There are three possible reasons that could be proffered for sexuality being so closely associated with male status. To the extent that sexuality was associated with the socio-economic status of powerful men, it retained its association with power and status even when the connection was less strong. Serial sexuality is attractive to men of all classes because, if access to women is restricted, it functions as a sign of the man’s status – of victory over other men. Male competitiveness, validation, and status were channeled through the realm of sexuality. For men, sexuality was a mark of status in terms of the capacity to compete with other men in securing the attention of the female sex: “Women provide heterosexual men with sexual validation, and men compete with each other for this.”69 Furthermore, men transferred to sex and sexuality the control they had formerly held in the household, and sexuality became the realm within which they could express and display their authority and their autonomy. Detachment in sexuality came to signal and organize the broader trope of autonomy and control, and, thus, of masculinity. Emotional detachment could be viewed as a metaphor for masculine autonomy, which the separation between sex and marriage had encouraged. Finally, through sex, men both competed with and forged bonds with other men by casting women’s bodies as the object of male solidarity.70 In other words, sexual freedom made sexuality a site for the exercise and display of masculinity for men whose status in the three arenas of work, home, and male sociability had been eroded: it transformed sexuality into status. If sex for men was a way to display their status and to bond with other men, the demise of men’s control over the household and of their autonomy in the workplace resulted in a sexuality that was hypertrophied, in that it merged and expressed at once the three aspects of masculinity as status: authority, autonomy, and solidarity.