The poorest things

I have complained before - several times at least - about the use of the language of 'need' in relation to sex. Nobody ever needs to have sex as they need to eat or drink or stay warm in order to survive, or need treatment in order to overcome illness. Occasional, brief acts of vaginal intercourse between fertile men and women are enough to keep the species going, if that is thought to be something we need to do - though I don't really see how anyone could believe it is. But beyond that, the language of need is quite out of place. I am not a needy person simply because I want to spend all my time fucking. That makes me greedy, perhaps seedy, requires me to be speedy, and may end up making me feel weedy, but says nothing about whether or not I am needy.

Lear, raging at his daughters' meanness of spirit, has it just right:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's:

Goneril and Regan had selfish reasons to haggle with their father over the size of his retinue, but it is true that the larger his company, the more they would be out of pocket. In the sexual case, I cannot see who bears any cost. If I have far more sex than I am said to need, who bears any cost at all? What could possibly be wrong with having more than I need?

The sexual liberation that characterized much of the second half of the 20th century achieved a good deal, but there has by now been a very powerful backlash. If I could get my hands on the people responsible for that backlash,

. . . I will do such things,--
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth.