You know what always cheers me up when I’m feeling down? Writing about sex.
Let me pose a question about Divine Providence: why did God make it so hard to be chaste? A typical man must, if he wants to avoid sin, endure more than a decade, sometimes more than two, of sexually mature celibacy before getting married. Then after marriage, his ability to enjoy his wife is (again assuming he wants to avoid sin) limited by how many children he can support. As a final cruelty, many wives lose sexual interest in their husbands shortly after marriage and refuse to sleep with them. (See these harrowing stories from Sunshine Mary, also Baumeister and Vohs’ shockingly honest–for academic writing–ruminations on sexual economics. I’ve also raised the issue before.) In today’s perverse world, it’s actually easier to get laid outside of marriage than in. Even those men (the majority) who don’t have women throwing opportunities for fornication at them must endure the constant temptations of pornography and masturbation. It seems like God is just setting men up to fail. (Women too, although they tend not to realize the gravity of the sexual sins to which they are prone: contraception, pornographic “romance fiction”, divorce, refusal to render the marriage debt…)
In fact, I think that lust per se is one of the less dangerous deadly sins, that is one that is least likely to get a person into hell on its own. Let us consider what I fear is a typical example of a teenage boy indulging in the solitary vice. My readers will know that I take a hard line on this sin; it is mortal, and if a piano were to fall out of the sky onto the boy’s head before he goes to confession, he will go straight to hell. On the other hand, I have pity for those in its clutches. The typical masturbator is most likely ashamed of his habit and would quit it except that years of absolute continence seems unendurable for him. And most likely heavy objects will not be falling out of the sky onto him, and he will have decades left of life. He may marry, but even if he doesn’t (or if he does and his wife shuts him out), his sexual cravings will become weaker with age. By forty or so, semi-permenant celibacy becomes fairly easy to endure. Rather than indulge a shameful but weakening appetite, how much sweeter is the appeal of virtuous dignity and reconciliation with a patient God.
For those men who live into middle age, lust finds itself at a greater and greater disadvantage. (I’m 36, and already it’s getting easier for me.) No man wants to be a slave of lust who isn’t one already. Our own sexual fantasies often seen silly and vulgar when we recount them in an unexcited mood. When not in the grip of lust, the Christian way of life seems more appealing to just about anyone. When fully reasonable, a man despises his pornographic materials and the contraptions he puts between himself and his wife. Human weakness is ultimately weak.
The key to the lustful man’s salvation is that he at least remain ashamed of himself during the decades when the fever is high. Today, unfortunately, sexual vice and perversion are championed by the ruling class. This adds a new temptation; a man can put aside his burden of duty and guilt any time by embracing sexual libertinism. This activates a much more dangerous deadly sin: pride. You’ll notice that the perverts don’t call their foul marches “Gay Lust” parades; they call them “Gay Pride” parades, and rightly so. Their purpose is to emancipate themselves from God, social propriety, and the natural law. They declare the body meaningless in itself, mere raw material to be used in whatever way best gratifies their desires. They expel all reverence before the mystery of natural meanings. Worst of all, they make war on the Church, using their control of the state and the media to persecute their enemies and to corrupt our children. If a man joins the sexual revolution, he will almost certainly be damned. Now it is not mere human weakness that separates him from God, but hard ideological conviction. He has declared as a matter of principle that he will stand with Satan and refuse to serve God and His order.
This raises the question of pastoral strategies. How should priests and spiritual guides (including the producers of culture) best approach sexual sins? We see already that some sexual sins are more dangerous than others, because some are easier to repent. We may wink at engaged couples who “jump the gun”, because they will probably reconcile themselves with the moral law soon enough. Similarly, we need not go after masturbation aggressively, because in most souls shame will eventually do our work for us anyway. Divorce and “remarriage” is probably the most dangerous sexual sin. The wife one abandoned will necessarily fade in the mind compared to the collaborator in adultery one sees every day. Especially if one has children with the second woman, the temptation to go along with society’s sham that one can promise exclusive lifelong fidelity to one woman after another will be nearly irresistible.
