Towards supporting a healthy masculine sexuality : utilising mainstream male health policy and masculinity theory

Males with intellectual and developmental disability may make unconventional socio-sexual decisions; their attempts at sexual expression can be read as inappropriate and therefore often result in adverse outcomes, sanctions, and strong responses that often deny basic human rights. Further, strategies and interventions aimed at male health screening are either overlooked or are second-order issues for caregivers. Exacerbating this reality is that the disability support system lacks the policies, knowledge, skills, and resources in how to support a healthy masculine sexuality. Missing from the conversation is a support framework to equip those who can be sexually autonomous, with the tools to support those who can't. We need to determine how all men with intellectual disability can make fulfilling, supported socio-sexual decisions, achieve optimal sexual health, and can attain positive, healthy, and masculine sexual expression. The proposed approach to research" leveraging from the momentum created by a male health policy and emergent developments in masculinity theory to engage with the mainstream" will shine an informed and pragmatic light on an issue that has been problematised, very often being resolved in a legal and/or medical context, and thus meeting the needs of everyone but the man himself. The status quo is an institutional and professional deficit in knowing how to support men with intellectual and developmental disability to develop a healthy masculine sexuality.