Courtly Love, Modernized

It used to be called courtly love. Now it’s a felony.

As noted yesterday, courtly love arose during the Middle Ages at the time of the crusades. It was a ritualized seduction, conducted by married women in relation to underage males. In principle, according to the poetry that the young men, called troubadours, wrote, the relationships were never consummated.

As the old saying goes, if you believe that,  you will believe anything.

Now, the important point is that courtly love was an important step toward courtship. Keep in mind that marriages back in the day were invariably arrangements. What we call courtship or dating did not become common practice until after the Protestant Reformation. It was an outgrowth of courtly love.

One understands, because one has previously speculated about it, that when Luther and his followers were excommunicated in the early sixteenth century, they were free to marry. And yet, they had very little to offer a prospective spouse. They did not have wealth, status, prestige or power.

What was left? Obviously, they could only offer love. Thus did romantic love become a staple of the marital estate. As for courtship leading to marriage, it was manifest in Shakespeare's high comedies, in the late sixteenth century, but very rarely before that.

In the meantime, relations between older experienced women and younger adolescent boys did not exactly go out of style.

They are alive and well in today’s America. Why, just last week, a half dozen young women were busted for engaging in carnal relations with high school boys, that is, with boys who were around 16 or 17 years old. Naturally, this has not exactly provoked a gale of outrage. These young women, most of whom are, dare I say, comely, do not look like rapists. Calling what they have done rape, as our gender neutered legal system has it, feels like a bit of a stretch.

Prosecuting an attractive twenty something female for hooking up with a seventeen year old male feels like an exaggeration, forced on all of us by the failure to distinguish between males and females, by our failure to understand that the relationships are incommensurate.

Anyway, it has usually been the case that young men who engage in carnal relations with older women are doing it for educational value. They are learning how to make love with women. You might or might not consider this a social good, but one fails to see how said teenagers have been traumatized, their lives ruined, by such casual encounters.

Of course, if the genders had been reversed, the acts would have been quite different. And the level of exploitation would have been manifest. A female who was seduced by a teacher would most likely have believed that she was involved in a relationship. A teenage boy, not so much.

Nowadays, women have been liberated. They have been freed from the rules that define dating and courtship. They have even chosen to express their sexuality as they see fit. It might not be the best thing, but it does not come down to us from the moon.

Unfortunately, the legal system seems hellbent on repressing the raw vitality of female sexuality. And, as you might imagine, feminists far and wide have been silent about all of it. It’s a cold day when feminists, who began their crusade by promoting the free expression of female sexuality, have been struck dumb over this modern version of courtly love.

So that you can better appreciate the horrors these high school boys were subjected to, here are some mug shots of the offending females.

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