The other question is how much horror we should teach our children to have of sexual sins. I think the wise path is to lean toward laxity. Children must know that these are serious sins that imperil their immortal souls. If they have the impression that only extraordinarily wicked people indulge in them, though, they might be too ashamed to approach the confessional after a moment of weakness. Or else the thought of being a monstrous sinner will be unbearable for them, and they will escape from it by embracing the ideology of the Enemy. I would instead leave the impression that many people make an occasional slip on these matters. (Don’t say that “just about everybody” does it. We don’t want the successfully chaste to feel like there’s something weird about them. The impression to give is that many falter and many don’t.) The important thing when you fall is to pick yourself up, get right with God, and carry on a chaste life. The danger of this strategy is that some horny youngsters may take away the message that sexual sins aren’t really a big deal. Just have your fun and then reform before you die. This strategy is impious, but it’s not totally disconnected from reality. Many people do have youths of sexual abandon and then rectify themselves in time to avoid hellfire. The way to promote full chastity is to help our children come to love God, so that they wish to live in His presence and be pleasing to Him. I guess there’s no getting around that in any case.
The Orthosphere 
his sexual cravings will become weaker with age
Thankfully, it’s the same for women. What a relief! I used to be in such a frenzy of fertility that I sometimes thought I’d go mad. I felt like my IQ dropped 20 points during puberty and I’m just now getting it back.
It almost makes up for the deterioration of my appearance. Men find me less attractive, but I’m less inclined to care.
Maybe instead of doing cartwheels over how great Theology of the Body is Catholics could tune back into our great and vast tradition of heroic celibates? You know that first 1900 years of our Faith? Funny how all of the demands to return focus on the importance of the marriage “vocation” has done nothing to stop the decline in marriage rates and the concurrent decline morals associated with marriage these past 40ys.
Marriage is the lowest acceptable way of life. We should be encouraging celibacy first and foremost; only if they cannot successfully live that life then they should pursue marriage. It was Baudelaire who wisely stated, “Unable to do away with love, the Church found a way to decontaminate it by creating marriage.”
But what does he mean by “love”? I disagree with this stance completely, for why would God command us to “go forth and multiply” if He did not intend for us to reproduce in a manner of beauty? (Ah, this only makes me want to read Theology of Body. . . .) I see the family as a microcosm of the life of the Trinity. The human experience is so complex, and, although true friendship is transcendent, the expression between a man and a woman and the extension of that love in their children (as in, marriage) cannot be explained away simply as a means by which the Church was forced to handle the passions of the flesh. It doesn’t add up. Just think of the beauty of motherhood!
@caseydeann
I did not say you should not get married, to the contrary in fact. What I said was that marriage is less praiseworthy than celibacy. Marriage is important and God did say to go forth and multiply, no one is denying that. My point is that if we were to erect a hierarchy of desirable “lifestyles” celibacy would come first then marriage. Baudelaire was being a little more negative than me but made basically the same point. Marriage was made sacred so that love, and the acts which are meant to be an expression thereof, were “decontaminated”. He basically viewed such intimacy as repulsive “The act of love strongly resembles torture or surgery.” Which would explain his negative views even towards love.
GOD created marriage not the church. Without marriage, there would be no church.
I doubt sexually promiscuous people spend much time reading Theology of the Body.
I actually find Theology of the Body to be rather depressing. I couldn’t finish reading it because it gave me performance anxiety, so I can only imagine how male readers react to it.
I haven’t read any of the material just observed people who seem to obsessed over TOB. From what I can tell these people use it to justify pretty much anything as having the stamp of approval of JPII. Again most of this is probably John Paul the Clown’s fault for being ambiguous and encouraging modernism through his own incompetence. The worst Pope in history.
“Our own sexual fantasies often seen silly and vulgar when we recount them in an unexcited mood.”
Ha ha! Too true. I laughed for a good while. It’s quite fascinating to ponder on the nature of the passions. While outside of temptation, they seem so undesirable, as if they should be so easy to walk away from. But in those moments, one wants nothing more than to acquiesce. The shameful part comes afterwards, when one realizes how fleeting and eternally useless the pleasure was after all. To make the mindful resolution to reject the desires of the flesh requires a lot of willpower. Excluding cases of prior addiction, chastity is actually easy (I think) as long as one doesn’t step into the situations that foster temptation. That’s what we need to teach our children. Of course, that becomes one of the most difficult tasks once society throws out all the social conventions concerning decency.
I was already on a website of Baudelaire quotes and this one fit your post so what the heck. “What matters an eternity of damnation to someone who has found in one second the infinity of joy?”
