Romanticizing the Crudity of Sex
Gnosticism, courtly love, and hypermodern disenchantment.
We tell stories about everything, including sex and romantic love, to avoid confronting some harsh truths. We’ve always done so, and we still do despite the relatively recent ideal of scientific objectivity.
The question is whether any of the uplifting fictions we live by are honorable as well as reassuring.
Animistic and Patriarchal Rationalizations of Natural Obligations
For many millennia there was no culture of romantic love. The pair bond evolved to support the mother’s onerous job of having to carry and give birth to encephalitic, helpless infants who needed to be socialized for an extended period. Stone Age mothers couldn’t have done so alone in the wild, so the clan learned to empathize, and mothers and fathers felt a rush of warm emotions for each other.
But the first religious stories about love would have been animistic celebrations of how natural processes seemed to the nomadic hunter-gatherers. Later, when people settled down in civilizations that allowed for greater social specialization and for class divisions, sex and love were governed by patriarchy and by religious myths which protected that prejudice.