April 26, 2021
If you grew up in the Church and purity culture, then you remember being taught by old men who thought they exuded wisdom that women should make sure to cover their bodies so that they wouldn’t tempt their brothers in Christ. This teaching implied that it was the woman’s responsibility to protect the man from his lustful thoughts. It also subtly implied to the men that they didn’t really need to take responsibility for their own lustful thoughts.
Why is it that the Church thinks men can’t control their lust?
Because Christian men can’t control their lust.
GASP!
“Uh, excuse me. What the fuck did you just say? Christian men can’t control their lust? How dare you perpetuate the same vile teachings as purity culture!”
Relax. I’ll walk you through this.
It’s helpful to think of lust, arousal, attraction, etc. as sexual energy. As you know from personal experience, sexual energy is very powerful, and when it starts stirring, you definitely know it.
What does energy do? It flows.
Energy can’t not flow. If an outside entity forcibly blocks energy from flowing, then usually bad things happen.
Emotions are energy in motion (E-motion). If you’re around someone experiencing good emotions, that energy will transfer to you, and it’ll lift your mood. If you’re around someone experiencing a bad emotion, that energy will also transfer to you, bumming you out.
This is easily illustrated with anger. You’re familiar with the phrase, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” It describes the unfortunate situation when someone completely loses their shit (releasing anger energy) over something that seems so small and inconsequential. To an outside observer, it seems like an over reaction. But the person who freaked out has actually been getting pissed off at many things over a long period of time. For reasons that could be quite numerous, they chose to repress that anger. They never let it flow in a healthy way. It built up. So when that small thing happened, that was the breaking the point. They could no longer keep it repressed. It burst forth like a broken fire hydrant.
This same thing happens with sex energy. I’d even say that sex energy is some of the most powerful energy that humans work with.
Sex energy needs to flow. If it doesn’t and gets repressed and built up, then it will come out somewhere, and like our friend who lost his shit, it’ll probably come out in a way that no one wants it to come out.
Who makes it a regular habit to repress their sexuality and sex energy? Christians.
For some reason, Christians still think they can just repress their sexuality and that it’ll just “go away.” That isn’t true. Repression doesn’t work and it never has.
A Christian man’s sexuality isn’t just some thing that he stores in a Jesus-shaped box until his wedding night. It’s energy that needs to flow. And flow it will, one way or another. So if he isn’t having sex with someone, then it’s going to flow out in other ways. The sex energy will be diverted.
The most common diversion for Christian men is porn and masturbation. But both porn and masturbation are also off limits for the practicing Christian. So on top of suppressing his sex drive, he now busies himself with forcing away his desire to watch porn and masturbate. It’s like those cartoons where the boat springs a leak so the guy plugs the hole with his finger only for another leak to bust through on the other side of the boat.
The forced blockage of flowing sex energy can divert in many other ways that could possibly cause harm to the man, others, or most disastrously (so he thinks), his “witness.”:
- Intense flirting.
- Sexting.
- Hiring escorts.
- Turning to more extreme, perhaps illegal kinds of porn.
Of course, none of those are allowed for a Christian man either. So what the hell is a fella to do?
Well, that just illustrates the obvious problem. Any Christian pastor who gets up on stage and preaches about sexual purity and abstaining from sex until marriage has their sex energy flowing out somewhere. The only way I would believe that it wasn’t flowing out is if he walked around in a tense, frustrated rage all the time. But how many pastors do that? Exactly. He’s getting off somewhere.
Returning to my original point, Christian men can’t control their lust. When they try to prevent their sex energy from flowing, then it diverts out in uncontrollable ways, usually in the form of compulsions. By definition, this compulsion is something they don’t necessarily want to do but can’t stop themselves from doing.
Let’s bring this full circle so you don’t think I’m actually letting Christian men off the hook. While I don’t believe Christian men can control their lust, I also believe that this condition they’re living in is entirely their own fault. They can say it’s God’s command to be chaste, but God doesn’t exist, so really they’re the ones putting all this pressure on their own selves to block the flow of their sex energy. This is once again another area where Christians are refusing to take responsibility.
I’m not sure how many sex scandals need to happen in the Church before these men finally wake up and realize that sex energy is meant to flow in a healthy way and not be forcibly blocked.