when you want to come...

 

The many times I’ve spoken, for my research, to young Christian men who believe they have a porn or sex addiction, they tell similar stories. One told me that as a teenage boy in his evangelical church, sex and porn were “kind of the popular sin to talk about just because you knew that it was something that every guy was struggling with.” Another young man spoke of his longtime adulthood mission to “win the war and be ready to keep on fighting” against his sexual desires. These men use the language of “sobriety and relapse,” referring to sex and porn, and they told me common experiences about how they came to realize their reputed problem and began attending treatment, sometimes in their church basements. As one put it, when his faith leaders began workshops on the matter, “Every session was just full of people—like there were people standing in the back. That’s what opened the floodgates.”

KELSY BURKE

The excuse that the terrorist who killed eight people in Atlanta has a 'sex addiction' is bullshit, of course. It's one more of the many grifts the xtianists use to get money and control people's sex lives. That, and the post I was reading at Lurkie's where he lampoons the temptations at which we are exposed now that the weather is going to get warmer and men are going to start wearing less clothes are the inspiration for this post. Also,  because he was writing about sin and men and sex and of course I had to read that and come back here and babble about it.

There's many a man who is lead to think that sex is sinful and porn is the gateway to hell. Especially the xtianists and many a man associated with any of the Abrahamic cash cows that peddle a Sky Daddy that controls everything except your dick. Religion makes you believe that Sky Daddy watches when you're touching yourself... yep. you better turn that light off or Jesus will weep. The idea that men are helpless before the idea of sex and that sex is not acceptable outside of the boundaries of marriage is absolut malarkey. 

But the thing is, because I'm a heathen and I got over the whole religion thing early in life (going to an all-boy's catholic school and tempting priests fresh out of the seminary did help, though) that does not mean that all men (gay and straight) get really over the idea that sex is sinful and enjoy sex and porn without blaming either of them for their 'out of control' libido and their raging hard-ons. When people started coming up with the excuse that the terrorist in Atlanta was a 'sex addict' I rolled my eyes so hard I almost fell asleep. And I was not alone.

There's no such thing as sex addiction, of course. It's the underlying problems affecting the person (man, in this case) such as depression and shame that would lead the man to do stupid things and blame sex (or porn) as the root of their lack of control. Conservative, religulous people frame male desire as out of control and people use that as an excuse to justify their need to control what they naturally feel. Or in the case of the Atlanta terrorist, the underlying problems most probably are a combination of inadequacy, white supremacy, entitlement and privilege. Something that many white, cisgender, heterosexual men have in spades. They pathologize sex and frame it within the confines of marriage, demonizing it to the extreme that sex for them is seen as the cause of all evils:

To date, 16 states, with bipartisan support, have passed resolutions declaring pornography to be a public health crisis. Each of these closely resembles an original resolution drafted by NCOSE leaders: All declare pornography to be “biologically addictive,” and most claim that viewing it directly causes violence.

BURKE

Yep, they're coming for your porn, sweety. If only they'd consider violent, misogynistic video games with the same intensity, no? But those have nothing to do with sex, so they don't care about them. So, the next time anybody tells you that porn is bad and that lusting after men is sinful, just send them my way. I'll bitch slap them out of it. 

XOXO