'Mere Christianity', bk 3, ch. 5

    "You can get an audience together for a strip-tease act -- that is, to watch a girl [or guy] undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theatre by simply bringing a covered plate onto the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon, would you not think that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the [sexual appetite] among us?
    ...everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much of food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titilations.
    ... Here is [another] point. You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food or to do things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare[*]. But perversions of the sex [appetite] are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful.
    ...Modern people are always saying 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.' They may mean two things. They may mean 'There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.' If they mean that, then they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if [humanity] had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is, would actually have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Chritianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body -- which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.' they may mean 'The state into which the sexual [appetite] has now got into is nothing to be ashamed of'.
    If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. there is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food: there would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time [fantasizing over] pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. ...We grow up surrounded by propaganda in favor of [inabstinance]. there are people who want to keep our [sexual appetite] inflamed in order to make money out of us. because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance." -- Mere Christianity, bk 3, ch. 5 





*However, I feel I ought to point out, as Lewis should have done here, that perversion in an appetite is not the same as excessive indulgence in an appetite. A sex-addict need not have a fetish, and someone with a fetish need not be addicted to sex; A glutton need not have pica syndrome, and a pica syndrome sufferer need not be a glutton.