Undersexed and Oversexualized
Let’s build off yesterday’s discovery that undersexed and oversexualized is the vicious synthesis (i.e., the synthesis of vices) that the modern world has stumbled on.
Undersexed fat, ill, unattractive, depressed. Digital inhuman online courtship systems, broken courtship models. Broken expectations. Broken marriage models, and unsupported by the culture at large. Lower testosterone. Women strongly encouraged to take artificial sex hormones that suppress sexual appetite. Diminished differentiation between the sexes physically and culturally. Less people having sex, less frequent sex, less satisfying sex.
Oversexualized Media, entertainment, school, culture. Ubiquitous pornography of the grossest kind. Sex ed classes on activities that would have been known 20 years ago only to the most jaded or deviant fringe, being pushed down to kindergarten. A cultural expectation of casual, frequent sex.
Undersexed => Oversexualized People require blunter, cruder, and more immediate stimulus to feel anything. Brazenly declaring your no-limits sexuality hides your lack of sexy from yourself and others. A continuous unmet craving for that deep connection drives people to hunt for it in the broken parody.
Oversexualized => undersexed Emphasis on frequent casual sex with any number of people drives an attack on sex roles and sex differences, because they lower the partner pool. Emphasis on frequent casual sex means attacking things like marriage and fecundity that limit the pool of sexual partners, but downplaying these things makes it all much less satisfying. Frequent unsatisfying sex leads to infrequent sex because unsatisfying. Pornified expectations make sex less satisfying and physiologically affect performance. There are biological reasons why lots of casual sex makes people less attractive, especially women. Casual sex makes attachment harder. Less attachment ultimately means less sex.
Usually we start with a virtue chart and then discover a synthesis based on it. This time, we’ve discovered a synthesis. Let’s reverse engineer a virtue chart based on it.
What virtue does oversexualization distort? Proper sexualization obviously, but what does that mean? I suppose it means something like getting exposed to sex only in moderate amounts and in due time, in healthy personal settings like family and church. Seeing the body as something healthy and the sexes as something healthy with controlled, fruitful public expressions like dances, dates, going to the beach, water fights, guys taking their shirt off for some sweaty work, women dressing to emphasize some of their form here and there, flirting, aesthetic art celebrating the human form . . . Is undersexualization is also a vice? If we take undersexed and oversexualized to be a genuine vicious synthesis, the chart suggests that it isn’t. I’m not happy with that conclusion. Perhaps we would say that being properly sexed (not undersexed) naturally leads to a proper amount of sexualization.
What virtue does being undersexed distort? Being properly sexed, obviously. Fecund, lovely, celebrated, manifold marital sex for the great many. Again, taking this vicious synthesis seriously suggests there is no such thing as being oversexed, and that immense sexuality is great if your control is also great.
A work in progress. We come from a damaged society, we shouldn’t expect fullblown wisdom overnight.
Zen
May 24, 2022
If I were making a Virtue chart, then I suggest the framing is skewed. It is like trying to understand breakfast and nutrition purely in terms of doughnuts.
Pleasure is good, but it has a purpose.
Ages ago I was working on a book on virtue, and I concluded that the true opposite of porn, was Sealings in the temple. If we don’t discuss family or Sealings, or the purpose of pleasure, then an accurate virtue chart may be impossible.
Bookslinger
May 24, 2022
For reference, here’s a previous chart on chastity/healthysexuality versus porn/frigidity. https://www.jrganymede.com/2021/07/08/virtue-upon-virtue/
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To help think this through, maybe consider drug-highs in opposition to the ecstatic joys of dwelling in everlasting burnings, or at least to the various forms of joy/glory bestowed by/via the Holy Ghost while in mortality.
Drug highs are an un-earned, temporary, and fake feeling of ecstatic joy — a temporal, profane, and fake replacement. The effect per unit dose diminishes and bigger doses are needed. There is psych/emotional as well as physical addiction. All other pleasures flee, and eventually it all stops working when an effective does is a killing dose, such as when the highest less-than-deadly dose does nothing but maintain a pain-free state.
Porn, and all sexual immorality, isn’t really sex in the big picture. Porn/etc. just pushes some of the same physical buttons that real sex does, but does so in a harmful way. Continued use generates acclimation and the need for increased doses until even the maximum dose does nothing but bring the user up to a “pain-free” state without any of the former joy.
The fact that psychologists aren’t screaming from the rooftops about the drugs/porn similarities is telling.
Screwtape
May 24, 2022
This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire.
Screwtape
May 24, 2022
All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable.
An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return-that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart.
Zen
May 25, 2022
The person who fascinates me is Hugh Hefner, founder of the original porn mag, Playboy.
Of course, he has an endless supply of beautiful, sexy women ready to throw themselves at him. And what happens to him? He ends up looking like a joke, and a creepy old man. He has endless orgies, but ends up with a thirst for scat and necrophilia, and torture porn.
In a similar vein, look at Harvey Weinstein. Again, endless women and …. please don’t make me repeat what depths he sunk to. But on the upside, he did have a nice cameo in the Lord of the Rings.
Google Weinstein Orc.
What it has done for our society has been brutal, for those old enough to remember or care.
Perhaps this is why God is so strict about even a little immorality, if this is where it ultimately leads. Exponential increases are extremely slow, people don’t understand just how slow they are … until they aren’t.
A vicious cycle indeed!