The fact that little has been written about fucking, beyond the erotic narrative, it is an indisputable fact. We know little about the customs of courtship in its last instances throughout history. Taboos or romanticism turn everything into presumptions and intuitions, but the truth is that simple facts such as abundant bastardism show that the prolific sexual life of any age has had to maintain promiscuity as an underground reality.
When Carmen Martin Gaite he delves into the uses and customs of fucking and adultery in the eighteenth century, sifted under the cloak of courtship, in the end he ends up finding justifications, motives and meanings of all that sexual life of a singular century. A study dating back to 1972 is still extremely interesting to this day.
The woman was still a quiet voice in that century, but her figure was already beginning to stand out in several western countries, a certain point of modernity, illuminated against the light by the powerful romanticism, began to host every soul that wanted to undress a little to feelings and sensations that approached the physical through evocations of the soul.
Undoubtedly a suggestive story about the custom less narrated by historians and sociologists. The beds as spaces for the most transcendent episodes of the passage of History, where the greatest secrets of state were confessed, in the heat of desire, and where descendants of blood between blue and red were conceived.
Trying to explain historical periods through intrahistory is like entering the clock mechanism of that History, where the last pieces are found, the smallest links and gears, as imperceptible as they are fundamental. The amorous uses, the courtship and the final site, hand to hand, suppose an extraordinary story of so many aspects, that it is always worth indulging in a narrative of this nature.
You can buy the book Amorous uses of eighteen in Spain, an interesting essay by Carmen Martín Gaite, here: