Sex Liberalization and Liberation of the Female: Implications for Romantic Love

Abstract

This study explores the effect of recent liberalization of sex attitudes and liberation of the female upon perceptions and conceptions of roman tic love. In short, have changing sex attitudes and equalization of the sexes led to a diminution of romantic love as an integral part of heterosexual relations? What is happening to romantic love in an age of sex and sexual revolution? Romantic love has historically been the subject of much prose and poetry. Few writers have been able to resist the temptation to describe it or sing its praises. Goode (1959:38-41) points up that: For obvious reason, the printed material on love is im mense . . . Poetic, literary, erotic, pornographic: By far the largest body of all literature on love views it as a sweeping ex perience. The poet arouses our sympathy and empathy. The essayist enjoys, and asks the reader to enjoy, the interplay of people in love. The storyteller ? Bocaccio, Chaucer, Dante ? pulls back the curtain of human souls and lets the reader watch the intimate lives of others caught in an emotion we all know. Others ? Vatsyayana, Ovid, William IX Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, Marie de France, Andreas Capellanus ? have written how-to-do-it books, that is, how to conduct oneself in love relations, to persuade others to succumb to one's love wishes, or to excite and satisfy one's sex partner. Decades ago, Willard Waller defined romantic love as idealized passion which developed from the inhibitions of sexual impluse (1938:189-92). The emotional and ideational context of romantic fervor was said to grow with the frustrations of sexual desire. Havelock Ellis has referred to a cycle of tumescence and detumescence. Courtship was described as the stage of the cycle connected with tumescence whereby sexual tensions were increased by a variety of secondary stimuli. Marriage represented the stage of detumenscence where the sexual ten sions were relieved under socially approved circumstances (Merril, 1959:43-44). Malinowski and others noted that where sexual freedom