It is not sex that gives the pleasure but the lover.

The line shifts emphasis from the mechanics or category of sex to the relational, emotional, and imaginative presence of the person involved. Pleasure, in this view, is not produced by an act in the abstract but by the lover—by attentiveness, intimacy, trust, desire, and the particularity of a shared connection. Read in the context of Piercy’s broader feminist and humanist concerns, the sentiment also resists reductive or commodified ideas of sexuality, insisting that erotic fulfillment is inseparable from mutual recognition and care. It can be taken as a critique of depersonalized sex and a defense of embodied, reciprocal love.