The Limits of Liberation

“Fantasy love,” claimed Andy Warhol, “is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting…Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway.” He lamented that social and scientific progress led to both people learning about sex at a younger age and longer life-expectancies, giving them more time to “play around with the same concept. The same boring concept.” Rather than endorsing a permissive attitude toward sex, Warhol thought it better to “let the kids read about it and look forward to it, and then right before they’re going to [do it], break the news to them that they’ve already had the most exciting part, that it’s behind them already.”