When I was in college, a 19 year old with raging hormones struggling to keep a lid on my sexuality, I complained to our campus priest how hard it was to be chaste, how my sexuality felt like a curse. "Rob," he said, "thank God for the gift of your sexuality. Never curse it, because it truly is a gift."
I have for the most part learned about sex through trial, error, and here say. It wasn't until I became Catholic that I learned there is an order and purpose to sex--a theology if you will; that it truly is a gift from God Himself; and that its expression within marriage is one of the most powerful and creative experiences of how God intimately communicates His love for us in covenant.
How to live out your sexuality as a man in the nuts and bolts of everyday married life, however, is as earthy as it is lofty. I've never heard any homilies or sermons about it; it rarely comes up in conversation. So I decided to write about it, from my experience as a Catholic man.
- In God's spiritual economy, sex is reserved for marriage--the only kosher place for its expression
- Sex is intended for pleasure/bonding (unitive) and baby makin (procreative)
- Jesus set a new standard for sexual purity--"I tell you anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart" (Mt 5:28)
Hopefully this sets the stage for talking about sex from a male perspective in the appropriate context, and that no one is scandalized by reading it. I want to do so by breaking it down into three parts as it pertains to: 1) the eyes; 2) the mind; 3) the body
The Eyes
It is written in scripture that "The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light" (Mt 6:22). For men, everything starts with the eyes. It is no exageration that men are visual; I think women tend to underestimate men's capacity to exploit what we see as it relates to our sexual faculties. All men, however, know this. The 'first look' is what gets men in trouble. King David got a glimse of Bathseba, the wife of Uriah, bathing on the roof and it was all downhill from there (2 Sam 11).
A few years ago someone gave me a copy of "Every Man's Battle" by Fred Stoeker which describes a technique called 'bouncing the eyes'. It has been really helpful, practical advice, and I would recommend it to any man. I started practicing it and realized that by cutting off visual stimuli before it has a chance to take root in the mind, the propensity towards sexual sin was drastically lessened.
So, you are walking down the street and catch a look at a boob or a buttcheek or whatever: bounce the eyes. You see something on a webpage that causes you to get arroused: bounce the eyes. It takes practice (because the first inclination is to latch on to the image) but eventually practice makes permanent in the form of habit. Bounce the eyes.
The Mind
So the eyes are the keyhole into the mind. The mind, then, fabricates the scenario using the visual props picked up throughout the day and stored for later as the actors. The scenario plays out in a kind of virtual reality. This is the adultery in lust that Jesus speaks about. I don't know if fantasies that crop up in the mind can ever be totally avoided in the subconscious, but they do not have to be willfully entertained. Again, when they are given permission to take root, the battle for sexual purity is kind of already lost. Because sexual fanstasy thrives on the 'new' and 'variety is the spice of life', the temptation is to entertain fantasy about anyone other than your wife. It could be the teller at the bank or an actress or a porn star. So you are 'using' this stranger for sexual self-gratification, to whom you have no right to be engaged with, in the mind, and ususally discarding them later.
By nature, fantasy is an escape from reality. Everything is free game. But what to do about what Jesus said about 'lusting with the heart?' Can he be serious?? Yes, I think he is serious that we as men are not to fanasize or lust after anyone but our own wives. And so it is off limits, something to which we have no right, and must be regarded like that. I usually know when an inopportune fantasy is taking me away from the present. When that happens I am severely handicapped if I entertain it, for my resolve gets exponentially weakened.
Why do we escape into fantasy? Because we are not happy with our real life or our real wife. Maybe she is not respecting me, not satisfying my needs, getting on my case about this or that, maybe she is wearing yoga pants and a hooded sweatshirt and bristles at my touch. Maybe I am stressed and need an outlet. Whatever the reason, we are not happy with things as they are. Fantasy is a dangerous game, though--it tends to one up itself, not satisfied with good enough. If we do not realize that we have no right to be satisfied, no right to look outside our vows, no right to another woman, the temptation to entertain fantasy will always be tantalizing, promising fullfilment, like a carrot in front of a donkey. It needs to be taken off the table, completely.
As men, when we invite other women to make a virtual home in our minds and hearts, whether its through casual glances or explicit viewing of pornography, we bring them into the marriage bed with us. Strangers become a part of the most intimate of marriage experiences. When one is having sex with their spouse and fantasizing about or imagining someone else, something is wrong, something is off, amiss. For me this is the most dangerous part of pornography--that a stranger in invited to supplant themselves in the most God-honored, intimate relationship and act there is--that between husband and wife. It is not harmless and not victimless. It pollutes the very essence of marital relations.
The Body
Let's move into our bodies, shall we? Men by their very biology move out from themselves, sexually speaking. Their gentialia is exterior to their bodies, refered to sometimes jokingly as 'he' or 'it'. We release sperm...it's what we do, what we were meant to do to reproduce. When we do, another two or three days (or two or three hours if we are in our teens or twenties) our bodies are ready to do it again. Til we die.
So, it can be a struggle to master the body. Augustine wrote about it in Confessions a lot, wrestled with it. It starts with the eyes, moves to the mind, and manifests in the body and how we handle our genitals. Masturbation may seem like an inevitable solution to how we handle sexual frustration ("it's just what guys do"), but I can tell you it doesn't have to be. It has probably been a good couple years since I have, but that only came into practice by recognizing that:
a) I had no right to self-gratification in that way;
b) it robbed my wife of intimacy that is rightfully hers;
c) as in fasting, we have the capacity to master and train our bodies--we are not animals and no one has a gun to our head forcing us to masturbate;
d) masturbation for men almost always involves visual stimuli, the lusting of the heart Jesus is talking about, which is a sin.
There is an interesting thing that comes with keeping your eyes off other women, your mind in reality, and you hands off yourself, though: you start to really get focused on your wife. In starving (rather than sating) your eyes, your eyes respond by seeking out a target. In keeping your mind unpolluted and roping it off from other women entering, your wife is the sole recipient of your fantasies. In keeping your hands off yourself, you are not wasting your seed on anything but what it is intentioned for, and you are pretty much ready to go.
It is ultimately satisfying to have a singular focus--your wife, the rightful heir to your body--and to focus all your sexual energy on her, and honor God in the process. You have more sex, more often, it's pretty gratifying, and performance is rarely an issue. There's no nagging guilt, no shame. It is intimate, because it is just the two of you--no strangers, no disconnect. When you do abstain, it is an appropriate season "a time to embrace and a time to shun embracing" (Ecc 3:5). When life comes from the act, it is seen as the "fruit of the womb," a blessing to be celebrated, a gift from God Himself, not something that went wrong but something that went right.
Sex is like fire. It hold power to warm, to cook, to power things, but also the capacity to get out of control, to destroy and consume if not respected, not handled properly. God knows all this; we are the ones that muck it up stumbling around in the wilderness. We are the ones that get burned.
Why do I write all this? It's not to tout or anything like that, but simply to show what is possible when we follow God's plan for sex in marriage as someone who is trying. I never hear about it, whether in a homily or sermon or in conversation, at least from a man's perspective, and so I figured I would write about my experience once I started putting into practice those things that helped move me towards a turning away from sin and misuse of sexuality into a rightful trajectory or conduct appropriate for a Christian marriage. I learned from other men, and from the teachings of the Church, and thought I would share what I learned, because there is peace in living by God's plan for sex and marriage, that it is possible with God's help, and that it is truly a gift.
So there you go;)
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