Manly Thor's Day Special

Do women like courtly lovers?
Perhaps the question seems too stupid. "Of course they do," you say. "Why there is nothing more that women want in this brutal modern age than a return to courtesy and humility from men." Really? Because if that is what women really wanted, you'd think that more men would be cultivating it wouldn't you? I mean, even if only for very cynical reasons you'd think they would pretend long enough to get laid wouldn't you?

And there do seem hints of it. As Lewis says in The Allegory of Love:

To leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one's lady or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth or even of the seventeenth century; and most of us have gone shopping in the twentieth with ladies who showed no sign of regarding the tradition as a dead letter.

I'm not so sure it was all that natural even in the thirteenth century. I'll tell you one thing that CS Lewis is far too genteel to say but I'm not: if you behave this way towards a woman, she may well let you and she may even take you shopping with her so you can carry her bags, drive her around in your nice car and buy her lunch but she sure isn't going to put out for you.

And we've all known guys who've tried this approach because we've all had to sit around drinking beers with the guy afterward while he bitterly criticized the woman in question and complained that "it's true, nice guys really do finish last."

Okay, this isn't a "game" or "seduction tips" site, so why go on about this. Well, because it is true: if you want erotic love from a woman courtly love is one of the worst ways to set about getting it. But you also ask, related to the above, if it is such a dumb way to get erotic love, why was so much literature ever devoted to it?

The answer to that is because it is a male fantasy. It's not the sort of fantasy men have while masturbating but rather the kind they have when they are without a woman to love. It's a sort of fantasy they have about what women fantasize about. I mention masturbation fantasies because, of course, the same guy who has the courtly love fantasy has those too and one of the things that drives the courtly love fantasy in the directions he goes is his certainty that real love cannot possibly be anyting like his erotic fantasies.

And there is the primary mistake. Assuming your erotic fantasies are not too weird, one of the big surprises of actually finding real love is that while fantasies are unrealistic, real women actually do crave sex and the actual stuff they respond to is much more like our sexual fantasies than it is like our courtly love fantasies.

We might miss this because there is a whole school of feminist and moral conservative paranoia that focus on the fear that men will become so addicted to fantasies or porn that real women will disappoint. If you want to see this paranoid argument about porn being better than reality thoroughly dispatched, go here. No really, go to that link and read it. Especially if you are a woman who has ever worried about whether your man masturbates too much. I mean it. If you have ever worried that some guy might lose his interest in his real partner because of porn or masturbation, go to this link right now and read the whole thing

Meanwhile, us guys who here in the guy room can ask ourselves a simple question. Think of a woman you like. Not some super hot babe you see but don't really know but an attractive woman you really like to talk to but who has some obvious flaws. In other words an ordinary woman you know and like. Okay, imagine that you have just learned that she thinks your attractive too and she is intrigued by you. No guarantee, no sure thing here—she is perhaps interested and that is all you know. Okay, here is your choice: you can go out with her for a drink alone together right now or you can jerk off to some really great porn. Which one do you want?

And that tells us something really important about courtly love: It was dreamed up by guys who didn't have such a choice. In much the same way that a bird in a cage can only imagine freedom as the opposite of being in a cage, a guy without a woman can only imagine "real" love to be the complete opposite of his masturbation fantasies.

I don't want to over play this hand: masturbation fantasies are not realistic either but the thing is we know they are fantasies. But reality is not and never will be the mirror image of a fantasy. What men forget when all they have is masturbation fantasies is that women do want to really get it. A lonesome guy I knew when we were both in our late teens once told me that he wished he could live in a world where women really did "all want to get it". What he couldn't see is that most of the women around him really did.

So he spent his life in pursuit of impossible dreams who let him grovel before them and serve him and then gave it to "some jerk" who didn't care. Meanwhile the girls he actually seemed to end up with angered him. There is a Charles Bukowski poem called "quiet clean girls in gingham dresses ..." that embodies the mindset perfectly:

all I've ever known are whores, ex-prostitutes,
madwomen. I see men with quiet,
gentle women ­ I see them in the supermarkets,
I see them walking down the streets together,
I see them in their apartments: people at
peace, living together. I know that their
peace is only partial, but there is
peace, often hours and days of peace.

What the guy in the poem never sees is that the whole thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because if you see that clean, quiet girl in her gingham dress well, she's kind of hot isn't she.  She may be subtle, restrained, elegant, classy in public but you can imagine her all flushed, her pupils dilated, her eyes with that rather vacant look of total abandonment, her breasts heaving as she breathes harder as she gets more and more out of control. You've already imagined that haven't you. And you really are counting on her really wanting to get it? Am I right?

If not, let me assure you she wants you to take her shopping.