Stupid people sometimes complain that there is no sex in Austen's novels. In fact, they are driven by the oceanic force of suppressed female desire, which dwarfs any opportunity for enactment. Actual sexual intercourse is the off-stage climax of the Austen novel. The possibility that defloration may be an anti-climax is to be found in the tingling ironies that cling to every word that Austen writes.

Female is real, and it’s sex, and femininity is unreal, and it’s gender.

The real theater of the sex war is the domestic hearth.

Sex for many has become a sorry business, a mechanical release involving neither discovery nor triumph, stressing human isolation more dishearte-ingly than ever before.

continuing sexual interest and perfect sexual adjustment between partners who have been together for thirty years is so difficult and rare that no one should feel guilty or inadequate for not having managed it.

It is often falsely assumed, even by feminists, that sexuality is the enemy of the female who really wants to develop these aspects of her personality, and this is perhaps the most misleading aspect of movements like the National Organization of Women. It was not the insistence upon her sex that weakened the American woman student's desire to make something of her education, but the insistence upon a passive sexual role

Sex is more fun than cars but cars refuel quicker than men.