Category: Sex, Love, Lust

Questions about Pronouns, Sex, and ‘Wokism’

Elliot Crozat writes, 

During my visit, one of our conversation topics was pronoun usage. If I recall, on one of the hikes, you gave the example "He who hesitates is lost” and asked about the function of ‘He.’ You then said that this pronoun seems to function as a universal quantifier such that, for any x, if x hesitates, then x is lost. I agree. Our agreement suggests that pronouns can function logically in ways that differ from their merely grammatical appearance.

BV: Right. Although 'he' and 'she' are classified grammatically as pronouns, their logical function in examples like the one I gave is not pronominal, but quantificational. Pronouns typically have noun antecedents, but 'he' in 'He who hesitates is lost' has no antecedent. It functions like a bound variable. I can imagine a Yogi Berra type joke. I say to Berra, "He who hesitates is lost," and he replies, "You mean Joe Biden?" (Here is a real Yogi Berra joke. Someone asked Berra what time it is. He replied, "You mean now?")

I spoke today with a friend, a philosopher, who is under some pressure from his employer to use the ‘preferred pronouns’ of colleagues and others even if such 'pronouns' don't align with the biological sex of the 'preferrers.' For various reasons concerning clarity and accuracy of language, freedom of speech and thought, and ideological disagreement, my friend is concerned about how to navigate this progressivist current in a responsible manner. We discussed some ideas.

Here’s one. Suppose a biological male, Mark, desires and requests to be referred to as ‘she.’ Suppose also that, generally speaking, all pronouns that are indexicals (i.e., demonstratives) refer to their respective persons or objects as they objectively are. Smith, a colleague of Mark, attempts to refer to Mark as ‘she.’ It would seem, then, that ‘she’ fails to refer – or that Mark fails to refer via ‘she’ – and thus ‘she’ is a useless and confusing bit of language. Smith’s use of ‘she’ is unhelpful on this account.

BV: I will first make the minor point that an indexical is not the same as a demonstrative. Every demonstrative is an indexical, but not conversely. Suppose I am standing before the deli counter. Having temporarily forgotten that the name of what I want is 'prosciutto,' I say to the deli man, "I'd like some of that." My use of the demonstrative 'that' must be accompanied by a demonstration if I am to succeed in conveying my request. I have to point to the meat I want. But I don't have to point to myself when I utter the indexical 'I' in 'I'd like some of that." 'I' is not a demonstrative. 

A second minor point is that 'I' sometimes functions as a bound variable.  Suppose that in explaining intentionality to a student, I say, "I cannot think without thinking of something." I have not made an autobiographical remark. The proposition I am attempting to convey to the student is that, for any person x, if x thinks, then x thinks of something. 

Grammatical pronouns can function pronominally, indexically, and quantificationally.  Here is a sentence featuring a pronoun functioning pronominally and which therefore has  an antecedent:

Peter always calls before he visits.

In this sentence, 'Peter' is the antecedent of the third-person singular pronoun 'he.'  It is worth noting that an antecedent needn't come before the term for which it is the antecedent:

After he got home, Peter poured himself a drink.

In this sentence 'Peter' is the antecedent of 'he' despite occurring after 'he' in the order of reading.  The antecedency is therefore referential rather than temporal.  In both of these cases, the reference of 'he' is supplied by the antecedent.  The burden of reference is borne by the antecedent.  So there is a clear sense in which the reference of 'he' in both cases is not direct, but mediated by the antecedent. (And if the reference of the antecedent is mediated by a Frege-style sense or Sinn, then we have a double mediation.)  The antecedent is referentially prior to the pronoun for which it is the antecedent.  But suppose I point to Peter and say

He smokes cigarettes.

This is an indexical use of 'he.'  Part of what makes it an indexical use is that its reference depends on the non-linguistic context of utterance: I utter a token of 'he' while pointing at Peter, or nodding in his direction.  The sentence need not be situated in a linguistic context.  Another part of what makes 'he' in the example an indexical is that it refers directly, not just in the sense that the reference is not routed through a description or sense associated with the use of the pronoun that fixes the reference to Peter and nothing else, but also in that there is no need for an antecedent to secure the reference.  Now suppose I say

I smoke cigars.

This use of 'I' is clearly indexical, although it is  purely indexical (David Kaplan) inasmuch as there is no need for a demonstration:  I don't need to point to myself when I say 'I smoke cigars.'  And like the immediately preceding example, there is no need for an antecedent to nail down the reference of 'I.'  Not every pronoun needs an antecedent to do a referential job.

