Book 2 Chapters 3-6 "Pleasure and Knowledge"

"When you make love you are using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All the marching up and down and cheering and waving your flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should get excited about Big Brother and the Three Year Plans and the Two Minute Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?" (Book 2 Chapter 3, page 110-111)


This quote comes from Book 2 Chapter 3, this talk comes up pretty early in chapter 3 during one of the usual talks between Winston and Julia. At this specific moment, Winston and Julia are on the topic of Winston's past experience with his wife Katherine and what his married life was like, it is then that Winston mentions how he could not stand how she would always reference intercourse as 'their duty to the party'. It is here that Julia mentions something important: that the mantra that intercourse is the citizens 'duty to the party' is basically rubbed into them for years. She even goes beyond it to basically give her thoughts on the matter and that is that the Party does not want them to actually enjoy it. They do not want them to view intercourse as something besides 'a duty to the party' due to the fact that they cannot control them if they were to take actual pleasure in it. Like every other thing, the Party wants complete control of everything and that is why this quote really stood out to me.
Something that is very apparent is like always the Party has a reason behind everything they say, so it should come to no surprise that they had ulterior motives when they would tell people that intercourse is mere ' a duty to the party'. By painting it in this aspect people view it in a different light, instead of thinking it is something they can choose to do or not do, they are seeing this as a chore. By making the citizens believe that it is a chore they are less likely to actually enjoy what they are doing, thus they are able to keep their citizens in control.
Along with this new view that we get about intercourse, we are able to see a good point that Julia raises: if they spent their energy on intercourse and are then self-satisfied then they wouldn't waste their energy on arbitrary things like Big Brother, Two-Minute Hate, etc. This is something that I found very interesting because it seems that the Party wants their citizen's full devotion to the Party yet by basically denying them of pleasure it seems to show that they are in a way admitting that if given the option people might not care about such things because they would be self-satisfied. This is an interesting thing because it allows us to see why they are depriving their citizens of basic pleasures: good food, free social interaction, enjoyment of intercourse and being able to do it freely. By depriving them they are causing them to get riled up (have energy or use their pent-up emotions) on things beneficial to the motives of the Party
To put it all together, we get a deeper understanding of how the Party thinks when Julia mentions why intercourse is talked about the way it is, to basically get the citizens to view it as only a chore, 'a duty' so that people do not actually take pleasure in it. This allows the Party to utilize their extra 'energy' they are not using to further the motive (propaganda) of the Party.
*Also I would like to mention another quote very briefly that I very much enjoyed which was :

"Sometimes he talked to her of the Records Department and the impudent forgeries that he committed there. Such things did not appear to horrify her. She did not feel the abyss opening beneath her feet at the thought of the lies becoming truths. He told her the story of Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford and the momentous slip of paper which he had once held between his fingers. It did not make much impression on her. At first, she failed to grasp the point of the story." (Book 2 Chapter 5, page 128)

This raises an important issue, Julia- someone younger than his who has not experienced some of the things he was able to have a child- do not understand the importance of what he is saying. If others were to have the same mentality as her it makes it very conceivable that people know most of what the are told is fake, but could not actually care less about the issue of constantly re-writing history to make Oceania look good. In dictatorships nowadays (like North Korea) we see that the same thing happens and it causes people to be completely brainwashed because they are only told what the government wants them to know, allowing them to have more control of their people because they believe that their government is this almighty being. That the government is so amazing for accomplishing so much, so when we see people have the mindset of Julia it is very disturbing, her leniency towards this should not be so because it is just feeding into the favor of the Party because people are just accepting lies because they feel as though it would change anything.That is why I also wanted to briefly mention this quote as well because it is an important topic that should also be addressed.