“If I had to fancy an insight on Rand’s sexual philosophy, I would probably say that she might have been a tad repressed and would have had loved to have a passionate relationship with a man.”
She did, she was married to Frank, and then she seduced and “forced” her young assistant Nathan into her bed where they had a torrent affair while Frank drank away his sorrows.
I believe Ayn’s sexual perversion was very tied to her decision not to become a mother. She knew all along that she was sent to the planet to be a writer and would not have time for babies. So her sexual life was just sex.
Take procreation out of a marriage relationship (And friends of Franks said that they thought he would have loved to have been a father), and all you have is sex. So Roark raping Dominique in the Fountainhead as their first sexual encounter, and Dagny moving up the so called chain of command to John Galt in Atlas is supposed to be somehow evidence of her aspiring to greatness.
It is the false and deadly side to the philosophy of Objectivism, and one of the reasons why people of faith have a difficult time reading Rand.
It is a shame that she put her own sexual immorality into the books, but not surprising giving the fact that she was an atheist and not interested in sexual morality, just objective morality. The fact that she can divorce the two is a fatal flaw in my opinion, not just for Ayn the writer, but for those who accept her at face value without realizing the true devastation to family life that results when a partner decides to move up the sexual ladder to the new wife or the new husband (or lover).
I can’t say that I blame Hank Rearden for his choice to have an affair with Dagny, given his parasitic wife Lillian, and her attempt to destroy him. One of the laugh out loud moments in the book comes when Lillian admits to James Taggart that she will be truly broke financially when Hank cuts her off. I see her as the epitome of all of the elites in our society when it finally dawns on them that Obama Economics will be the end of financial prosperity for everyone, not just the so called capitalistic rich.
Let’s hope Atlas Readers will take the sexual immorality of Rands characters as symbolic and hope that those who are pursuing true happiness will look to find it in a loving relationship with a husband or wife and children, something she never really explored in her fiction, supposedly because she was not a mother.
I do love this paragraph from Atlas which describes the children of one of Galts Gulch’s citizens. I have tried to raise my own five children with a similar sense of freedom:
P 784:
The recaptured sense of her own childhood kept coming back to her whenever she met the two sons of the young woman who owned the bakery shop. She often saw them wandering down the trails of the valley - two fearless beings, aged seven and four. They seemed to face life as she had faced it.
They did not have the look she had seen in the children of the outer world - a look of fear, half secretive, half sneering, the look of a child’s defense against an adult, the look of a being int he process of discovering that he is hearing lies and of learning to feel hatred.
The two boys had the open, joyous, friendly confidence of kittens who do not expect to get hurt, they had an innocently natural, non-boastful sense of their own value and as innocent a trust in any stranger’s ability to recognize it, they had the eager curiosity that would venture anywhere with the certainty that life held nothing unworthy of or closed to discovery, and they looked as if, should they encounter malevolence, they would reject it contemptuously, not as dangerous, but as stupid, they would not accept it in bruised resignation as the law of existence.
They represent my particular career, Miss Tagart, said the young mother in answer to her comment, wrapping a loaf of fresh bread and smiling at her across the counter. They’re the profession I’ve chosen to practice, which, in spite of all the guff about motherhood, one can’t practice successfully in the outer world.....
I came here in order to bring up my sons as human beings. I would not surrender them to the educational systems devised to stunt a child’s brain, to convince him that reason is impotent, that existence is an irrational chaos with which he’s unable to deal, and thus reduce him to a state of chronic terror. You marvel at the difference between my children and those outside, Miss Taggart? Yet the cause is so simple. The cause is that here, in Galt’s Gulch, there’s no person who would not consider it monstrous ever to confront a child with the slightest suggestion of the irrational.”
I don’t think Ayn was repressed sexually, so much as she was not able to explore the full range of her sexual powers which come to full fruition with pregnancy and orgasmic birth. Which, by the way, most women have never experienced in our culture because of an extreme dependence on doctors and midwives to deliver the children.
My guess is that if Ayn had been more open to motherhood, it would have toned down the sex scenes in the books, and she would have been able to apply Objectivism to childbirth, as some of us have done, and she would have been at the forefront of the unassisted childbirth movement.
Jenny Hatch
A torrent affair? That's not one of those golden rainbow deals is it? Yuk.
Perhaps I am the only one who doesn't "look for hidden meanings" behind every paragraph while reading a book. Dagny and Hank had a true passion for each other, which they "released" during their love making.
"Sexual immortality"....that just about describes a majority of people breathing at this very moment. If you did not wait to have sex until you were married, that would be your "sexually immoral". Sorry, can't be the judge and jury on that one.