Sexual Relations Should Center on Mutual Pleasure and Closeness

Sexual Relations Should Center on Mutual Pleasure and Closeness is a principle expressed first in Jubal Harshaw’s defense of Mike’s sexual ethic and later in Mike’s own account of what intimacy means. It rejects sex as an instrument of hurt or control and instead makes mutual happiness and growing closeness its measure. The principle’s sharpest distinction is not simply between restraint and freedom: it is between relationships shaped by jealousy and fear, and intimacy made possible by love, trust, and a willingness to share.

Definition and Ethical Basis

Jubal argues that sex ought to be a means of happiness, and that, at the least, it should bring pleasure rather than pain. He frames this as a basic ethical test: the worst feature of sex is its use to hurt one another, and there is no good reason for intimacy to become anything less than a source of shared well-being. His defense responds to the claim that Mike’s sexual code violates the laws and conventions of Earth. Rather than presenting conventional prohibition as proof of moral soundness, Jubal asks what its consequences are for people’s relationships.

In Jubal’s account, the commandment against coveting another person’s spouse has not eliminated desire. Instead, the attempt to suppress it coexists with adultery, jealousy, family conflict, and lasting harm. He distinguishes the inward experience of desire from a physical act: the social code, he argues, cannot plausibly be considered obeyed merely because people deny or conceal what they feel. The contrast sets up the rule’s central claim that intimacy should be judged by its effects on the people involved, not by the appearance of conformity to a restrictive convention.

Sharing, Trust, and Growing Closer

Mike’s alternative, as Jubal reports it, is that there is no need to covet another person’s wife when love can be shared. He presents love as something not diminished by being shared, and casts fear, guilt, hatred, and jealousy—not openness—as what people stand to lose. Jubal recognizes that this proposal appears radically naive against familiar social customs, but he uses the example of societies that once practiced more open sharing to question whether adopting conventional chastity and adultery necessarily brought improvement. His argument makes the rule a challenge to inherited assumptions about exclusivity rather than a claim that the surrounding world already accepts it.

The religious dimension follows from the same logic. Jubal argues that if Mike and his followers understand living beings as collectively divine, their sexual practices should not automatically be judged by rules made for ordinary mortals. On that account, the group’s sexual union expresses a movement from individuals into unity and back into plurality. Jubal reasons that exclusive pairings would contradict a creed that treats shared union as essential, and that concealing the union would misread a religious rite as something shameful. This is his interpretation of Mike’s teaching, offered in response to Ben Caxton’s discomfort; Ben admits that he may have misunderstood what he witnessed.

Mike’s Account of Human Intimacy

Later, Mike describes how his understanding developed through a comparison between the ideal and the patterns he sees among humans. He says the ideal should be a beautiful meeting of male and female, but that in human life it is often replaced by indifference, mechanical conduct, exploitation, fear, guilt, hatred, and violence. He also notes that children can be taught to regard sex as bad, shameful, or untrustworthy. In this account, the problem is not desire itself but the way social attitudes can reverse and deform what should be a source of happiness.

Mike identifies jealousy as the link among these harms. He says he still does not fully understand jealousy, but experiences it as a profound wrongness. When he first learned the pleasure of sexual union, his impulse was to share it with his water brothers: directly with female partners and indirectly by encouraging further sharing with male partners. Keeping the experience exclusively for himself did not occur to him as a desirable possibility. His explanation therefore makes generosity and shared intimacy central to the rule, rather than treating them as optional additions to an otherwise private bond.

Conditions and Significance

Mike’s account also places a clear condition on intimacy: sharing is grounded in love and trust. He says he cannot attempt physical love with a woman who has not already shared water with him. The water-sharing relationship is thus more than a ritual or social label in this explanation; it establishes the trust that makes sexual closeness possible. He describes the same principle as operating throughout the Nest, where intimacy depends on a prior blending of spirits as well as bodies. The rule does not, in this account, prescribe indiscriminate access; it links shared pleasure to an established relationship of mutual confidence.

Taken together, Jubal’s defense and Mike’s explanation give the rule both a social criticism and a spiritual structure. It opposes the familiar chain in which jealousy produces concealment, guilt, and harm, while presenting love and trust as conditions under which intimacy can become shared happiness. Its radicalism lies in challenging possessiveness as the presumed proof of love, but its governing measure remains mutuality: people should become closer through intimacy, not use it to injure, dominate, or isolate one another.