A remarkable fact about marriage, seldom explicitly noted, is that it consists of one man and one woman. That is very sexy, to say the least. If there were another practical way to raise children marriage would probably be regarded as sinful. It would be worse than an affair because more prolonged; it would be worse than having a mistress, or such, because it would be so consolidated and secure. The married partners have even been so scornful of public opinion and propriety that they have actually contracted themselves, legally, one to the other, in their scandalous relationship. I once heard a cynic refer to marriage as legalized prostitution. Marriages might be more interesting if more wives took that definition seriously. How would the average wife react if she were to find two ten dollar bills pinned to her pillowcase one night? Would she be scandalized? Perhaps, but, it seems likely, deliciously so. Would she fuss, or weep? Perhaps. Perhaps not. I expect she would be sexually excited. If she takes the twenty dollars, of course, she would have to understand that she is expected to behave accordingly. Indeed, if she wants another twenty sometime, she had better be a damn good lay. The central point of this paragraph is that marriage, whether intended to be or not, is a particularly sexy institution. What a fantastic opportunity for intricate and delightful sexual experiences is available in marriage. In marriage we have one man and one woman who have each other all to themselves and their pleasure. They are free in a socially accepted, if not approved, institution to contrive the most exquisite enjoyments for one another. The heights of their pleasures will be limited only by their own imagination. To be sure, the grim outside world, the society, will try to reach even into their home with its approvals and disapprovals, its permissions and prohibitions, its common-denominator definitions, its instructions for suitable, standard, repetitive, routine relations between men and women, its prescriptions for turning the intricate and stimulating joys of sex between individuals with minds and imaginations into, in time, a passive, too-familiar, boring congress of bodies, with little more to recommend it than a release from physiological tension and, perhaps, the assurance that one is a “good” person, i.e., a person who has conformed to standards set in eras of scientific ignorance by individuals who, tragically, feared and hated their bodies, and with the typical malice of such, through the control of education and by means of superstition, tried to preclude others from experiencing joys they had been compulsively driven to deny themselves. To a large extent the contagion of their loathings, centuries later, still infects and emotionally disfigures millions of human beings, depriving them of precious ecstasies, theirs by right of their intelligence and nature.