Article @ New Humanist, published 29 June 2023

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.

Read the rest of this article in NewHumanist.org.uk