Sex and Objectivism

By Ayn Rand
Date: 10 March 2001
Excerpt from "Atlas Shrugged"[Note: It's not written gender neutral because this was before Political Correctness. Don't let this fool you into thinking it appliesonly to men!]

[Some people] think 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. Love is blind, they say; sex is impervious to reason and mocks the power of all philosophers. 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 woman he sleeps with and I will tell you his valuation of himself. No matter what corruption he's taught about the virtue of selflessness, 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 as an act 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 woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself, the woman whose surrender permits him to experience -- or to fake -- a sense of self-esteem. The man who is proudly certain of his own valuewill 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, but to express it. There is no conflict between the standards of his mind and the desires of his body...

Observe the ugly mess which most men make of their sex lives -- and observe the mess of contradictions which they hold as their moral philosophy. One proceeds from the other. Love is our response to our highest values, and can be nothing else. Let a man corrupt his values and his view of existence -- let him profess that love is not self-enjoyment but self-denial, that virtue consists, not of pride but of pity or pain or weakness or sacrifice, that the noblest love is born, not of admiration but of charity, not in response to values but in response to flaws, -- and he will have cut himself in two. His body will not obey him, it will not respond, it will make him impotent toward the woman he professes to love and draw him to the lowest type of whore he can find. His body will always follow the logic of his deepest convictions; if he believes that flaws are values, he has damned existence as evil and only the evil will attract him. He has damned himself and he will feel that depravity is all he is worthy of enjoying... Then he will scream that his body has vicious desires of its own which his mind cannot conquer, that sex is sin, that true love is a pure emotion of the spirit. And then he will wonder why love brings him nothing but boredom and sex nothing but shame....

Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.

Us and them..

Sitting here at the office desk writin this blog might seem incestuous to some, but to me its nothin but a logical extension to the practice of impregnating my personal life with the official one more and more as the time progresses.

Well..how I landed up here is a nobody's guess..I am another one of those dreamy-eyed engineering graduates who feel they really are going to make a difference to the organization that they would be joining. Only after being a part of this 'corporate bandwagon' does one realise the obvious futility thats a part of the charade that you are made to go thru at the engineering college.

Anyway...I sit here today in my cubicle looking out of the window into the open spaces outside and that alone makes me realize that there are horizons to span, skies to reach...While the guy next to me is all work and no play, the female sitting cross to me has this liking to hum all the recent Bollywood tunes while doing her work...cant tell you how that made me go nuts, till I came to find her alternate hobby. The only time when she isn't lending odes to bollywood, she is talking to her near and dear ones about everythin frm her next holiday plans to the problems with her maid at home and all this is loud enough for me not to have a miniscule chance at missing any of this...I ve come to make peace with her humming offlate!!!

I again look out of the window to relax my eyes of constant staring at the terminal n I suddenly realize that the sun has set down..I look at the watch then and see that the hands are showing 7:15 p.m. That doesnt mean that the work-day's over thou, for instead; like thousands like me the day for the Indian s/w industry has just begun!!!!