Terrance Real, from The New Rules of Marriage, pg. 247:
In our culture, pleasure remains highly suspect. Like connection itself, pleasure is fine in measured, "appropriate" doses, so long as it doesn't interfere with the real work of production and caretaking. But the enforcers of the social order have always understood that pleasure is not a very docile or obedient force. Pleasure is hard to corral and hard to resist. What would happen if our young men, like Ferdinand the bull in the famous children's story, suddenly cared more about smelling the flowers than about donning their suits and briefcases to enter the ring? What if our young women were to care more about exploring variations of sexual pleasure than about marriage, fidelity, and children? Western society has always understood that pleasure is by its nature insurrectionary.
We don't take pleasure in one another and we don't give pleasure to one another nearly as much as we could because, as a culture, we simply don't much value it.
