Alienated Lovers

…Contraception allows sexual partners to go through the motions of being intimate without their being truly intimate, that is, unreservedly and unconditionally so. The fact that contraception is perfectly in accord with the dominant tone of an alienated society (p.41) means that the general populace scarcely notices its intrusion upon their intimacy, although it cannot help but notice the consequences of this intrusion in the trivialization of sex, the weakening of the marital bond, the increase in infidelity, the decline in the birth rate, and the sharp rise in the rate of women who conceive and abort unwanted offspring.

An intriguing example of how oblivious a person can be to the processes of alienation is brought to light in a letter to Abigail Van Buren, America's most popular advisor to the lovelorn. An unusual feature on this occasion is that although the letter was published, Dear Abby could not think of any way to respond to it.

I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It's getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don't know him well enough to discuss money with him.6

The "liberated" woman is somehow more confident that she can communicate better with a stranger than she can with her live-in 'lover'. She is oblivious to her own inner alienation, how her verbal and sexual modes of communication are separated from each other.
What appears to bother her most is not her own personal disorder, the illusion that she is "liberated", or that her most trusted confidante is a person who does not know her, but that she is paying too much for contraception.