instruction to the viewer on how to see. The advertisement, with a tongue-in-cheek but unmistakable code, sells a paradise for heterosexual men, populated by readily available female objects. It is worth pausing here for a moment: The agency, Boirot emphasizes, is not to blame; it is simply applying the established rules. This is the more unsettling realization—that no mastermind is needed when an entire field breathes the same visual language. Even here, the future tourist is handed a script in which his role is that of the desiring, seizing subject—and with that role comes the expectation that he will fulfill it.

The imaginary is already at work in the preparation phase. In online forums, sixteen-year-olds post requests for a place with "beaucoup de filles!!", and the replies, with the authority of the experienced, confirm that one will "not be disappointed" there. The anthropological interpretation of an inconspicuous object—the condom—is fascinating. Packing it serves a hygienic purpose, but above all, it signals an expectation. One interviewee recalls that sex was never discussed—"but of course we all thought the same thing, after all, we were going to Lloret, and we certainly all took condoms." The self-evidence of this conclusion, the tacit agreement of an entire group, is more revealing than any explicit announcement. Equally telling are the meticulous preliminary negotiations about how to establish the necessary intimacy in the dorm room during a conquest: Who gives up the room? Is there a rotation? Who has priority? This logistics of the hypothetical, as Boirot astutely observes, is less practical than projective—it allows one to dream of future pleasures, much like packing summer clothes in winter brings anticipatory joy. With Erving Goffman, this could be interpreted as "frontstage preparation": long before the performance begins, the props are checked, the role memorized, and promises made to fellow actors. And therein lies the trap. Anyone arriving with a condom and a conquest plan has committed themselves to something before their friends that they will later have to fulfill—the pressure to perform doesn't begin on the first night, but rather while packing their suitcase.

Moderate excess

Those who observe the scene from the outside see anomie: meaningless nights, alcohol as a mask over the emptiness. Boirot reverses this perspective. For the young revelers, she writes, the risk lies not in excess, but in boredom. Drinking, smoking, substances—this is not a romantic challenge to life, but a pragmatic insurance policy against what is most feared: that nothing happens. In her elegant formulation, we are closer to the Soma from Huxley's "Brave New World" than to a drug diary. Having fun is a serious matter, a task that demands time, money, and technical skill. Anthropologically, vacation can be understood as what Victor Turner called the "liminal phase": a threshold state outside the everyday order, in which familiar roles seem suspended and an egalitarian "communitas" of fellow travelers forms. But Turner's point is precisely that the threshold is not a lawless place, but has its own, often stricter rules – and in Lloret the rule is: prove that you belong.

The crucial term here is that of "controlled loss of control," or "calculated hedonism," coined by research on nightlife. What appears to be unbridled revelry is, in fact, carefully framed: one loses control because one believes oneself to be in an environment designed for partying, with pedestrian zones and friends as a safety net. The supposedly boundless freedom is an extremely standardized, even ritualized, freedom. Even the physical evidence of excess becomes pieces of evidence: the empty bottles on the tiled floor, the receipt for shots one doesn't remember taking. And vomit—to which Boirot devotes a remarkable passage—loses its repulsiveness in this context and, with Mary Douglas and Georges Bataille in the background, becomes a trophy of valor, a war wound that testifies to the daring before the test of mass intoxication.

Here, the gender divide becomes apparent for the first time. Many young women in Lloret also drink excessively, participate in drinking contests, and down shots. But for them, total loss of control is significantly less tolerated. Excess without any limit other than that of the body is a tendency leaning towards the masculine – and thus itself a test of character: whoever can hold their liquor the most, lasts the longest, and leaves the most spectacular trail, gains recognition among their friends. What counts as evidence is therefore gendered, and the same intoxication that makes a young man the hero of the night damages a young woman's reputation. It's the classic double standard, translated into the language of empty bottles – a first indication that the same practice is viewed differently depending on gender.

The machine and its hierarchies

Boirot's book is at its strongest when it descends from the imaginary into the machinery. For the atmosphere of the night, it turns out, is not a spontaneous surge of youthful energy, but an industrial product – standardized, segmented, optimized for profit. What the club sells, explains a manager, is not the alcohol (that brings in the money), but "a party experience." And the tout's role is a self-fulfilling prophecy: they advertise a packed club, even though every night starts from scratch. Only when enough groups believe it will be full will it actually be. A nighttime illusionist's play.

This machine reveals what Boirot rightly interprets as an intersectional phenomenon. At the door, the "physio," the physiognomist, decides—a job title that elevates a prosaic activity (remembering faces, recognizing anger) to an almost supernatural intuition. Yet behind this celebrated inspiration lie highly objectifiable criteria. The entrance fee, freely set by the doorman in Lloret, serves both profit maximization and sorting: An unwanted guest—Boirot emphasizes that she has never seen an unwanted female guest—rarely receives a clear "no," but rather an absurdly high price as a gentle rebuff.

The criteria for this sorting are gender, nationality, and skin color. The clubs are segmented by country of origin; one manager describes the system, unperturbed, with the metaphor of a traffic light: green for Northern Europe, orange for the "Latinos" (among whom he includes the French), red for everyone outside Europe. "I don't have a problem with anyone," he adds, "but we're talking business here." The racist selection, as Boirot meticulously documents, is mostly based on price: an entrance fee that cost between six and fifteen euros for young men perceived as white jumped to at least twenty-five euros for racialized individuals. Particularly revealing is the observation of how, when the researcher shows unease, the criterion of race smoothly translates into a criterion of class—the supposedly "too popular" style—while white guests in the same style were admitted without question, and impeccably dressed Black or North African men were turned away.

