Category: Sex, Love, Lust

A Cure for Infatuation

Marriage is an excellent cure for infatuation.

It is also a test whether the infatuation was something more. If the marriage lasts and deepens, then it was; if not, then it wasn't.

To be infatuated is to be rendered fatuous, silly.  Not that infatuation is all bad.  A love that doesn't begin with it is not much of a love.  The silly love song That's Amore well captures the delights of love's incipience.  But fools rush in where wise men never go/But wise men never fall in love/so how are they to know?

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The Role of Concupiscence

The role of concupiscence in dimming our spiritual sight has long been recognized by many, among them, Plato, Augustine, and Pascal: "There are some who see clearly that man has no other enemy but concupiscence, which turns him away from God." (Pensées, Krailsheimer #269, p. 110)  One wonders how much of the atheism of a Russell or a Sartre or an A. J. Ayer  is the theoretical reflex of an inordinate love of this world and its flesh pots.

Frequent the flesh pots and it may turn out the best you can do by way of a conception of God is that of a celestial teapot.

 

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Feminism as Masculinism

I just heard Dennis Prager say that feminism is misnamed and ought to have been called 'masculinism.'  He continued, "There is no celebration of the feminine in feminism."  I remember having a similar thought back in 1973 when Playgirl Magazine first appeared.  My thought was that there is nothing liberating in women imitating the worst features of men. 

One ought to distinguish, however, between equity and gender feminism.  See The Absurdity of Gender Feminism.  There are undoubtedly good aspects of the former, pace certain conservative extremists.

Sex and the ‘Sixties

London Ed writes,


Another thing from that era [the '60s], now surfacing in  England, is the rampant promiscuity disguised as 'alternative' and  'liberation'.  Jimmy Savile (I assume you have been following this case)  was one of them. But I remember John Peel, who was an icon of English  counterculture, boasting of sleeping with girls as young as 13, and there is a  splendid passage in Playpower, by Richard Neville (editor of IT and OZ) about  bedding a 'cherubic' fourteen year old, after smoking pot with her.  It was  meant to be liberated then, but in retrospect … ?

Monterey Tom sends a link that provides a response, The Sexual Revolution and its Victims.  The piece concludes:

At every step of his life, though, the sexual revolution wrought its harm.  It perversely rewarded the irresponsible behavior of his parents and his stepparents.  It had, even by then, made sexual activity among young people something to be expected, so that a lonely kid like Danny would constantly have to wonder about himself.  It had corrupted the popular culture, so that well-chaperoned and innocent CYO dances were a distant memory.  It set him up for a short-circuited sexual relationship with a mother-substitute, depriving him of the children that might have sweetened his advancing years.  It swept away all the institutions that used to bring boys together, as boys, to train them to be decent and well-adjusted men.  It raised him up in an anti-culture of faithlessness, as he would witness one sexual “relationship” after another dissolve by ill-will or boredom.

It has brought us a world wherein people sweat themselves to death in the pursuit of unhappiness.  Some of those people, by the grace of God, miss their aim. 

Merton, Marilyn, and David Carradine

Today, August 5th, is the 50th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death.  What follows is a post from 13 June 2009.

………………..

Thomas Merton, Journal (IV, 240), writing about Marilyn Monroe around the time of her death in 1962:

. . .the death was as much a symbol as the bomb – symbol of uselessness and of tragedy, of misused humanity.

He’s right of course: Monroe’s was a life wasted on glamour, sexiness, and frivolity. She serves as a lovely
warning: Make good use of your human incarnation! Be in the flesh, but not of the flesh.

The fascination with empty celebrity, a fascination as inane as its object, says something about what we have become in the West. We in some measure merit the revulsion of the Islamic world. We value liberty, and rightly, but we fail to make good use of it as Marilyn and Anna Nicole Smith failed to make good use of their time in the body. Curiously enough, a failure to make good use of one's time in the body often leads to its early destruction, and with it, perhaps, the possibility of spiritual improvement.

Curiously, Merton and Carradine both died in Bangkok, the first of accidental electrocution on 10 December 1968, the second a few days ago apparently of autoerotic asphyxiation.  The extremity and perversity of the latter practice is a clear proof of the tremendous power of the sex drive to corrupt and derange the human spirit if it is allowed unfettered expression.  One with any spiritual sensitivity and depth ought to shudder at the thought of ending his life in the manner of Carradine, in the heteronomy and diremption of the flesh, utterly enslaved to one's lusts, one's soul emptied out into the dust.  To risk one's very life in pursuit of intensity of orgasm  shows a mind unhinged.  Thinking of Carradine's frightful example, one ought to pray, as Merton did thousands of times: Ora pro nobis peccatoribus.  Nunc et in hora mortis.

Coitus Reservatus and Beyond

It is a decidedly unpopular thing to say these days, but I'll say it anyway, echoing a conviction of William James: Much profit comes from avoiding sensory indulgence.

