Of Romance And Revolution

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00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled "Love Virtually".

00:05 Ahead of Valentine's Day, Outlook's latest issue explores the many kinds of love,

00:10 from online dating for the youth and dating for the elderly,

00:14 to the otherworldly and unrequited love.

00:17 The issue also looks at how the concept of love has evolved

00:22 at a time when the divide between communities of different faiths is widened by politics.

00:28 "Of Romance and Revolution" by Snigdhen Dubhatacharya from Outlook

00:33 Socialists and communists initially created hopes of revolutionizing romantic relations,

00:40 but ended up controlling them.

00:42 In Czech novelist Milan Kundera's short story "Lost Letters Part 1",

00:47 when Mirek and Zena are on their way home in a streetcar,

00:52 after making love for the first time,

00:54 he finds her sitting on a corner bench in the jolting streetcar,

00:58 her face sullen, closed, surprisingly old.

01:02 Asking about her silence, Mirek learns that she has not been satisfied with their lovemaking.

01:08 She says he made love to her like an intellectual.

01:11 In the political jargon of those days, the word intellectual was an insult.

01:17 It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people, Kundera wrote.

01:24 It was not clear to Mirek what exactly Zena meant by making love like an intellectual.

01:30 It was perhaps for the lack of a better language that she used it to express her dissatisfaction.

01:36 Nevertheless, it was probably an impact of the communist revolution

01:41 that encouraged Czech women to freely express their sexual feelings.

01:45 As historian Katarina Leskova points out,

01:48 in the early years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s,

01:54 women were equal to men not only at work and according to the law,

01:58 but also in expert discussions on sexuality and marriage.

02:03 The party preached women's equal right to orgasm.

02:07 In the early 1950s, the government even embarked on a nationwide research into the female orgasm.

02:14 About a century before, from the mid-19th century,

02:17 socialist and communist ideals stormed Europe and America,

02:22 with many radical ideas involving not only the mode of production and ownership,

02:27 but also love and sex.

02:29 The early socialists, including Frenchman Charles Fourier and British Robert Irwin,

02:35 came up with sweeping attacks on the existing family structure,

02:39 advocated the abolition of marriage, and some even advocated free love.

02:45 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.