In fact, it seems that no expression, used indexically, has or could have an antecedent.  Hector-Neri Castaneda puts it like this:

Whether in oratio recta or in oratio obliqua, (genuine) indicators have no antecedents. ("Indicators and Quasi-Indicators" reprinted in The Phenomeno-Logic of the I, p. 67)

 For a quantificational use of a grammatical pronoun, consider

He who hesitates is lost.

Clearly, 'he' does not function here pronominally — there is no antecedent — nor does it function indexically.  It functions like the bound variable in

For any person x, if x hesitates, then x is lost.

But is this token ‘she’ a pronoun in appearance only? It seems to function in some ways like a proper name (perhaps a sobriquet or a tag of sorts) of one who has undergone a name change. On this view, the token ‘she’ wouldn’t function as a rigid designator, since there are possible worlds in which Mark doesn’t use ‘she.’ But the token seems to work as a name or tag for Mark in relevant circumstances.

BV: I would say that 'she' has a sense which requires that any human being  successfully referred to by its use is a biological female. I am inclined to say that if you try to refer to a biological male as 'she,' then the reference won't be successful. But this is none too clear.  

Consider the example of Cassius Clay, who underwent a change in the way he viewed himself and hence selected a new name to reflect his subjective change of ‘self-identification.’ As a matter of respect for Clay as a person, others began to call him by his new name ‘Ali.’

Is the Clay-Ali scenario relevantly similar to the situation of Mark, who in this world subjectively identifies as female despite being biologically male and having formerly identified as male? Suppose Smith speaks about Mark by saying “She went to the market.” Does Smith refer successfully to Mark in virtue of using “she” as something like a proper name rather than a pronoun?

BV: One can change one's religion but one cannot change one's sex. That's an important difference. I myself find it very easy to identify with women, but surely it is impossible for me to identify as a woman if that means:  apperceive or interpret myself or alter my physicality or raiment in such a way as to bring it about that I become a woman. I can no more identify as a woman than I can identify as a cat or a carrot. Of course, I can pretend to be a woman and even successfully pass myself off as one.  (Cf. the movies "Tootsie" and "Mrs. Doubtfire" which you no doubt have seen.) But a man in drag remains a man, even if he is in what I call  'super-drag' where this includes surgical mutilation and augmentation of the body, hormone replacement 'therapy,' etc.  And the sexual frisson/excitation that a man might feel when putting on panties and bra is male frisson is it not? And thus further proof that he remains a man even if he has had his genitalia lopped off and a vagina fashioned from his former penis? 

I am inclined to say that a literal sex change operation is an impossibility. No animal can change its sex or have its sex changed.

Here is a proof from the metaphysics of time. Tell me what you think of it. Every adult woman was a girl. Every adult male was a boy.  The past is unalterable. (Not even God  can restore a virgin.) Now it is possible for a man to become a woman only if it is possible for a man to have been a girl. But that is impossible because it is impossible to alter the past.  Therefore, it is impossible for a man to become a woman no matter how he is altered, even chromosomally. The nature of time rules it out.

Here is another thought. You can change your religion or your political affiliation, but not your race or your sex.  These non-negotiable facts are extra-linguistic. Now with the exception of mere Millian tags, the senses of words determines their reference and not the other way around. I suggested above that one cannot successfully refer to a biological male using 'she.' And this for the reason that 'she' has a sense that is sexually restrictive, assuming that it is being used to refer to sexually-polarized animals such as human beings as opposed to ships and flags as in "She's a grand old flag; she's a high-flying flag . . . ." So is the extra-linguistic fact I mentioned partially determining the sense of 'she'? That's what I am puzzling over at the moment. But I am just 'shootin' from the hip here and perhaps what I have written is not sufficiently clear to permit evaluation.  

If the proper name account doesn’t succeed, perhaps ‘she’ has a non-indexical use. Some pronouns have non-indexical applications. David Braun lists three types of pronoun use: indexical(demonstrative), bound variable, andunbound anaphoric. See https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/indexicals/#IndNonIndUsePro

Perhaps ‘she’ has a bound variable use, such as: “Every male who subjectively identifies as a female believes she will be better off doing so.” Or maybe ‘she’ has an unbound anaphoric use, such as: “Mark was late to work today. She was caught in traffic.”