The problem is not so much that you could step into bad situations but that people who feel lonely, abandoned, neglected, even abused, will seek these bad situations to alleviate their sadness and get that moment of excitement and forgetfulness.
Someone could immediately respond that one should seek God instead and sit down to pray or something. Then there are a few problems. First one being that there is already some guilt and shame so it is often tempting to “just go through with it” or “I am on the run already anyway”.
The second one is that prayer, even though it often calms you down, is not always guaranteed to do that. The third one is that the original motivation, the anxiety or depression, often does not fix itself easily no matter which way you choose. Maybe giving in to temptation is a slow downward spiral and prayer is a slow upward spiral. But the key word here is slow. And people who are chronically lonely and neglected are usually also impatient.
With respect to your question about Divine Providence, one could just as well ask why God made it so easy to get drunk, or so hard to pay attention to the homely. Sin is almost always the broad, smooth, downhill path. It’s what we do when we’re not trying to do something else.
But you are right to say that lust seems to be in a class by itself. It is at once terrible and ludicrous, destroying lives and inciting the most ridiculous antics. Hardly a day passes without the local paper reporting that lust has made another wretched fellow into a monster or a fool.
I think your final suggestion is a good one. Young people should be taught to control their sex drive, but we should not downplay the difficulty of doing so. I think we should spend more time talking about why it is unwise to stoke the furnace of lust and how to shut the dampers and bank the coals.
why did God make it so hard to be chaste?
I’m actually not sure that he did. It seems to me that mankind has, since the Creation (whenever you want to date that), undergone evolutionary selection for men with higher sexual drive. It’s entirely plausible to me that the average man in the mists of time had a lower sexual appetite than men today.
I am just an amateur as a psychologist. But I actually do not believe that human sex drive, for the most part, is biological. The sex drive many are struggling with these days is not about sex per se but an attempt to substitute sex for love. Why men are thought to have a stronger sex drive is because the male role requires you to be more independent and self-contained. A female is generally permitted to desire closeness, tenderness, protection and care. Also, you do not need much sex drive to make a woman pregnant, so I think the argument from evolution fails there.
It’s actually the precise opposite. Men’s libidos are steadily decreasing, along with their testosterone levels and sperm counts. Japan is the country most famous for this, but it is something that can be observed in all OECD nations, and is an effect independent of rising obesity rates or even stress. Men even look less masculine today than they used to, and women seem to be actively selecting for male baby-faces, which are a true indicator for lower testosterone levels.
It used to be that men would demand sex from their wives, on a rather frequent basis, but if she now isn’t presenting herself wrapped in cellophane and sporting 5″ red heels while dancing the tango, he’ll just shrug his shoulders and play some video games instead. There is a reason, after all, why so many wives resort to reading Twilight novels while munching on cupcakes. Women love to be chased and ravished by their husbands, and men don’t really do that anymore — partially because they are cowed by feminism, partially because they just can’t be bothered.
The gap between male frigidity and female frigidity has narrowed considerably.
It also used to be that there was no such thing as marital rape…
Yeah, that didn’t help any.
Yes, but that is a microphenomenon of the past fifty to a hundred years (maybe several hundred years). I’m talking about the grand sweep of human descent from the first Man until now.
My hypothesis could be wrong, of course, but I do think that a lot of the sociosexual foolishness we see is a result of the original, *proper* desires being distorted by the Fall and subsequent human evolution. (So that, for instance, the reason it seems objectively “wrong” and “broken” to see a beautiful woman attracted to a slimy but silver-tongued cad is that it actually is an error in the system, so to speak, and represents a *distortion* of the original female drive to desire a high-quality mate. The angst over “hypergamy” is reasonable because the current pattern of female hypergamy is an unnatural distortion of the proper, original pattern).
I must be an outlier, but when married I was always desirous of the wife. Being celibate hurts.
I know that it is my situation now unless I remarry (Bonald, the Westminster Confession allows remarriage if the covenant is broken — but limits the grounds to adultery & abandonment, with a warning not to let the canon lawyers expand this).
But I miss the physicality of marriage.
Excellent points. As much as we talk about how much feminism is emasculating men, it’s also true that our toxin-filled world is doing a good job of it also, as well as creating more manly women.
