Rand describes the type of sexual relation she approves of as the following: “…sex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which (a man) cannot perform for any other motive but his own enjoyment… He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself… …whose surrender permits him to experience- or fake- a feeling of self esteem… 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.”i
The woman’s function is not to be of worth in her own right, but to be a reflection of the man. Rand doesn’t say what “The Meaning of Sex” is for women. The above implies it is to be conquered and possessed; and no action other than surrender necessary to achieve an appropriate sexual relationship.
This is in accordance with what Rand writes in “Fountainhead”, where the heroine’s motivation is described, “…the act of a master taking shameful, contemptuous possession of her was the kind of rapture she had wanted.”ii Later, the heroine describes the beginning of the relationship, “He didn’t ask my consent. He raped me. That’s how it began.”iii
The red-flag words Ayn Rand uses to describe her ideal sexual relationships are: selfish, for his own enjoyment, conquer, possess, master, shameful, contemptuous, rapture, he didn’t ask, and rape. Is it any wonder most of Ayn Rand’s fans started as conservative teen-aged boys?
iNew Intellectual pg 99 Quoting her book, Atlas Shrugged.
iiPg 217 The Fountainhead, Signet, Penguin Books, 1952
iiiPg 671 The Fountainhead, Signet, Penguin Books, 1952
Ayn Rand also presents sex as the sole act a human being can do only out of desire. And since it stems only from desire, it reflects with precision the true personality of that person, and the person’s most passionate wants.
True. It is telling that in Fountainhead, a story she called a “presentation of a moral ideal”, she presented the true personality of what she called “an ideal man” as a rapist.
Your comment reminds me of the conclusion of The Psychology of Pleasure, Nathaniel Brandon, ch 6 of The Virtue of Selfishness. Thank you for reading and thank you for your comment.