"Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself"
About this Quote
Vidal lands the first punch with grammar: "Sex is". Two blunt syllables, a mic drop dressed up as ontology. The move is classic Vidal - take what culture treats as destiny or moral battlefield and reduce it to a stubborn fact of life, no sermon attached. The insistence that "there is nothing more to be done about it" isn’t resignation so much as an attack on America’s national hobby of laundering sex into meaning: romance as salvation, purity as virtue, scandal as character test.
Then he needles the Protestant work ethic with a deliberately philistine yardstick: sex "builds no roads, writes no novels". The point isn’t that sex is irrelevant to art or history (Vidal knows better; his own work is saturated with erotic power and its political consequences). It’s that we keep demanding sex justify itself by producing something respectable. We want it to pay rent in the currency of achievement, family, legacy, plot. Vidal refuses the transaction.
The sharpest line is the last: sex "gives no meaning to anything in life but itself". That’s not anti-sex; it’s anti-mystification. He’s pushing back against the way desire gets conscripted into grand narratives - national, religious, therapeutic - that conveniently police who gets to want whom, and how publicly. Coming from a gay novelist who spent decades watching sexuality become both taboo and spectacle, the subtext is surgical: if sex is powerful, it’s powerful precisely because it doesn’t need to be redeemed. It’s an appetite, a pleasure, a compulsion, sometimes a tenderness - and the moment you turn it into Purpose, you hand it over to whoever claims to define the terms.
Then he needles the Protestant work ethic with a deliberately philistine yardstick: sex "builds no roads, writes no novels". The point isn’t that sex is irrelevant to art or history (Vidal knows better; his own work is saturated with erotic power and its political consequences). It’s that we keep demanding sex justify itself by producing something respectable. We want it to pay rent in the currency of achievement, family, legacy, plot. Vidal refuses the transaction.
The sharpest line is the last: sex "gives no meaning to anything in life but itself". That’s not anti-sex; it’s anti-mystification. He’s pushing back against the way desire gets conscripted into grand narratives - national, religious, therapeutic - that conveniently police who gets to want whom, and how publicly. Coming from a gay novelist who spent decades watching sexuality become both taboo and spectacle, the subtext is surgical: if sex is powerful, it’s powerful precisely because it doesn’t need to be redeemed. It’s an appetite, a pleasure, a compulsion, sometimes a tenderness - and the moment you turn it into Purpose, you hand it over to whoever claims to define the terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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