It has perhaps not been adequately observed that the problem of sexual freedom in all its forms is, in large part, a problem of freedom of expression. It seems clear that, from generation to generation, the tendencies and the acts themselves vary little; on the contrary, what changes is the extent of the zone of silence or the weight of the layers of lies surrounding them. It is over the innermost realities of marriage itself, the sexual relations between spouses, that verbal superstition has imposed itself most tyrannically. The writer who endeavors to present the story of Alexis honestly, eliminating from his language formulae which are supposedly decorous but in reality are the semi-timorous or semi-licentious formulae of cheap literature, has little choice except between two or three modes of expression more or less inadequate and often unacceptable. The scientific terminology recently formulated and doomed to become outmoded with the theories that support it, worn away by an excessive popularization which quickly takes from it its virtue of precision, is valid only for the specialized works for which it has been created. Its labels go against the chief aim of literature, which is individuality of expression. Obscenity, a literary mode which has always had its adherents, is a defensible shock treatment if one has to force a prudish or indifferent public to face what it does not want to look at or what, as the result of too prolonged a habit, it can no longer see. Thus, the use of obscenity can correspond to a sort of cleaning up of words, to an attempt to give a kind of clean, peaceful innocence to a vocabulary essentially neutral but soiled and dishonored by usage. Yet such a brutal solution remains an external solution: the hypocritical reader tends to accept the unseemly word as a form of the picturesque, almost as a form of exoticism, a little the way the passing tourist in a strange city allows himself a visit to the slums. Obscenity is soon exhausted, forcing the author who relies on it into excesses which are even more threatening to truth than the understatements of past times. The brutality of language conceals the banality of thought and, with certain major exceptions, is indistinguishable from a kind of conformism.