Lust
Gandhi gave up sex at 37 - not many people know that. He had married
at 14 (or perhaps younger), as was customary in India at the time,
and had been troubled by his obsession with sex. Being the pious
person he was, or aspired to be, he could not square his ceaseless
desire for marital sex with its intrusion on his relationship with
his wife. Gandhi had never had an easy relationship with his wife,
and she had complained of his roughness and brusqueness. By the time
he was 37, his wish to become celibate stuck, finally.
My preoccupation with sex since my teenage years staggers me. I know
I am no different to most young men, but this obsessive, recurrent
desire to have sex with as many beautiful women as I can see, get my
hands on, buy, download, or imagine is remarkable. It does not abate.
My tastes have changed and what once I may have dismissed without a
moment's thought, I can now lust after, but the constant, the living
constant, is the desire. It may be more restrained, but it is
current.
Yesterday I was with a guy about twenty eight years of age. As ever, our
conversation veered to women. He has demands, standards, expectations
of his future woman. She may not be fat, or short, or ugly. She has
to be beautiful, slim, and young. She has to have lustrous eyes,
wonderful hair, and exquisite skin. She has to be desired by other
men. She has to find him thrilling, to love him, and to do so at
first sight. I could see the parallels with the previous night.
The night before, I was with a friend who is engaged. He has known
his fiance for eight years. They broke off a couple of years after
they first met but kept the bond going until they committed to each
other again two years ago. We sat gobbling deliciously spicy Indian
food, until he gobsmacked me and told me he met this wonderful, 26
year old gorgeous Polish girl with the deepest blue eyes and a
perfect body. They went out a few times behind his fiance's back, ...
Then the fiance found out.
His voice, when speaking about the Polish femme fatale, told the
whole story: she was a nine, or a ten, beautiful even without makeup,
animalistically sexy in a pair of jeans (no one wears a pair of jeans
like her), and when he took her out to the pub, he could not leave
her alone, because every semi-drunk lad was hitting on her. All the
guys were looking at him: "what on earth does she find in him"? But
what he found most endearing about her was that she thought she was
"just average".
A few weeks ago, he had sat in a pub on a sunny Saturday afternoon
having a drink with the woman he waited all his life for and thought
"this is the life: the love of my life is at home safe and sound, the
hottest woman I have ever pulled is reading the papers across from
me, I got my BMW parked outside, and the weather is gorgeous." The
roof crashed a few days later. (Interestingly, the femme fatale knew
about his status right from the start, and now she awaits patiently
while he sorts out his mess - knowing that his first priority is to
mend things with his fiance!)
It all seems such a waste: this excess of hormones that is driving
us, otherwise smart men, nuts. It causes us to veer off course, it
pulls us away from the real priorities, and it soaks up a lot of our
time. More importantly, my guess is that 90% of the men you meet are
walking around nursing wounded prides. We all know that my 28 year
old friend will "mature" one day and accept that he is not a
millionaire, nor an amazingly charming man; he will become grateful
for the attention of a somewhat attractive young woman, not the
perfect 10 that he wants, and marry her.
My other friend, well, he will probably end up losing both women. And
when he ends up with a third woman, his evaluation criteria will have
similarly mellowed. He will look back to the "golden days" when he
was able to pull the 'femme Pole' and think "Ah, those were the days.
Oh well, at least I got a shot at sitting at the top table."
The hormones are driving us crazy trying to seek out potential
reproductive mates. But to be fair to the DNA program that these
hormones are on, nature just wants us to have a mate, it is not picky
about which. The hormones do not tell us "she's gotta be a killer".
We do.
Why do we do that?
Well, by the time we are 13, we are already well-educated. The
topless shots, the nude mags, the porn sites, they do a great job of
telling us what perfection should look like - and to each his tastes.
You may like busty brunettes, I may like barefoot blondes. You may
like Asian, I may like Black. For heavens' sake, by the time you are
14, you already know you have a thing for perky nipples on large
areolas - but not that you will remain single for the next ten years
because of that!
Of course, the hormones are on a weird DNA program. Even when you get
the woman of your dreams, even when you have just 'banged' that
trophy blue-eyed blonde, your hormones instruct you to look at
another woman - a different 'genre' to the one you're with. You're
suddenly craving that wavy-haired, dark-skinned, voluptuous knock-out
shaking her hips in perfect harmony to the latest hypnotic RnB
rhythms.
The funniest part of the story is that I am actually bad at the
activity this whole vortex of energy is about: s e x. I would be
happy if all the hours upon hours that I wasted of my life so far,
had turned me into a living Casanova: a guy women travel from other
continents to be 'healed' by. But all this time and psychic energy
for very little real practice?!
Nature really is being nasty.
Resolution?
Do a Gandhi!
Comments
There are many obsessions. Sexual obsession (of whatever fetish or orientation) is best understood in terms of the other obsessions.
No, the answer is not some kind of immature and fundamentalist rejection. That is really a way of giving some kind of ultimate tribute to the object of your lust. That is a confession of lasting obsession.
No, the answer is life and integration of all acts into something big and meaningful. The power of an object of obsession is dissipated by putting it into perspective.
In other words, growing up.
Your integration idea is right: sex must be only one component of a man's life, and ideally his whole life should be pointing somewhere.
Addressing the issue at root is also important: men have to stop looking and seeking out things that drive them wild.
Acknowledgment of the sexual angle and openly helping young men to come to terms with it - by marrying, for example - should also be helpful.
Young women should be educated about men's hormones too. I dislike this series of romantic lies that men tell their women.
All of the things that experienced and insightful people (not me, I just read a lot) tell us are important are EXACTLY those things that put little drives-me-wild fascinations into perspective.
If you spend two hundred dollars a month on shoes (to make you more "sexy"??) then you need to learn the value of doing a days work. If you are driven wild by food and cannot stop eating it, then you need to put some energy into considering your future. If all you think and talk about is football, sorry, you are a poor excuse of masculinity and you should put some thinking into what the other side of the world is like. Addicted to the "fascination" of your favorite video game, or to the "allure" or pornography? Get a life, or find someone to take care of.
Art, religion, family, work, creativity and community are all solutions to the slobbering slavery of a lot of different kinds of lust.
Of course, you can be addicted to them too...
I have heard plenty of people in my life insist that young people should grow up first and only then think about marriage and kids. That is a fallacy. Flat out wrong. The only way TO grow up is to give yourself to someone else. Once you dedicate yourself to the cause that you and a woman have created out of your two bodies, your previous juvenile petty lustful life will never be the same.
You are right. What women don't know about men - which is about equal to what men don't know about women - is a huge dysfunctional, wasteful dead-end.