These non-indexical accounts seem strained to me, and hence I’m thinking the proper name account might be better. Or maybe there is still another account that best explains what is happening in these linguistically-odd situations. Maybe all efforts to refer to Mark as 'she' fail to refer.

I’d like to hear what you have to say on this issue, since you’ve thought deeply about pronouns and about the philosophy of language. I’d be glad to give you a call this weekend to chat, if you're free. Or we can discuss via email. 

BV: I have time for one more comment. 'Mark was late for work because she was caught in traffic.' If I heard that I would ask, "Who was the female in question and what did her getting caught in traffic have to do with Mark's being late for work?"

Your philosopher friend should politely tell his employer that his preferred pronouns are those of standard English and that, while he is willing to tolerate the linguistic innovations of others, he expects toleration in return. If his tolerance is met with intolerance, then he should politely remind the intolerant about who has the guns.

Left, Right, Gender, and Sex

There is nothing in the graphic below to disagree with, although more could be said. But one quibble: The correct word is not 'gender,' but 'sex.' Gender is a grammatical category first and foremost. But it is not unreasonable to allow a widening of the term to cover certain social roles that one's sex fits one to play.  So if you want to talk about gender roles, go right ahead. One such is the firefighter role.  This is a social role typically filled by biological males, and for good reason. Men make better firefighters than women due to their  greater physical strength, an attribute grounded in their sex, which is a biological category.  That men are physically stronger than women is a generic statement, and such a statement, since it is not a universal affirmative, cannot be refuted by adducing cases in which some woman is stronger than some man.

So it is entirely natural and unsurprising that men are 'over-represented' among firefighters. You would have to be in the grip of the 'equity' delusion to think that there is something wrong with this 'over-representation.' The term is here being used in its factual or non-normative sense. It is a mark of the muddled to confuse factual and normative uses of terms. There are proportionally more male firefighters than female. This is a 'feature' grounded in biological  reality not a 'bug' introduced by 'sexists.' It is a fact that does not need fixing.

Wokesters are social constructivists gone wild. No doubt there are social constructs. For example, textbooks of biology are social constructs. They would not exist if social animals such as ourselves did not exist and did not interact socially to produce them and to consume them. Biology itself is a cooperative social enterprise, and, as such, a social construct.  Just don't confuse biology with the biotic, or, in general, the study of some range of natural  phenomena with the natural phenomena studied.  Biology is a social construct, but the biologists we are familiar with are all of them human animals and therefore not social constructs.

It should be obvious that not everything could be a social construct. Life itself, as a necessary precondition of all social constructing, cannot itself be a social construct.  The same goes for the abiotic stratum that undergirds the biotic. Could the social constructors themselves be social constructs? Whose? Who constructs the constructors? Either a vicious infinite regress arises, or you must accept the nonsense of social constructivist bootstrapping: one socially constructs oneself. And note that such  self-construction could not be social if others did not help with the task. This adds a further layer of absurdity. If my self-construction requires your help, and yours mine, then we must first exist non-socially in order to socially construct each other. But then I am not, at bottom, a social construct.

And then there is the fact that, before human beings came along, there already was sexual polarity in plants and animals.  Will you seriously maintain that there was no such sexual polarity before humans made the scene and started doing botany and biology? 

If you think about all of this carefully, you should be able to see the absurdity of the idea of 're-imagining' (as a wokester might say) what is natural and both logically and temporally antecedent to the social as a social construct. The world cannot be social construction 'all the way down.'

I cannot explain it now in any detail, but this woke social constructivism, which issues in such lunacies as that babies on birth are 'assigned' their sex, is a particularly virulent and degenerate form of metaphysical idealism according to which reality is mind-made. This idealist motif has coherent articulations, but woke social constructivism is not one of them. 


Left-Right Agendas

Book Lust

The old man's libido may be on the wane, but this man's book lust  remains as stiff-standing as ever.  I'm reading along in Anthony Kenny's Aquinas on Being and I find a footnote in which he praises a certain Hermann Weidemann's article contained in a certain anthology. I think, "Oh boy, when I am in Tempe on Friday I'll snag that volume from the Arizona State University  library."

In the bookman's eros we descry the superiority of the spirit over the flesh. The pleasures of the mind can extend for decades, from earliest youth to advanced old age.  But not even the artifices of a Hugh Hefner can help those enmired  in the dotage and decrepitude of the flesh.

