Its basic theme can be expressed as follows: the most personal and intimate meaning of erotic life is destroyed by the forms in which our culture has reified and trapped it. Marriage, which is entered for a thousand nonerotic reasons, is destroyed from within by a thousand unyielding traditions and legalized cruelties; where it is not wrecked, it loses all individuality and leads to stagnation. Prostitution has almost turned into a legal institution which forces the erotic life of young people into a dishonorable direction which contradicts and caricatures its innermost nature. Marriage and prostitution alike appear as oppressive forms which thwart immediate and genuine life.

XREF: Echoes Marcuse's and the Frankfurt School's critique of institutionalized repression of sexuality, and Reich's arguments about marriage as a bourgeois institution.

Georg Simmel, on individuality and social…, loc. 862