Men who desire to conquer: romantic love and masculinity among some young professionals

Abstract

The aim of this study is to understand how masculinity is constructed in the way some well-educated male professionals in their early adulthood in contemporary Turkey describe love. The study is based on seven in-depth interviews conducted between May 2003 and July 2003 in Istanbul.This study analyzes romantic love first at the level of emotions, and second at the level of couple relationships. Passion and powerlessness were found to be the two constitutive emotions in the participants' definition of love. The desire to conquer was identified as the primary leitmotif in their narratives. The participants wish to end their relationships as they think that they conquered the loved women, and to fall in love as many women as possible. The way that participants describe love is inherent with a specific form of male power that objectifies women. The participants imagine their gender identities as modern masculine arguing that their couple relationships are based on equality. As a way of performing this modern masculinity, they condemn the controlling of women's sexuality through the codes of honor in Turkey and introduce trusting one another to replace the code of honor. The fact that women will be sanctioned if they live according to the same definition of love based on conquest due to the patriarchal structure of Turkish society was never thought of.