The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

conventionally educated by somewhat stern parents
or nurses, the association between sin and the sex
organs is so firmly established by the time he is six
years old that it is unlikely ever to be completely
undone throughout the rest of his life. This feeling
is, of course, reinforced by the Oedipus complex,
since the woman most loved in childhood is one
with whom all sexual freedoms are impossible.
The result is that many adult men feel women to be
degraded by sex, and cannot respect their wives
unless their wives hate sexual intercourse. But the
man whose wife is cold will be driven by instinct
to seek instinctive satisfaction elsewhere. His
instinctive satisfaction, however, even if he
momentarily finds it, will be poisoned by the sense
of guilt, so that he cannot be happy in any relation
with a woman, whether in marriage or outside it.
On the woman’s side the same sort of thing
happens if she has been very emphatically taught to
be what is called ‘pure’. She instinctively holds
herself back in her sexual relations with her
husband, and is afraid of deriving any pleasure
from them. In the present day, however, there is