English Paper 1

Havelock Ellis, a British physician and psychologist once said, “Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex”. Sex is an instinct, and as humans, people’s need for sex is equal to any other instinct such as food and sleep. Sex, as a tool for reproduction, is the basis for life and if it was not for sex, humans or any other creatures would not be able to survive. For that reason, it is significant that people understand sex and its specific roles in life. The opinions about the role and significance of sex in life often contradict and differ from one person to another and from one culture to the other. Many poets and writers have become obsessed with the issue of sex and have tried to convey point of view about sex and provide knowledge and corrections of many sex issues they think are inaccurate uses of sex. Sharon Olds in “Sex without Love” and Ariel Levy in “Women and the Rise of Rauch Culture” present some serious issues that arise from people’s misusage and misunderstandings of sex. Olds’s speaker uses a subtle and convicting tone in order to show her discontentment with the way love has been disregarded, while Levy uses a sarcastic tone by which she asks for people’s common sense in order to show the ridiculousness of the idea that pornography and stripping are forms of women’s liberation. To show how the idea of sex without love has become a norm and that the society believes in the validity of such falsities, Olds uses irony and similes to describe the act of sex without love which is similar to what Levy does when she uses anecdotal evidence and examples to convey how the unusual ideas about womanhood and sexuality became a norm. Both authors show the idea of sacrificing precious values such as love and femininity for cheap prices such as having sex without love or becoming normal in the eyes of others.
Havelock Ellis, a British physician and psychologist once said, “Sex lies at the root of