Life & Wisdom Quote by Alex Comfort

Comfort’s line lands like a scalpel: neat, clinical, and designed to make the pious flinch. By pairing “chastity” with “malnutrition,” he drags sexual abstinence out of the chapel and into the clinic, reframing it as deprivation rather than discipline. The provocation isn’t just that chastity can be harmful; it’s that we’ve been trained to misread scarcity as moral achievement. Starvation and sainthood start to look suspiciously alike when you ask who benefits from calling need a sin.

The intent is classic Comfort: pry “virtue” away from inherited social control and return it to human flourishing. “Eventually” matters. He’s predicting a moral reclassification, not pleading for permission. The subtext is that cultural norms around sex are historically contingent, propped up by institutions that prefer regulation to messiness, obedience to pleasure, and guilt to autonomy. By choosing malnutrition - a condition no serious person romanticizes - he undercuts the aesthetic halo around self-denial. You can’t call a child’s hunger “character.”

Context sharpens the edge. Comfort wrote in an era when the postwar West was renegotiating bodies and authority: the sexual revolution, loosening censorship, second-wave feminism, new conversations about consent and health. He wasn’t merely saying “have more sex.” He was insisting that ethics should be measured by well-being and agency, not by how convincingly someone can perform restraint. In one sentence, chastity stops being a badge and starts looking like a symptom.