Life & Wisdom Quote by Alex Comfort

Comfort’s line lands with the sly confidence of someone trying to rescue pleasure from puritan bookkeeping. “A meal” is pointedly ordinary: not champagne-and-caviar fantasy, but the daily ritual of eating. By insisting it “can be an erotic experience in itself,” he reframes eros as a sensory mode rather than a strictly sexual act. The phrase “in itself” is doing the real work, refusing the idea that food is merely foreplay, a lubricant for romance, or a metaphor waiting to be cashed out in the bedroom. Appetite doesn’t need an alibi.

The intent is both permissive and political. Comfort, best known for The Joy of Sex, wrote against a mid-century culture that often treated bodily pleasure as either suspect or commodified. This sentence nudges readers toward a broader erotic literacy: noticing textures, smells, pacing, anticipation, and the tiny negotiations of sharing. It implies that intimacy is built through attention, not just intercourse; that desire is trained in how you inhabit your senses.

There’s a quiet cynicism under the warmth, too: modern life splits us into compartments, turning meals into fuel and sex into performance. Comfort’s provocation stitches those torn categories back together. If eating can be erotic, then eroticism isn’t rare or elite; it’s accessible, renewable, and tied to care. The subtext: if you can’t find pleasure at the table, you’ll likely chase it elsewhere in louder, emptier ways.