Lust - Do You Give Love a Bad Name

Our culture has a very confusing stance on lust nowadays. It is okay to dress however you like, modestly or immodestly, covered or exposed, but it is not okay for another person to stare at the body parts that I have chosen to put on display. Mike Pence choosing to not go out alone with any woman but his wife is sexually repressive, misogynistic and holding women back. Will and Jada’s publicly open marriage where either is free to sleep with whomever they would like is celebrated? Men are creeps for consuming so much pornography but women are empowered by performing in it and children are being intentionally exposed to it at younger and younger ages. These are just a few of the wildly conflicting messages that are fighting for control in the cultural narrative today. Today, we’re going to cut through the noise and talk about lust.

Before we get too far, first we need to define lust. Lust is not just about being sexually attracted to another person or only being interested in someone for sex. Lust is more than that as exemplified in the term, “a lust for life.” Obviously, someone using that term is not insinuating that the subject has an unbridled sexual desire for living, that wouldn’t make any sense. Instead, lust could better be defined as strong and compulsive desire towards self-gratification attained through use of the object of desire. Lust is deeper than a want or longing, but it compels the person overtaken by it into active pursuit. Lust is also primarily focused on self-gratification, it is seeking for its own desires to be fulfilled. Finally, and this is important, the focal point of lust, the object of its fixation is just that, an object. Lust is, by its very nature, dehumanizing of its object because its desire to use that object to fulfill its desire must be greater than the value of the desire’s or needs of the object.

Now, that was a lot of interesting jargon, but the important aspects to understand are that lust is primarily focused on driving you to have your desires satisfied by whatever it is you are lusting after. If your lust is focused on a person and it is, as is typical, sexually motivated, then the other person you are lusting after is seen as the person who can fulfill your sexual desires. This is another area that many of us don’t recognize about lust; it is impossible to fully satisfy lust. It’s like hunger, you can have a meal now, but very soon you will be hungry again. We see this happen when a person starts viewing pornography. Early on, it feels like if they could only see these images that it would be sufficient. Eventually, those images get stale and the viewer needs to progress on to something else. This is also why we see so many examples of celebrity couples, people who are largely considered to be the most beautiful in the world and yet, soon after the relationship starts one partner is already caught cheating on the other. Lust is the result of very powerful chemical, neurohormonal reactions in the brain which cause us to respond more impulsively than we normally would. So, if this is a natural process, does that mean 1. that we can’t control it and 2. that we should actually be giving into them?

While it’s true that we cannot consciously shut off these hormonal responses, we do have a significant amount of control in the area of lust and most of it happens before those chemicals are released. In the middle of a club when you are dancing very provocatively with someone, it will most definitely be a challenge to resist the natural impulses to take that dance to someplace a little more private. On the other hand, it is a whole lot easier to decide not to go to the club in the first place. In the case of Mike Pence, it was probably not as much of a concern that if he went out to lunch with a female colleague that he feared he would not be able to control himself and he’d end up sleeping with her, but instead the recognition of how many marriages have been torn apart because of affairs that started as innocent lunches with colleagues. Overcoming the chemical urge of lust is far more difficult the longer you have allowed it to build up and the further you’ve allowed the stimulating situation to progress and, for each of us, there is going to be a point of no return. Avoiding situations that you know are going to trigger those chemical urges are the most effective ways to keep them under control stop them before they start.

Now, the second question, “Should we even try to manage these natural hormones or is it actually healthier to follow them where they lead?” This is the question behind polyamorous relationships, open relationships, singles looking for one-night stands and many, many more. If it’s the result of a natural, chemical response, then wouldn’t the most natural thing be to just give into it? This question, however, takes us out of the realm of sexual biology alone and into the realm of sexual ethics, as well. Biology cannot dictate ethics, but ethics must understand and, at times, subdue our own biology. After all, chemical biology is the process at work driving a rapist to attack their victim and yet we offer no justification for the act of rape. This is a fact that all of us can agree on, but the area of conflict we find is in how far back do we draw the ethical line. One of the most consistent messages we will hear in the world today is the message that consent, for all intents and purposes, is king. As long as both or all parties are legally consenting adults then there are no ethical dilemmas at all. The area that consent fails to reach is the fact that many people will consent to things that are actually very harmful to them physically, psychologically and even spiritually. Lust drives us to knowingly inflict this type of pain onto others and their consent allows us to attempt to justify it to ourselves. The problem goes even deeper than that, however, as its damage becomes cyclical; in knowingly and willfully hurting them, we are also hurting ourselves, searing our own consciences and disassociating with reality. Instead, our sexual ethics need to be determined by a standard much higher than consent and that standard is love. Love denies lust by placing the other person's needs ahead of our own wants. Love will not sacrifice the wellbeing of the other person just to temporarily have it’s own desires met. This is why lust can never be love. It is a cruel counterfeit and one that far too many of us have allowed to stand in as substitute. Lust takes advantage of those who are so broken that they are willing to give consent, love treats that person the way that we would want to be treated in their place, rather than taking advantage of the broken, giving them what they truly need to the best of our abilities.

There is so much more that we would love to talk about on this subject, and if you would like to hear it, make sure to let us know in the comments!