The patriarchal imaginary of romantic love was used in the 19th century to naturalize the sexual division of labor typical of industrial capitalism. According to this discourse, love steers sexuality towards the human relation par excellence that is marriage and, in doing this, dignifies sexuality by putting procreation at the service of God and Country. In the 20th century, Brazilian middle classes still believed that, without putting feminine sexuality under control, the changes brought forth by Modernity would cause social chaos. Since the 1970s, under the influence of women’s movements and feminisms, women’s sexuality became again an issue of social concern in Brazil; furthermore, women’s right to enjoy pleasure without risking pregnancy was hotly debated. In this context of controversy, it is possible to find in some literary texts signs of how the crisis of women unsatisfied with a conventional bourgeois marriage necessarily caused the crisis of heteropatriarchal masculinity, given that the wives’ desire of exploring their erogeneity questions the foundations of the imaginary with which the husbands define and practice their masculinity. A queer reading of these texts – a reading against the grain – allows us to perceive the signs of the Macho Man’s symbolic agony, brought about by the injury inflicted on his masculinity by the emergence of feminisms and women’s movements.