At the end, even stoked to the max with Viagra to the point of hearing loss, Hef couldn't get it up sufficiently to penetrate the young lovelies who cavorted around him. He was reduced to manual mode while the bunnies romped with each other exchanging intimacies I charitably imagine to be more innocently sororal than libidinously lesbian.

Can One Copulate One’s Way to Chastity?

John B. writes,

I'm a regular reader of your blog and I've written very occasionally, but not for a few years.  Here's another comment. 
 
I enjoy your periodic return to the question of whether one can philosophize one's way to a release from philosophy.  But I think that, to split hairs, you're wrong to say that one can't copulate one's way to chastity.  After a manner of speaking, one can.  It's true that one can't copulate one's way to virginity . . . . But isn't "copulating one's way to chastity" at the heart of marriage as the remedium concupiscentiae?  When the Apostle Paul tells his readers that it is better to marry than to burn with lust, he seems to have in mind something like copulating one's way to chastity.
 
Think of a bachelor who has unruly sexual desires, some of which he may act on.  He then falls in love and gets married, agreeing to an exclusive sexual relationship with his wife.  Over the course of his marriage, his inclinations are tamed and re-structured so that, while he may still experience fleeting moments where, sure, he notices that another woman is very pretty, his sexual desire as such is exclusively, or nearly exclusively, for his wife, whom he loves more and more.  Actually having frequent sexual intercourse with his wife is part of this transformation, since having sex with the same partner, in the context of a loving relationship, has powerful psychological effects.  It might be an oversimplification to say that the man in question "copulated his way to chastity," but it would also be an oversimplification to say that he didn't.
 
Take that for whatever it's worth, and keep up the good work.
 
I see your point, John, but if the question is whether one can achieve chastity by sexual intercourse, I would say no.  One cannot copulate one's way to chastity either in marriage or outside of marriage. But if the question is whether being married helps one avoid unchastity, the answer is a resounding yes.  And that, I take it, is the point you succeeded in making.  Marriage channels and directs sexual energy in a licit and productive way even if no procreation results.  It is therefore indeed remedium concupiscentiae. We need the remedy and the mitigation. We are naturally concupiscent from the ground up, and the decadent, sex-saturated society we live in exacerbates the natural tendency,  pouring gasoline on the "fire down below." 
 
The logically prior question is: what is chastity?  "Chastity is the virtue which [either] excludes or moderates the indulgence of the sexual appetite." (Catholic Encyclopedia, here.) It is a form of temperance, one of the four cardinal virtues. Chastity is either absolute or relative depending on whether it excludes indulgence in the sexual appetite or merely moderates it.  Absolute chastity is called continence and is classed as a "counsel of perfection." As such, it is not morally obligatory but supererogatory. The supererogatory is that which is good but above and beyond what is morally required.  Absolute chastity is not required of those in the marital state; relative chastity is.  So the exercise of the virtue of chastity is compatible with at least some forms of the indulgence of sexual appetite in marriage.
 
Chastity in marriage is extremely difficult to achieve. Who would have the temerity to claim that he has achieved it on a regular basis? It is obviously not enough to refrain from sexual relations with partners other than one's spouse.  Suppose you are having sexual intercourse with your wife while thinking lustful thoughts about your neighbor's wife.  That would count as a violation of chastity in marriage. Am I right about that, John?
 
Moral collapse has proceeded so far that discussions such as the above will strike the majority as quaint and absurd and out of all relation to anything 'real.' When the Pope allows a 'devout Catholic' supporter of abortion on demand for any reason at any stage of fetal development to receive Holy Communion in Rome, then we are fast approaching the end.
 

St. Valentine’s Day at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder.  David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her.  In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales.  Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music.  [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary.  They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee.  Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement.  Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement.  Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events.  It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love.  A great version from 1964.  Lynne died at 83 in 2013.  Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters.  Another great old tune in a 1962 version.  The best to my taste.

Three for my wife.  An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda:

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day.  Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements.  Recalling past inamorata while listening to sentimental songs  — is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism?  But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life.  A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”

Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.

All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.

My daddy is a handsome devil
 He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.

Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.

