“Is sex necessary?” young E.B. White and James Thurber asked in their endlessly delightful 1929 collaboration. “When we hook up with another, in sex or love (or, more rarely, both) we prove that our isolation is not permanent,” Dorion Sagan, son of Carl and a terrific science storyteller in his own right, wrote in his fascinating history of sex. “Part of the modern ideology of love,” Susan Sontag said in her 1978 meditation on love, sex, and the world between, “is to assume that love and sex always go together… And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t.” But hardly anyone has articulated this paradoxical premise better than Andy Warhol in his 1975 sort-of-memoir The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) (public library) — a compendium of his reflections on everything from art and beauty to food and fashion to money and success.

Warhol, who identified as gay and whose work drew heavily on his participation in the LGBT community, confessed to his biographer in 1980, at the age of fifty-two, that he was still a virgin. His assertion has been disputed, but whatever its biological veracity, it does reveal rather unambiguously Warhol’s reservations about, or perhaps even apprehension toward, sexuality and desire. This lens makes his meditations on the subject particularly intriguing, bespeaking at once his own ambivalence about it and our broader cultural conflictedness about love and sex, but especially about the relationship between the two.

Warhol’s central premise is that our greatest anguish about love and sex comes from the buildup of our fantasies and their inevitable clash with reality — the bodily counterpart to Stendhal’s “crystallization” theory. Warhol writes:

The most exciting thing is not-doing-it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it, it’s much more exciting.

Consciously or not, his facetious approach to the subject becomes a meta-testament to his core admonition — that we, as a culture, are taking sex far too seriously to actually derive joy from it. He offers an appropriately facetious solution:

There should be a course in the first grade on love. There should be courses on beauty and love and sex. With love as the biggest course. And they should show the kids, I always think, how to make love and tell and show them once and for all how nothing it is. But they won’t do that, because love and sex are business. But then I think, maybe it works out just as well that nobody takes you out of the dark about it, because if you really knew the whole story, you wouldn’t have anything to think about or fantasize about for the rest of your life, and you might go crazy, having nothing to think about, since life is getting longer, anyway, leaving so much time after puberty to have sex in.

Warhol takes it a step further and applies Susan Sontag’s radical idea about remixing education to sex-ed:

Instead of telling kids very early about the mechanics and nothingness of sex, maybe it would be better to suddenly and very excitingly reveal the details to them when they’re forty. You could be walking down the street with a friend who’s just turned forty, spill the birds-and-the-bees beans, wait for the initial shock of learning what-goes-where to die down, and then patiently explain the rest. Then suddenly at forty their life would have new meaning. We should really stay babies for much longer than we do, now that we’re living so much longer. It’s the long life-spans that are throwing all the old values and their applications out of whack. When people used to learn about sex at fifteen and die at thirty-five, they obviously were going to have fewer problems than people today who learn about sex at eight or so, I guess, and live to be eighty. That’s a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept.

That boredom, Warhol argues, arises from the disillusionment of facing the rift between the fantasy and the reality of sex and romance:

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets anyway. Let the kids read about it and look forward to it, and then right before they’re going to get the reality, break the news to them that they’ve already had the most exciting part, that it’s behind them already. Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting. The most exciting attractions are between two opposites that never meet.

And yet fantasy, for Warhol as for Stendhal, is the necessary hotbed of romance:

People’s fantasies are what give them problems. If you didn’t have fantasies you wouldn’t have problems because you’d just take whatever was there. But then you wouldn’t have romance, because romance is finding your fantasy in people who don’t have it.

One aspect of fantasy is the notion of nostalgia — a romanticized fantasy of the past — which Warhol sees as central to desire:

It’s safe to say that most sex involves some form of nostalgia for something. Sex is a nostalgia for when you used to want it, sometimes. Sex is nostalgia for sex.

He goes on to consider the interplay between love and sex:

Love and sex can go together and sex and unlove can go together and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad.

Warhol offers a psychological prescription for reconciling the disconnect by bringing awareness to our individual predilections:

The best love is not-to-think-about-it love. Some people can have sex and really let their minds go blank and fill up with sex; other people can never let their minds go blank and fill up with sex, so while they’re having the sex they’re thinking, “Can this really be me? Am I really doing this? This is very strange. Five minutes ago I wasn’t doing this. In a little while I won’t be doing it. What would Mom say? How did people ever think of doing this?” So the first type of person — the type that can let their minds go blank and fill up with sex and not-thinking-about-it — is better off. The other type has to find something else to relax with and get lost in. For me that something else is humor… If I went to a lady of the night, I’d probably pay her to tell me jokes.

He explores another dichotomy of sexual personality types, suggesting — in part self-servingly in light of his alleged virginity, and in part with a broader generosity of sentiment — that much of our sexual anguish comes from trying to conform to cultural norms that come in conflict with our inherent tendencies and characteristics:

Just being alive is so much work… After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn’t work because they need the exercise and they’ve got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them even more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it’s too much work. But if you have the time for it, and if you need exercise — then you should do it. But you could really save yourself a lot of trouble either way by first figuring out whether you’re an energy-getter or an energy-loser. As I said, I’m an energy-loser. But I can understand it when I see people running around trying to get some. It’s just as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as for an unattractive person to have sex, so it’s helpful if the attractive people happen to get energy from sex and if the unattractive people happen to lose energy from sex, because then their wants will fit in with the direction that people are pushing them in.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol is a curious read in its entirety. Complement it with a graphic biography of Warhol, then see Alain de Botton on how to reconcile the paradoxes of sex.