Love & Passion Quote by Martha Gellhorn

A sentence like this lands with the cold snap of self-surveillance: sex can be “practised” like a duty, even a political position, but “enjoyed” only at the cost of losing something. Gellhorn turns the bedroom into a battlefield of willpower, where pleasure is framed as capitulation. The real sting is in the ellipsis before “seemed a defeat” - a tiny pause that performs the very recoil she’s describing, as if the admission of wanting has to be swallowed mid-thought.

Coming from a war correspondent who made her career in zones of consequence, the line reads like the private analogue to public conflict. Gellhorn’s world rewarded hardness: stamina, clarity, the ability to watch without flinching. In that moral economy, enjoyment isn’t innocent; it’s suspect, a fog that blurs the sharp edges of autonomy. “Moral conviction” suggests sex can be justified as principle - marriage, liberation, even a kind of fairness to a partner - but desire itself is treated as an enemy agent.

The subtext is less prudish than strategic. She’s not arguing that sex is bad; she’s arguing that wanting is a form of dependence, and dependence is a trap women are trained to fall into. For a woman journalist navigating masculinized spaces and famous men (Hemingway is the shadow here), pleasure risks being read as surrender: to a lover, to narrative, to role. The brilliance is how she indicts that training without fully escaping it, letting the line crackle with the cost of being “strong” all the time.