A recent YouGov poll asked Britons about their “love language”. The survey referred to US author Gary Chapman’s concept of the “five love languages,” which are summarised as quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service and touch. To most British men and women, praise and time together were the preferred ways to feel loved by their partners. But some of the results were strikingly gendered. Over 20 per cent of men placed utmost importance on physical touch, while only 7 per cent of women cared about it. The figures were practically flipped when it came to acts of service, considered to be “helping” or doing those little things that make someone’s life easier.
The poll, while not straightforwardly pernicious, is nonetheless problematic. The idea of “love languages” is a piece of pop psychology, rather than a scientific phenomenon. The results reinforce the idea that, when it comes to love, men value sex, while women value atonement.
Historian Eleanor Janega is concerned about the way concepts such as “love languages” are being co-opted. “We’re seeing a lot of reactionary ideas come to the forefront and a real pushing of the idea that women are first and foremost baby machines, and that we exist in this biological capacity where we are always and for ever at a kind of disadvantage to men,” Janega said at the 2 March launch of her latest book, The Once and Future Sex.
Misogynist propagandists like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate often push this notion that women are naturally nurturing and subdued beings, corrupted by feminist ideology. Men, in turn, are instinctive, corporeal creatures. In response, Janega decided to do a “real deep-dive, historical look at gender”, reminding us all that its perceived natures and assigned duties are blatantly socially constructed.
For this, she turned to a historic period that is relatively unexamined when it comes to the female perspective, let alone when related to sex and desire. The Once and Future Sex explores the ways in which women were seen in the course of the roughly 1,000 years we call the Middle Ages. Between the fifth and 15th century, the book shows, women weren’t seen as inherently frigid homebodies or delusional romantics. As Janega puts it, “the majority of recorded European history thinks that women are innately sex-crazed.” Similarly, her research shows how the great majority of women in the Middle Ages worked outside the home, in the fields, as shop- or innkeepers, as midwives or maids, or in the many industries and crafts of the period.
Women were also not seen as exceptional when holding jobs, even when married with children. In fact, those who could proficiently run household or business accounts and manage staff were understood as assets and better wives. The Once and Future Sex is peppered with such examples and anecdotes, helping us not only humanise our foremothers, but also remember how profoundly historically contextual our ideas of women are. With stories like that of the 15th-century London wool merchant Rose of Burford, who upon her husband’s death continued running the business and even settled fiscal arrangements with the crown, or of her French contemporary Christine de Pizan, the court author who wrote the “equivalent of a medieval best seller”, The Book of the City of Ladies, Janega spurs you on until the final page.
Her conclusion is that, while those 1,000 years are indeed the pillars upon which western societies are built, medieval people and their thoughts are not transposable to our times, nor can they possibly serve as illustration to contemporary sexist tropes. On the contrary, as Janega writes, “seeing the past and rejecting it allows us to imagine new futures and make the changes that are necessary to create a more equitable world.”
It is in the spirit of creating a more equitable world that journalist Sophie K. Rosa’s debut book Radical Intimacy is written. With great diligence, Rosa goes about exploring the ways in which our socioeconomic system robs us of authentic and liberatory intimacy. The book explores alternative narratives for love and intimacy, reporting on the communities who have over the last century proven that there is life beyond the mainstream norms – not only when it comes to romance and family, but also wider issues like death and home ownership, friendship, care and solidarity.
It’s an ambitious book by a great reporter, and the research is exhaustive: from the Gay Liberation Front London communes of the 1970s to today’s Campaign for Psych Abolition, fighting against the incarcerating and often punitive nature of psychiatric care. But one keeps wanting to hear Rosa’s voice through the beautifully woven stats and quotes. While the introduction feels like a rousing call to arms, the rest of the book reads like a collection of journalistic pieces.
Despite their very different topics, Janega and Rosa’s books work well in tandem. Where one confronts misinformed tropes with the real lives of women living 500 years ago, the other shows us that there is nothing inevitable about patriarchal or heteronormative relations: we are living side by side with the alternatives.
Both prove vital reading in a world struggling for palliative answers and often resorting to regressive ideologies. Both provide hope. And both prove how women do not uniformly fit into the boxes provided by pseudo-scientific theories like the five love languages. Women have been sex workers, sole landowners, squatters, carers, artists, asexual, bisexual, queer or not identifying as women at all. And all these people, past and present, have experienced moments of authenticity and moments of intimacy – not just in spite of, but often because of, their idiosyncrasies.
Eleanor Janega's "The Once and Future Sex" is published by W. W. Norton & Company
Sophie K. Rosa's "Radical Intimacy" is published by Pluto Press
This piece is from the New Humanist summer 2023 edition. Subscribe here for access to the full magazine.