Herein lies one of the book's most bitter ironies. Young, racialized French people repeatedly return to Lloret precisely because they feel less discriminated against there than at home: "Where I come from, you see a gang of Arabs, and they're immediately afraid. Here, you want to get in, you pay, that's it." The fact that a place of open selection appears as the lesser evil says less about Lloret than about the extent of everyday exclusion in their countries of origin. Boirot resists the temptation to sensationalize the scene and instead exposes how a xenophobic risk management theory—that national and racial homogeneity promises less friction—masquerades as economic common sense.

The staging of virility

And what about masculinity itself? Boirot follows the sociologist Raewyn Connell and conceives of it in the plural, as a "configuration of practices," not as a fixed identity—and always in relation to femininities and to other masculinities that are hierarchically structured. Connell's concept of "hegemonic masculinity" doesn't refer to a character type, but rather a normative position that all men must strive to meet, even those who never attain it: a fluid ideal that exerts its influence precisely through the constant effort to live up to it. This shifts the theoretical emphasis from the question of what a man is to the question of what he must continually do to be considered one. Candace West and Don Zimmerman have termed this "doing gender"—gender not as a quality, but as an ongoing performance rendered to others, which can be judged at any time. Party tourism proves to be a privileged laboratory for precisely this performance, as it concentrates everything that puts masculinity to the test in a confined space and a compressed timeframe: peers as the unavoidable audience, alcohol as a stage prop, desire as the subject of examination. What takes place here is, in Michael Kimmel's terms, a "homosocial enactment": the young men perform their virility far less for the women, who are ostensibly the focus, than for the other men, whose approving or mocking gaze determines rank and belonging. In case of doubt, the woman is less the target than the witness—or, to put it more coldly, the evidence presented to one's buddies.

The most surprising aspect of Boirot's findings is the discrepancy between the hypersexualized imaginary and the rather tame reality. She, too, as she admits, was caught up in the preconceived notion and constantly anticipated sensual scenes. In reality, however, as her questionnaire among the revelers confirms, most find their expectations unmet: few kiss anyone, even fewer sleep with anyone, and the young tourists have no more sex on vacation than in everyday life. What emerges is more an atmosphere of "sexual voyeurism" than of interaction—the simulacrum suffices, as Jean-Didier Urbain wrote about tourist adultery.

The collapse of the myth shakes the self-confidence of many young men—precisely to the extent that masculinity is understood here not as something possessed, but as something that must be constantly proven. Psychological research speaks of "precarious manhood": unlike femininity, which is considered a biographical status, masculinity must be acquired and can be lost at any time, which is why it is under chronic pressure to prove itself. It is therefore revealing how the young men explain their failure. Hardly anyone doubts the belief in the establishment of easy promiscuity; that would mean questioning the very script on which their own role depends. They prefer to blame themselves—too shy, not fluent in the language—or, more often, the women. There is the language barrier, which overlooks the fact that French women are also present and that seduction is more than two or three sentences. There is the “mathematical problem”—eighty men to twenty women—which, almost unnoticed, names the structural truth of these destinations: that the revelers are overwhelmingly heterosexual men, a self-imposed bottleneck in which men primarily encounter other men—the homosocial stage structurally has more actors than spectators. And then, most seriously, there is the reinterpretation of the female “no” as a strategy of domination. In the essentialist role model described by Michel Bozon, man is considered hypersexual by nature, woman as the one who grants or withholds. Male failure thus becomes the woman’s decision not to “grant” her sexuality, and her autonomy is reinterpreted as a hostile tactic. Some believe that simply assuring someone of good intentions is enough to gain consent—and those who, as “nice guys,” feel rejected resort to harassment and insults. The aggression here is not an outburst, but the flip side of the pressure: where masculinity is measured by success and success fails to materialize, the woman who refuses becomes the one to blame for the impending loss of status.

Here Boirot draws the sharpest line of her book. Seduction is permeated by power dynamics, and it endangers young women far more than men because both possible paths are fraught with danger for them. Those who engage in sex risk their reputation, especially if the encounter ends quickly—even if they weren't the ones who ended it. Those who refuse expose themselves to the harassment of someone who considers himself a good boy and won't take no for an answer. The male performance, the masking of overwhelming desire in front of their peers, is a matter of status for men; for women, it's a matter of safety.

What remains

Boirot's merit lies in having taken seriously a phenomenon that almost everyone either glorifies or despises – and both are ways of looking the other way. She shows that beneath the feigned carefree attitude, a ritualized phase of masculinity construction is taking place, in which power relations and commonplace violence are practiced. Party tourism, seemingly pure collective communion, organizes both the social interactions and the rejection: sexual, racial, and class-based.

What distinguishes the anthropologist's perspective is her refusal to caricature those involved. The young men asking for "girls to pick up" are not monsters, but actors in a script they didn't write, the costs of which are unequally distributed. What Boirot makes visible throughout the entire investigation is precisely this pressure: masculinity here is not something one possesses, but something one must constantly perform, prove, and defend against the fear of failure—before the eyes of other men and at the expense of the women, who are reduced from target to mere witness and from subject to evidence. The pimps, the bouncers, the residents with their emotional woundedness at a city that, in the outsider's view, shrinks into an interchangeable, cheap backdrop—they all populate a choral narrative in which no one possesses the whole truth. Perhaps that is the real point of that interviewee from the first evening who claimed it was all "not that complicated." It's actually not complicated – as long as you refuse to look closely. The moment you do, anthropology begins.