It’s also true that children are reaching puberty at a much younger age because of what they eat, and they grow much bigger. This means they become sexually aware and mature much sooner, even as our society coddles them to shirk the responsibilities of adulthood for much longer. When I was young, most kids got interested in sex in high school and were married within a few years. Today, kids must think about sex from middle school, but no one expects them to be married much before mid-20’s. So we’ve opened the celibacy gap from a few years to more than a decade. During this time, kids tend to do all the sexual experimenting they please, so that marriage no longer holds any special mystery. Even most couples who do marry have little to discover about their partners after marriage. Couple this with decreasing libido, and there is little wonder that marriages are lacking.
However, the marriage vow, if taken seriously, says “to love”, not “to be in love (lust).” Marriages fail because lust is selfish. Love is a giving of oneself, selfless. What else can explain loving couples in their 5th and sixth decade of marriage, when, often, the lust is long gone.
One should feel guilt for violating God’s laws. That is what drives them to repentance and saves them. That humans will fail is inevitable. That we do not minimize the sin is paramount. That we understand the depths of God’s grace and live in his forgiveness is essential.
@Alte
You forgot to mention porn as a contributing factor to growing male indifference. And not just hardcore porn, but our entire pornographic culture.
Also, because our society is an emasculating one with almost no outlets for masculinity or masculine pursuits (especially in urban areas), its often a psychological struggle for even the most masculine men to feel virile. I struggle with this myself (and I’m only 24, with a high sex drive).
As always, feminism is of the devil.
Ambient porn. Yes, that’s also a wonderful improvement. I’ve unfortunately had to join the ranks of married women who have realized that trying to compete with the Parade o’Sterile Skanks is a fool’s errand.
A typical man must, if he wants to avoid sin, endure more than a decade, sometimes more than two, of sexually mature celibacy before getting married.
There is no “must” about this. The rising age of first marriages is the product of liberal social engineering.
“It seems like God is just setting men up to fail.”
God has nothing to do with it. God did not create liberalism or the modern state.
You would be exactly on the mark if you said Satan has made it hard to avoid sin and is setting men up to fail.
I agree wholeheartedly. Society has changed what used to be a window of a few years between awareness and marriage into decades by its insistence that everyone get a college degree and maybe some money first. It inculcates this selfish tendency not to “settle down too soon.” Also, food additives have caused children to be sexually functioning four to six years earlier, while, at the same time, emotional maturity has been stunted. It is said that the average 12 year today has the body of a 16 year old and the mind of an 8 year old compared to 40 years ago. Add this to the constant societal programing about sex, and it’s not hard to see why things are out of control.
bonald wrote:
It isn’t just cruelty, it is sin. First Corinthians 7:5 instructs us:
If a woman does that which the Bible says do not, she is sinning against both her husband and God. Her husband should insist that she repent on her knees before him and the Lord.
It certainly is the most destructive in terms of earthly consequences.
Alte wrote:
This is interesting to me. I observed this last week and wondered about it. I had taken some of my children to swimming lessons at a nearby community recreation center and noticed that the twenty-something male instructors were oddly feminine. They didn’t seem gay to me, but they had wispy body hair, narrow shoulder, paunchy abdomens, and higher-pitched voices. I found it unattractive; why would women be actively selecting for low-testosterone men?
-sunshinemary
They’re more attentive lovers and make better fathers, on average. Women still prefer to have sex with more physically masculine men, but they are more inclined to marry the feminine-looking ones, so that’s who’s winning the reproductive race.
The Economist reported on it correllating with lower levels of infectious disease, too.
It’s hormones in the food supply, that stay in the meat and dairy products our young boys then eat. Same thing is happening in all sorts of animal species, where there are no liberals or feminists to be found.
This might be interesting for you all: Recent Developments in Ideology Research It discusses the physiological differences between people of liberal and conservative temperaments. To sum it up, conservatives are the ants and liberals are the grasshoppers.
I’d love to see research into liberal/conservative men’s testosterone levels, but I’m thinking you’d have trouble getting funding for that, as the results would probably end up with headlines like, “Study proves liberals are a bunch of girly men.” We also know that urbanisation is actually a side-effect of androgyny (that more emo men and more butch women have a preference for urban areas — the men because they are more “sociable” and less territorial, the women because they are less timid and enjoy anonymity), and the liberal/conservative divide is actually a urban/liberal divide. Likewise, having higher visual-spatial skills (related to elevated testosterone levels) is associated with a more binary morality system, as is common in the Abrahamic religions. And so on.
