Geoffrey Chaucer uses sex as a manipulative tool in The Canterbury Tales. Depicting sex as a power that women exercise over men rather than the marital bond of "lovemaking" makes clear Chaucer's distorted views of love and marriage with underlying tones of misogyny. He expresses these views throughout the work, however, the theme of love and sex is most evident in the sub-stories of The Wife of Bath and The Miller's Tale. Chaucer divides the theme of sex into two fundamental parts: carnality and romance. Although carnal love is a controversial topic, Chaucer delves into the topic by creating characters with ferocious appetites for sex and the means to satisfy their desires. While, to deal with romance, he relies heavily on courtship and the introduction of relationships that are means to satisfy one's carnal desires or simply to satisfy one's natural desire for power over others. The Wife of Bath introduces sex as nothing more than a carnal need and as a constant struggle to gain the upper hand as well as material objects. Most of the roots of this tale are found in the prologue in which the wife discusses her personal sexual exploits with her five previous husbands. Chaucer presents an internal conflict when the wife momentarily questions the moral implications that being married five times imposes on her. Her conflict ends with comparing herself to the men of the Bible: "A holy man was Abraham, I know, and Jacob also, as far as they go," then recounting their circumstances as presented by the Bible, "Yet each with more than two wives come to live” (Chaucer). The wife initially presents her point of view on the importance of sex in relationships in a subtle way, for example by referring to the male genitals as a "hanging purse", indicating her.. . at the center of the card... both a material object and a comedy, diminishing its seriousness and ultimately diminishing the repercussions for the degradation of its unspoken rules as an institution. Works Cited Aers, David and marriage." Chaucer, Langland and the Creative Imagination. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980. 144-73. Print. Bloom, Harold and Blake Hobby, eds. Human Sexuality. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009. Print.Brewer, Derek B. "The Miller's Tale." Nd Bloom Literary Reference Online. Network. 15 December 2013. .Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Np: np, nd About.com: Classiclit. Network. December 16, 2013. .Miller, Mark. Philosophical Chaucer: Sex, Love, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print.