Towards an integration of Lust and Love? Eroticisation and Sexualisation since the 1880s

Abstract

In this paper I seek to understand recent changes in romantic and sexual relations of young people from an historical perspective. It focuses on the emancipation of women and young people since the1880s, a moment when social codes dominating the relations between women and men, girls and boys, parents and children, changed towards greater leniency, conceptualised as informalisation. From this perspective, the paper sketches how the success of young people and women in escaping from under the wings of respectively parents, men and husbands, has coincided with an emancipation of their sexuality. As individuals and collectively, women and young people increasingly became sexual objects as well as sexual subjects: in processes of trial and error they increasingly learned to cope with sexual longings, both with those of others directed at themselves and with their own sexual longings. In these processes, they directed themselves both to the established codes and to their internalised codes about how to connect and integrate sex and love – that is, to connect sexual and relational intimacy. These codes were changing as women and young people became emancipated, thus propelling subsequent attempts at finding a more gratifying and enduring lust-balance between sexual pleasure and relational fulfilment. These changes manifested themselves in subsequent spurts of sexualisation and eroticisation. The paper sketches significant moments in these processes and ultimately raises the question ‘Where are we now?’ A tentative answer to this question is unfolded as a theory about why love has become more difficult, lasting love in particular.