Virility and male discourses: a “new man” for brazilian society

Abstract This article explores how the idea of virility was established through masculinist discourses present in the magazine Playboy Brazil in the 1980s; and how these discourses helped to create a new pattern of masculinity. Through a qualitative approach that emphasizes the importance of the information generated from a careful and critical look at the written sources, the journal’s columns and articles are revisited from the perspective of the discourse analysis proposed by M. Foucault, with a view to apprehending how the social subjects presented by the journal are constituted. The results show that the magazine spread a new ideal of virility that directly affected the sexuality and masculinity of the so-called “new man”.