In other words, even though conservatives have more children, if those children are a bunch of manly girls and girly men, they’ll struggle to pass on their traditions. So a healthy diet (no hormone-warping junk food and low carb for boys), encourage physical fitness (especially in boys), environmental conservation (keeping industry from poisoning the groundwater), and keeping fathers in the home (affects hormonal balance in children) need to be three major priorities for conservatives.
I suspect that one major reason why liberals balk at the idea of complementarianism is that they are more biologically androgynous. They are simply not as complementary as we are, by their very nature. The mental and physical difference between the sexes is simply greater, at the conservative end of the spectrum.
That is why, when conservatives say things that other conservatives take for granted, like, “Women should be protected,” liberals act like we’re from a different planet. That sort of protective instinct in males is related to territorialism (testosterone levels), and the urge to be protected is related to timidity in women (estrogen levels), so they very well may have absolutely no idea why we feel that way. They can’t relate at all. And they chalk it up to us just being a throwback to the 1950s… when there was more physiological differences between the sexes.
Just sort of rambling here now. LOL Sorry. I should have moved this over to my own blog.
Since I’ve already completely derailed the thread, here’s one more link:
On One Hand You’re an Authoritarian, on the Other Hand You’re Not
Background info: lower interhemispheric interaction creates a mind that operates more on the logical level and less on the emotional level. The really fascinating thing is that conservatives seem to have more androgynous minds (both leaning masculine) but higher physiological difference, with liberals their minds are also more similar (both leaning feminine) but with lower physiological differences.
And now I’ll stop boring everyone with my girlish nerdiness.
I suspect that one major reason why liberals balk at the idea of complementarianism is that they are more biologically androgynous. They are simply not as complementary as we are, by their very nature. The mental and physical difference between the sexes is simply greater, at the conservative end of the spectrum.
This is a very interesting idea, but I think there’s also another factor at work, and that is the cultural debasement of ideas of masculinity and femininity.
I have liberal views on gender roles (which I’ve blogged about a lot in the past). Perhaps this has something to do with my biology, but it also has something to do with the fact that my society and culture has never offered me a male role that I can embrace and identify with. Instead, it has offered me the opportunity to be a crude caricature of a man – drinking beer, watching football, being emotionally retarded and treating women like sex objects. Why would I want to buy into that?
I’m about the same age as Bonald, and I feel that I’ve never been offered a fully three-dimensional way of being a man – a way that involves being strong and loving, intellectually and emotionally intelligent, protective and sensitive. When I’m confronted with the crude, rigid ideas of gender found in popular culture (the imbecilic Sex and the City comes to mind here, though the likes of Friends are just as bad in a way), I’m inclined to warm to the feminist view of things, which at least accepts the diversity of real men and real women.
Since I am ambidextrous, I should be a wimp and a liberal. Brings up and interesting question: what is a liberal? And what is authoritarian? If the answer to being liberal is “live and let live”, then I would say that I am not. If it is to be compassionate, then I am. But, if part of compassion is to allow people to live in unhealthy ways, then I would say I’m more of an authoritarian and less compassionate.
God took a bunch of timid men and made them the apostles. Some of them were fiery by nature, and others not. None of them had enough huevos to face death for the Gospel until he gave it to them. In the end, I think one’s leanings are more dependent upon one’s programming than one’s genetics.
“A typical man must, if he wants to avoid sin, endure more than a decade, sometimes more than two, of sexually mature celibacy before getting married.”
Your answer is that this is only a modern problem. People used to marry young.
BTW, the hard part of staying chaste is that it makes it harder to marry (for a man). Women don’t respond well to older virgins in great part because they have very little experience with women (its one of those rich get richer things).
If you want to secure a good wife these you almost have to fuck her before marriage. And if your getting up there in age (say 30) its best to have had at least a couple of partners. Otherwise you are likely to be extremely awkward, have terrible seduction skills, and be a very bad judge of women.
I wonder if arranged marriages in the western tradition aren’t truly superior, even on the supposedly secular standard.
Yikes! I’m doomed!