A much more difficult practice is to enter into it with cool detachment. Coitus reservatus, for example. But it is no more difficult than playing blindfold chess, which is not that difficult. One experiences the sensations attendant upon sexual intercourse while remaining indifferent to them: one regards them as mere sensations. (In my lexicon, coitus reservatus requires non-ejaculation, whereas coitus interruptus allows it, but outside the partner.)

Moral Responsibility in Dreams

I had a lucid dream the other night in which I lost my cool to an extent I would consider morally reprehensible in waking life.  But was there any moral failure in the dream?  And then there are the dreams in which I am having sexual intercourse with a woman not my wife.  I'm aware I am dreaming and I think to myself: "Well, this is just a dream; I may as well enjoy it."  So on occasion I grant nocturnal permission to a nocturnal emission. 

Was there real, not merely dreamt, moral failure in the dream?      (Augustine discusses this or a cognate question somewhere in his pelagic pennings, but I have forgotten where.)

Lucid dreaming while asleep is not the same as fantasizing while awake.  But they are similar.  Suppose I am entertaining (with hospitality) thoughts about having sex with my neighbor's wife.  That sort of thing, I have argued, is morally objectionable.  I mean the thinking, whether or not it results in any doing.  Jesus just says it (MT 5:28).  I argue it here and here.  (Of course if he is God, he doesn't need to argue it, and because I am not God, I do.)  Does the similarity support the claim that the nocturnal permission is as morally impermissible as the diurnal permission?

Catholic University Returns to Single-Sex Dorms

A paucity of common sense, a lack of wisdom, a tendency among those in authority to abdicate . . . these are among the characteristics of contemporary liberals.  Common sense would suggest that in a sex-saturated society putting young men and women together in the same dormitory would be an unwise idea, one rather unconducive to the traditional purposes of a university.  Among the traditional purposes were the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge and the inculcation of critical habits of mind.  (Take a gander at Newman's Idea of A University.)  The facilitation of 'hook-ups' and the consumption of prodigious quantities of alcohol was never on the list as far as I know.  'Hook-ups' there will be.  But only a liberal would adopt a policy that facilitates them.  University officials abdicated their authority starting in the 'Sixties.   The abdication of authority is a fit topic for a separate post.

That a Catholic university would sponsor coed dorms is even more absurd.  In Catholic moral theology sins against the sixth and ninth Commandments are all mortal.  It would be interesting to explore the reasoning behind this.  But part of the motivation, I think, is a conservative appreciation of the awesome power of the sex drive and its perhaps unique role in distorting human perceptions.  Of the Mighty Tetrad (sex, money, power, fame/recognition) sex arguably ranks first in delusive power.  In the grip of sexual obsessions we simply cannot think straight or live right.  The news is replete with examples, Anthony Weiner being the latest example.  'Weenie-texting' he threw away his career.  In the grip of his obsession, a naked old man, Strauss-Kahn,  pounced on a hotel maid.  And so on.

But all is not lost.  CU is backtracking on this one.

Advice on Sex from Epicurus

Epicurus (circa 341-271 B.C.) wrote the following to a disciple:

     I understand from you that your natural disposition is too much
     inclined toward sexual passion. Follow your inclinations as you
     will provided only that you neither violate the laws, disturb
     well-established customs, harm any one of your neighbors, injure
     your own body, nor waste your possessions. That you be not checked
     by some one of these provisos is impossible; for a man never gets
     any good from sexual passion, and he is fortunate if he does not
     receive harm. (Italics added, Letters, Principal Doctrines, Vatican
     Sayings, trans. R. M. Geer, Macmillan, 1987, pp. 69-70)

Had Bill Clinton heeded this advice, kept his penis in harness, and his paws off the overweight intern, he might have left office with an impressive legacy indeed. But instead he will schlep down the  centuries tied to Monica like Abelard to Heloise — except for the fact that he got off a lot easier than poor Abelard.

Closer to home is the case of Robert Blake whose lust led him into a tender trap that turned deadly. He was very lucky to be acquitted of the murder of Bonnie Lee Bakeley. Then there was the case of the dentist whose extramural activities provoked his dentist wife to run him down with the family Mercedes. The Bard had it right: "Hell hath  no fury like a woman scorned."

Most recently, Dominique Strauss-Kahn has secured himself a place in the annals of libertinage while wrecking his career.  Ah, those sophisticated Frenchmen.

This litany of woe can be lengthened ad libitum. My motive is not Schadenfreude, but a humble desire to learn from the mistakes of others. Better that they rather than I should pay my tuition in the school of Hard Knocks.  Heed me, muchachos, there is no more delusive power on the face of the  earth than sex. Or as a Turkish proverb has it, Erkegin sheytani kadindir, "Man's devil is woman." And conversely.