'The Damned Thing' from Anarchism is not Enough by Laura Riding

When the lover said ‘I love you’ it would be socially impossible for him to mean: ‘Our personalities have an intense and irresistible sympathy. I am so conscious of you and myself together that sometimes my sexual glands are stimulated by the very sight of you.’ It would be impossible for him not to mean: ‘My sexual glands, by the growing enlargement of my sex instinct since childhood and its insidious, civilised traffic with every part of my mental and physical being, are unfortunately in a state of continual excitement. I have very good control of myself, but my awareness of your sexual physique and its radiations was so acute that I could not resist the temptation to desire to lie with you. Please do not think this ignoble of me, for I shall perform this act, if you permit it, with the greatest respect and tenderness and attempt to make up for the indignity it of course fundamentally will be to you (however pleasurable) by serving you in every possible way and by sexually flattering manifestations of your personality which are not strictly sexual.'