The Mighty Tetrad: Money, Power, Sex, and Recognition

Money, power, sex, and recognition form the Mighty Tetrad of human motivators, the chief goads to action here below. But none of the four is evil or the root of all evil. People thoughtlessly and falsely repeat, time and again, that money is the root of all evil. Why not say that about power, sex, and recognition? The sober truth is that no member of the Mighty Tetrad is evil or the root of all evil. Each is ambiguous: a good liable to perversion.

Read the rest at Substack.

Linked at my Facebook page. You may leave a comment there if you wish, or send me an e-mail message.  I have come to refer to Facebook as Furzbuch because its suppression of free speech surely stinks to high heaven. 

There I must walk the line. But I won't back down.  It's going to be a long twilight struggle* against the forces of darkness, my friends. (Wo)Man up, gear up, but be of good cheer. Long live the Republic!

____________

*"Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are– but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation'–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." JFK Inaugural Speech, 1961.

Of the four, tyranny is greatest threat at the present time, the tyranny of the deep state wokesters who control the Democrat Party and pull the strings of the puppet-in-chief, Joe Biden.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light, or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag  team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandal straps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

And so in the end Jack returned to the religion of his childhood.

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1)

Kerouac home in October

Kadın erkeğin şeytanıdır

"Woman is man's devil." (Turkish proverb)

Never underestimate the power of concupiscence to derange, disorient, and delude.

When Spanish bishop Xavier Novell resigned last month, the Roman Catholic Church cited strictly personal reasons without going into detail.

It has now emerged in Spanish media that he fell in love with a woman who writes Satanic-tinged erotic fiction.

In 2010 at the age of 41, he became Spain's youngest bishop, in Solsona in the north-eastern region of Catalonia.

[. . .]

It came as a shock when Religión Digital reported that he had fallen for divorcee Silvia Caballol, a psychologist and erotic novelist. The news site said that the former bishop was now looking for a job in the Barcelona area as an agronomist.

Caballol's books include titles such as The Hell of Gabriel's Lust and the trilogy Amnesia. In the blurb for one of her works, the reader is promised a journey into sadism, madness and lust and a struggle between good and evil, God and Satan with a plot to shake one's values and religious beliefs.

Story here.

Sounds Incoherent to Me

Here:

“I don’t want to have sex with anybody and I probably won’t ever have sex,” says Benoit over Zoom, although she does explain that the key point here is sexual relations with others: she does masturbate.

If she masturbates, then she has sex with herself in which case she does want to have sex with somebody. But then again perhaps 'masturbate' in her idiolect means 'wash one's private parts.'  

The Lust of the Eyes and the Pride of Life

This just over the transom from T. O. with my responses:
I am wondering if you'd like to tackle this question prompted by your latest post on the sensus divinitatis. 
 
Suppose a man indulges his sensual desires and passions (especially sexual passion) without restraint when he is young. Then, as he ages, he realizes the folly of his ways and retrains himself. He trains himself to avert his eyes from beautiful women or lusty images, instead of simply soaking up the sensory delight unimpeded. He becomes chaste. He takes every lustful thought captive and refrains from sexual behaviour or activity that is inordinate or otherwise immoral. My question is, can this man ever fully escape the pull and attraction of sexual passion having so fully indulged it in his youth?
Thank you for asking such an easy question. The answer is No, based on my own experience, my observation of the lives of others, and wide reading in the wisdom literature of the East and West.
Even though he is now chaste and is more or less self-restrained, he still feels the intense pull of sexual desire from time to time, even if he doesn't entertain it. Will he always feel this pull? Will he always feel that pang within when he sees a beautiful woman, no matter how many years he cultivates a disciplined and chaste soul? Or, is this simply an idiosyncratic matter that is unique to everyone, regardless of how they have lived in the past? 
Yes, he will always feel it, with the exception of a very few spiritually advanced souls, the existence of whom is hard to verify in a critical way that avoids hagiographic excess.  The intensity of the allurement will diminish with time along with the means of acting upon it.  As we work to abandon our vices, they do their part by abandoning us.
 
But of course there are those fools who fail to make good use of their decline in vitality (the "pride of life") for spiritual advancement and try to keep their enslavement to the flesh going until death swallows them. Hugh Hefner is one example I have commented on. Jeffrey Epstein is another.
 
My title above is from 1 John 2:16: "For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." (KJV)

Omne quod est in mundo, concupiscentia carnis est, et concupiscentia oculorum, et superbia vitae . . . .

The New Testament verse condemns the Roman Catholic Church in its current corruption.
 
The following two are probably my best entries on the topic: