This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 4:29 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Today we may see indiscriminate mating as immoral and crude, but it was necessary for the preservation of the species under primitive conditions of life. The larger the gene pool from which an offspring emerged, the more likely he was to possess adaptive potentialities. When, by chance, “bad” genes (that is, those transmitting characteristics not favorable to survival in a particular environment) were inherited from mother or father, the offspring usually did not survive for long, so there was a tendency for these characteristics not to be perpetuated.
Another factor must have entered the picture at some point many thousands of years ago. Changing atmospheric and soil conditions made possible the advent of tall grasses; shelter and food became more available within a given geographical area, and with the domestication of animals and especially with the acquisition of control over fire, a “camp” could be maintained for relatively long periods of time.
Consider now in a speculative fashion the kind of organization which such circumstances might require. Women tied down by childbirth and child rearing would be likely to remain close to the camp. Men would hunt but return to the camp, either at nightfall (for protection and warmth) or after longer periods of hunting. Individuals would begin to have for their neighbors, though to a lesser extent, the kind of feeling that a mother has for her child. People would be regarded as belonging in one of two categories-those whom one knew and those whom one didn’t know. The latter probably were killed whenever possible, but gradually larger groups collected where the land would support them. And as their numbers increased, people found it necessary to develop tolerance for one another.
About this time, speech probably developed. The utterance of vocal noises appears to have evolved as one method available to primitive man for finding his camp and identifying his own kind. Thus, the rudiments of human speech probably derived from crude calls which identified the location of the camp and gradually came to indicate danger or success in hunting by varying inflections of tonality. Differences in vocalization also distinguished one tribe from another, and probably promoted a developing sense of clan membership.
As long as society remained primitive, the relationship between married male and female was a practical one: the family unit was a unit for physical survival. Almost everyone in it had to work long and hard. A male and a female who became partners and had children normally had greater chances for survival and more advantages than they would have had if they had stayed alone. The first young children were a survival liability, but as they grew up the original “couple” became a group-with all of its members participating in the survival activities. “Love” was not important. In primitive vocabularies there was no word for “love.”
It was not until the Middle Ages that the word “love” (in the sense in which it is used today) became current. Communities developed under the protection of the nobles in their great castles. The lady of a castle assumed the same prestigious position as her husband, the lord. Other people did the work, but the lady of the castle had leisure time to learn to read and practice the arts. Usually she was more educated than her husband, and if she had duties, they were light and principally administrative. Having so much spare time, she often became egocentric, and she began to adorn herself.
She also became bored.
When the Crusades began in the eleventh century, many of the nobles went off to war, leaving their wives at home. The men who did not go on the Crusades tried to amuse the ladies; they wooed them usually with extramarital sex in mind. During this period there arose the phenomenon of the troubadour, usually a noble, who went from castle to castle to entertain. These troubadours sang songs and ballads about “romance” to entertain the lady of the castle.
There is much literature that suggests that sex outside of marriage became the fashion with these ladies. Probably these married women were the aggressors and initiators in these sex activities. The women were bored. They were intellectually and artistically superior to their husbands, and probably resented the inferior, nonproductive position into which they had been forced by a male-dominated society. Extramarital passion was defined by them as “love.”
These ladies of the Middle Ages, in their excessive leisure, gathered into groups called Courts of Love, which defined the current rules and traditions of “love.”
