On Sex

More from our guest blogger, Ayn Rand:

…sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value….

They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you…. But, in fact, a man’s sexual choice is the result and the sum of his fundamental convictions. Tell me what a man finds sexually attractive and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life. Show me the [person] he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he’s taught about the virtue of selfishness, sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment—just try to think of performing it in a spirit of selfless charity!—an act which is not possible in self-abasement, only in self-exaltation, only in the confidence of being desired and being worthy of desire. It is an act that forces him to stand naked in spirit, as well as in body, and to accept his real ego as his standard of value. He will always be attracted to the [person] who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the [person] whose surrender permits him to experience—or to fake—a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own value, will want the highest type of [person] he can find, the [person] 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…. But the man who is convinced of his own worthlessness will be drawn to a [person] he despises—because [that person] will reflect his own secret self, will release him from that objective reality in which he is a fraud, will give him a momentary illusion of his own value and a momentary escape from the moral code that damns him…. He will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer…. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom, and sex—nothing but shame.