let's talk about sex

"The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think - for the same reason - that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one's mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you - just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails of its own volition...

The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of woman he can find, the woman he admires, the strongest, the hardest to conquer - because only the possession of a heroine will give him the sense of an achievement, not the possession of a brainless slut... He does not seek to gain his value, he seeks to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body."

"But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a woman he despises - because she will reflect his own secret self, she will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, she will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him."


"You'd never accept any part of their vicious creed. You wouldn't be ableto force it upon yourself. If you tried to damn sex as evil, you'd still find yourself, against your will, acting on the proper moral premise. You'd be attracted to the highest woman you met. You'd always want a heroine. You'd be incapable of self-contempt. You'd be unable to believe that existence is evil and that you're a helpless creature caught in an impossible universe. You're the man who's spent his life shaping matter to the purpose of his mind. You're the man who would know that just as an idea unexpressed in physical action is contemptible hypocrisy, so is platonic love - and just as physical action unguided by an idea is a fool's self-fraud, so is sex when cut off from one’s code of values. It's the same issue, and you would know it Your inviolate sense of self-esteem would know it. You would be incapable of desire for a woman you despised. Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire, is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love."


What glory can there be in the conquest of a mindless body?



- excerpt from For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand

Ni submitted homework at 11:45 PM

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