ABSTRACT
In Victorian statements such as ‘the more spiritual love of a woman will refine and temper the more sensual love of a man’ (Calcar 1886:47), the sensual love and carnal desires of women are hardly acknowledged, if at all. Such statements typify an ideal of love that is as passionate as it is exalted and desexualized (cf. Stearns 1994), with a rather depersonalized sexuality as a drawback and outlet for his ‘wild’ sensuality behind the scenes of social life. Although in the twentieth century a ‘sexualization of love’ and an ‘erotization of sex’ (Seidman 1991)1 have continued, until the second half of this century the dominant social code regarding the sexuality of women and men continued to represent a lust-dominated sexuality for men and a complementary (romantic) love or relationship-dominated sexuality for women. This ‘traditional lust balance’ was attacked in the 1950s, when the topic of female sexual pleasure and gratification gained considerable importance in sexual advice literature. Especially from the 1960s on, the sexual longings of all women, including the ‘respectable’ and the unmarried, could openly be acknowledged and discussed. Then, for the first time, women themselves actively took part in public discussions about their carnal desires and sought a more satisfactory relationship between the longing for sexual gratification and the longing for enduring intimacy (love, friendship)—a more satisfying lust balance. These longings are inter-connected, but not unproblematically. Today, some people (mostly men) even view them as contradictory. In any case, changes in individuals’ codes and ideals as well as changes in public morality regarding sex and love have coincided with rising tensions between the two types of longing. From the 1960s on, topics and practices such as premarital sex, sexual variations, unmarried cohabitation, fornication, extramarital affairs, jealousy, homosexuality, pornography, teenage sex, abortion, exchange of partners, paedophilia, incest and so on, all part of a wider process of informalization, implied repeated confrontations with the traditional lust balance. As studies into the connection and the tension between love and sex are rare, while historical studies into this area are even harder to find,2 what follows is an‘essay’. It is an attempt at sketching a coherent picture of these social and psychic changes
within and between the sexes, and to unfold a perspective that is inherent in the concept of the lust balance. This concept is taken from Norbert Elias, who used it in a wider sense, indicating the whole ‘lust economy’ (1994:456-519). Here, the concept is used to focus on the relationship between sex and love, a ‘balance’ that is perceived to be polymorphous and multidimensional (just as in Elias’s concepts of a power balance and a tension balance): the attempt to find a satisfying balance between the longing for sex and the longing for love may be complicated by many other longings; for instance, by the longing to raise one’s social status or by the longing for children.
