Much has been written about sex as gender, and about sexuality, in Lawrence, but what about sex itself? A commitment to consummate sexual experience is the central element of Lawrence's writing and philosophy. In ‘The Real Thing’, his 1927 diatribe against the women's movement, he writes,

Full sexuality is, however, dependent upon the achieved individual sexual identities of the two players as man and woman. As I argued in chapter 3, feminist cultural critique partly cut its teeth on readings of Lawrence as exemplary literary misogynist. This has meant that all subsequent analysis of Lawrence, even vehemently anti-feminist or ostensibly apolitical readings, must engage in some sort of defensive evasion of the early feminist case. However, more recent psychoanalytically informed analyses, or work drawing upon gay theory, have argued for a much more sexually contradictory Lawrence than this rather monolithic masculine monster. Rather than oppose with a countervailing critique, we might instead read Lawrence against himself. There is a desperation in his polemicizing, in his insistent assertion of the strictures of roles. All of his work can be read as an anxious investigation of how the messiness of existence fails to fit into a neatly organized system of binary qualities, however hard Lawrence at times might want to make the system stick. I began chapter 3 with a quote from Fantasia of the Unconscious on the difference of men and women. Lawrence continues a little later: