Orwell, George — Nineteen eighty-four [515]

With Julia, everything came back to her own sexuality. As soon as this was touched upon in any way she was capable of great acuteness. Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. — Orwell, George, Nineteen eighty-four, 515

Note

Here the panoptic model extends inward: the Party does not just watch bodies, it engineers their desires — privation manufactured to convert libido into political fervor. Julia ‘grasps’ the mechanism intuitively rather than theoretically, which the narrator marks as her peculiar acuteness.