The Question of Men in Love: A Beauvoirian Response to Jørgen Lorentzen

Abstract

In this essay, I engage Jørgen Lorentzen in his search for the man in love. Lorentzen argues that, in research on men and masculinity, men's heterosexual love is rarely a site where men may experience positive social change, offering Shakespeare's Romeo as a literary example of a man in love who undermines both power and patriarchy. Reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex together, I argue that Beauvoir's theoretical perspective provides masculinity studies with critical insights that may mediate the ways in which scholars theorize and study the question of men and love. Using Weber's ideal types as a heuristic device, I focus on the conceptual differences between the serious man and the passionate man, arguing that men's ability to remain sovereign in love is a mark of their privileged position, their capacity to move and speak with either the power of the masculine ideal or the power of passionate freedom behind them. Either way, men are still struggling to recognize women as a peer and partner within the current structure of heterosexual relationships. However, unlike research on men and masculinity, Beauvoir's work empowers men to see the specific obstacles in their way, giving men a clear sense of hope in their search for authentic love and thus a movement toward positive social change.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Roma Stovall Hanks, Linda Burcham, and Sara Godwin for their intellectual and social support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.