Love & Passion Quote by Norman Mailer

Mailer drags the dirty secret of mid-century capitalism into the light: the marketplace doesn’t just sell products, it sells arousal in disguise. “Subterranean impetus” is doing double duty. It suggests something primal and repressed, but also something engineered and routed through pipes and channels, like infrastructure. Desire isn’t a side effect of ads; it’s a power source. The phrase “half the business world is juiced” turns libido into fuel, implying that commerce runs on a kind of illicit energy it won’t name aloud.

The sharpest blade is “half sex.” Mailer isn’t talking about explicit pornography so much as the tease-and-deny mechanics of consumer culture: bodies fragmented into legs, lips, torsos; flirtation without intimacy; promise without consequence. Advertising becomes a respectable strip club, offering stimulation while keeping everyone clean enough for daylight. That “half” is the point: it’s arousing precisely because it’s incomplete, a perpetual engine of wanting that can be redirected toward buying.

Context matters. Mailer is writing out of an era when American public morals were tightening and loosening at once: suburban conformity on the surface, sexual revolution simmering underneath, mass media learning how to monetize both. His intent is accusatory, but also diagnostic. He’s less scandalized by sex than by how safely it’s packaged and deployed. Pornography, in his framing, isn’t just a genre; it’s a business strategy that teaches people to crave, then hands them a shopping cart.