Some thoughts on the traditional context of romance, marriage, and sexuality (Part One)
By Mark Wegierski
web posted November 24, 2025
Despite such exotica as one, currently-existing, tiny African tribe where male homosexuality predominates, Margaret Mead's imaginative reconstruction of life in Polynesia, the hypothetical existence of matriarchal societies for 30,000 years of human prehistory, the deliberate misinterpretation of the anthropological meaning of societies that are matrilineal or where various goddesses are worshipped, and various gruesome non-Western customs such as widow-burning and female circumcision, there can be perceived a rather similar "traditional" approach to sexuality throughout very many human societies. Some of the actual main divisions in "traditional" approaches are between those societies centered on monogamy, and those which permit polygamy; between those societies that frown on cousin-marriage, and those that permit it; and those where purely romantic love is more usual than "arranged marriages" -- as opposed to those where "arranged marriages" are the norm. Prostitution in various forms has obviously existed in virtually every society, with its own hierarchies and stratification, but it was at virtually no point a part of any kind of radical "sexual radicalization" of society. There was certainly the presence of children born out of wedlock – but we know from modern statistics, for example, that the rate of illegitimate births for African-Americans in the 1960s was roughly equivalent, if not slightly less in fact, than that of whites today.
The various interactions of the sexes in traditional societies, and the various types of sexual issues permeating those societies, often appear extremely remote, from our current-day standpoint of late modern society. In fact, even such comparatively recent periods such as the Victorian Age and the 1950s, appear to be becoming increasingly remote to us. (There was, for example, a recent scholarly book published by the University of Toronto Press looking with obvious derision at a major British newspaper's debate about what were supposedly the main options for women in Victorian times: "marriage vs. celibacy." Today, the ethos of earlier societies, must, as Nietzsche noted, often strike the typical, late modern person as "simply mad.") Among the few earlier existing societies which appear to have a real resonance to our own in terms of sexual issues are those of Ancient Greece (because of its apparent toleration of male and female homosexuality), and that of certain eras of Ancient Rome (because of the apparent analogy to our own, Western decadence). While not wishing to get into a long discussion of homosexuality in Ancient Greece, it could be pointed out that the various Greek city-states were clearly, in virtually every other aspect of their existence, ultra-traditional by most Twentieth-Century standards. Some have suggested that homosexuality among the Ancient Greeks was virtually "pro-social" – apparently existing without the antinomian, deconstructionist edge of most, current-day, gay activism. As for Ancient Rome, its legendary sexual decadence may have been of somewhat less intensity and duration than is suggested in some popular movies. It is also somewhat ironic that what was probably the height of Roman decadence under Caligula and Nero occurred almost precisely when the Empire was at its strongest. While not wishing to get into a debate about the causes of the Fall of Rome, it would be ridiculous to try to blame it on one specific vice. There can be little doubt, however, that an over-all falling birthrate weakened the Empire – and to the extent that falling birthrate was tied to a licentious sexual climate – then sexual decadence may have played a role. On the other hand, the great Eighteenth Century English historian Edward Gibbon, semi-covertly blamed the Fall of Rome on the rise of Christianity, in his monumental, multi-volume, work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Nevertheless, one enormously important aspect of life in virtually any society existing before the Twentieth Century, was that the vast majority of persons lived in what today would be considered abjectest, grinding physical poverty. This was indeed the case in virtually every one of today's Western and European societies. The poverty, for example, in Poland (which was under foreign occupation or "Partition" from 1795 to 1918), and even in England in the Nineteenth Century, is today difficult to imagine. The talk today of what "the rich" countries are said to owe "the poor" countries, and what "all white people" are said to owe "all people of color" lacks any meaningful historical sense.
The abject physical poverty of the vast majority of the population in nearly every Western and European society, meant that the scope for the flowering of heterogeneous sexual exploration (whether for good or ill) in those societies, was highly limited. However, despite the abject physical poverty, many of the workers' and peasant families endeavored to live a meaningful existence. Certainly, the Church offered certain spiritual and psychic comforts – even if Marx derisively (and inaccurately) called it "opium." We all know today the horrors that the dogmatic atheism of Soviet Communism led to. To point out the image probably most easily accessible to the reader, relations between the sexes before the Twentieth Century, for the majority of the population in European countries, were probably similar to those seen among "the proles" as described in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four – except, of course, for the usually-comforting presence of the Church, and a highly edifying cultural milieu of which even the poorest people had some inkling. Can one imagine today the hunger of the Nineteenth-Century workingman to learn to read, to educate and improve himself, to attend a public lecture or classical symphony concert? In a situation of poverty, relations between the sexes seemed to develop organically along the lines of young love, courtship, marriage, followed by large numbers of children, and the rapid aging of both parents.
To be continued. 
Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical researcher.
