It would be quite as reasonable for a woman to say that, because a prostitute enjoys roast beef or lobster (or anything between), the pure wife should feel it a sin to enjoy good food.
Of course there are people who think it is wrong to enjoy anything, but while overgratification from food or drink has a certain essential sensuality about it and gluttony was one of the “seven deadly sins,” there is no psychological principle according to which intense enjoyment is rightly prohibited, providing the consumption of food does not exceed the necessity of the body for growth and restoration of tissue. Up to that point the more one enjoys one’s food the better for himself and incidentally for everyone else. If, however, the enjoyment has to come from an increase in the amount consumed or the cost of it, then a quite unjustifiable element of unsocial action surely enters.
One should enjoy food, and the more enjoyment the better, provided the enjoyment does not depend on the increase in amount or expensiveness of it.
Similarly there is every good reason why both women and men should enjoy sex and regard it as quite as necessary as food.
Instinctively both women and men would do so if their sexual instincts were accessible. Those men and women to whom their instincts are accessible do gain their greatest comfort if not their greatest happiness through the uninhibited expression of the sex instinct.
§ 58
If the greatest happiness in life be something other than the emotions incident to the fusion of man’s and woman’s beings in the love drama, then, whatever that greatest happiness may be said to be, it is surely conditioned on a happy marriage. Those who think otherwise are not happily married and they need to become so before their words can have any authority. Those not happily married have, of course, no means whatever of knowing at first hand what is, or should be, implied in that term.
§ 59
Instinct has taught the woman to expect strength, physical or spiritual, or both, of the man. Let it not be forgotten that mental and spiritual strength is a perfect substitute for physical strength. It does not mean that intellectual ability is the equivalent of spiritual strength as the former may be coexistent with an emotional undevelopment which is the same as spiritual weakness. A man may, even a child may, be an intellectual prodigy as a chess player or mathematician without implying any emotional development in the direction of normal erotism.