SEX IN HISTORY

SEX AT THE TIME OF ULYSSES

Another element that comes into play is the very nature of the sentiment of love. We are used to considering our amorousness as peculiar to humanity at all times, but this isn't so. Romantic love is a modern concept, like the dishwasher and the telephone.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, for example, we don't find a single word about love as 'falling in love'. We find seduction, betrayal, desire, but there is no romantic love. Penelope is a faithful woman in a heroic way to Ulysses, but she is not madly in love.
Penelope is faithful because this is her social role as a wife, her honour. Likewise Hector goes to his death to follow his sense of honour. Primitive societies think of the individual as a single person - with doubts, feelings, and afflictions.

Humanity doesn't begin to tell of men and women who act under the thrust of their personal impulses until Shakespeare who invents romantic love between Romeo and Juliet and sings of their sentiment that renders the song of birds wonderful.
I am not saying that before then nobody was in love. I simply mean that falling in love was unknown as a 'cultural phenomenon' within society, just like today the period between love at first sight and the relationship in crisis remains unknown.

A large number of our difficulties in love relationships stem from the fact that they are new problems, which our ancestors never dealt with seriously.
These problems didn't exist in the past at all, since the function of marriage was never the search for and the development of mutual pleasure. The purpose of marriage was economical and social. Life as a couple was the first level of the organization of work.
Man specializes in the production of goods; woman in the production of services. In this way, humanity has been able to increas its productive capabilities enormously.

The idea of pleasure in life as a couple is the offspring of post-war leisure time, of the 8 hour day, of the mechanization of work, and of weekends. When people worked 12 hours a day and did everything with muscle power, they were so tired at night that the only pleasure was to eat and sleep. At most, a quickie. They had neither the time or the energy to ask themselves if there was true love. The idea of divorce was a rich man's idea. It is only recently that the idea of "finding someone with whom to live happily" has developed.

Well... what prevents us from finding a solution?
Essentially nothing. If your relationship with someone grows and you enjoy yourselves, there won't be an Inquisition that will persecute you or accuse you of witchcraft. At most, they will envy you.