I suppose I could prove you wrong, but then I couldn’t save myself for marriage 😉
Or you might step outside your nonsense a moment and realize that there is no moral and that it is all just a bunch of stuff that happened. False god, false christ, nonsenses all the way down. Weakling straight males weakly straddling the performance of masculinity in a contemporarily feminized christianity, when the only proper project is to chuck abrahamic relgion in toto.
Can we crusade against the muslims together?
How could we possibly trust you not to sack Constantinople?
I tried stepping out. Have you followed the logic of stepping out of logic?
Can we crusade against the muslims together?
Can we oppose no-fault divorce together? Gay marriage, abortion and intentional chemical infertility? Government indoctrination? Leftist control of every major propaganda organ? Don’t *YOU* want to marry a virgin?
If so, perhaps. If not, you’ll make great fodder for the muslims.
Can we crusade against the muslims together?
Liberals are far worse than muslims. Liberalism is a cancer which is killing the white population. So I would say that anything is better than liberalism, as anything is better than death. Liberalism does not propose a viable path forward, it offers no future, only death.
Why are muslims a problem anyway? Well … because liberal leftists let them in. So liberalism created this problem, like all other ones.
So no, thanks, I’m not doing anything together with liberals, those that embrace the philosophy of suicide. I’d rather let the muslims take over. At least then with liberalism is out of the way we can start a reconquest. It will be a better position then now, with liberalism blocking every non-suicidal course of action.
As says the masthead to Lydia McGrew’s blog, we must stand against both enemies: Liberalism and Islam.
Pingback: Girly men versus nerdy girls « Traditional Christianity
I am not sure, Alte, if what you are seeing is a consequence of US society decline or not.
This afternoon I was reading Spengler. He pointed out that the US liberation or conquering of countries generally turns them into a society that no longer has the confidence to have children… and from Lithuania to Germany to Japan the fertility ratio is now less than one child per woman.
This existential lack of confidence may be affecting the US as well. It is fairly clear that if you have any ability to avoid risk, you should avoid the US family court system (that intrudes into all American families, whether they want it to or not).
I would expect that would lead to effeminate, unfit men with little confidence. You need to have a spine, some confidence, some character, to woo.
Porn? Meh. The quality has dropped (we no longer make women with bodies like Norma Jean’s). But cheesecake pinups did the same thing, as did greek statues in ancient times.
Pingback: The sin of Corinth. | Dark Brightness
The Christian man may take the wifely refusal in a positive way– as an opportunity to practice Mortification of the Flesh which a modern Christian is otherwise not inclined to.
Then after marriage, his ability to enjoy his wife is (again assuming he wants to avoid sin) limited by how many children he can support.
It looks like that you are not familiar with calendar-based fertility control: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar-based_contraceptive_methods
Also, even actually trying, it is not always so easy to get pregnant and even when pregnant 20% of the times results in natural misscariage in the first 3 months, so I’d say that one can very easily aim at 4 or 5 children without condom, nor pills. And I doubt that anyone that works cannot support 4 or 5 children.
Also the whole talk about not being able to support too many children is ridiculous. My great-grandmothers had each 12 to 14 children, and no problem supporting them. I’m richer than they were, so why would it be a problem for me and for them no problem?
Pingback: Does this match your experience? « The Orthosphere
Because God wanted (or wants) people to marry young, that’s why, and have lots of children. This was necessary for the mankind to survive during most of the history, before modern medicine and contraceptives.
If God had wanted people to marry when they are thirty-somethings, childhood would have lasted until the early thirties.
Young marriage has been the norm for most of the history of the humanity. Now, Christian boys and girls are asked to be celibate during their most fertile years, when hormone levels are highest. It is a recipe for sin.
Now, when people get married, they have a lot of experience in sex, declining hormone levels, past partners to compare their spouse to. They are jaded, this is why women lose interest.
But if you were the only sexual partner of your wife and both of you were in your teens, there would be no shortage of sex inside marriage.
My great-grandmother married very young and had 9 surviving children (so she was not a prude). She was very devout of the Virgin Mary and she used to pray a lot. My sister married when she was 33 y.o. and had only one daughter. So you see the difference.
Marriage itself is a form of chastity. Not celibacy, of course, but chastity.
Pingback: Lightning Round – 2012/11/28 « Free Northerner