Is enough consideration given to women's sex drives?

[BlaineTog]

You must be separated to a lesser degree than more severe sins. Since you are really harming yourself.

One would think. You hear answers all over the place with this one, ranging all the way to it being supposedly worse than rape. As far as I know, though, the Church doesn’t have a sophisticated rating system for the severity of sins, only drawing a distinction between mortal and venial, so my guess is it’s a matter of opinion how bad it is for you. For my money, it’s not nearly as harmful to your soul as the more obvious abominations, but given that you’re not supposed to do any of them, it’s probably not particularly relevant anyway.

Also I’m curious to exactly how M hurts your soul? The church says how it’s wrong but what does it do to your well being? Your soul? What negative effects does it have if your moderate about it and private about it?

Here, I’ll open up one of those canned responses that borders on cheesy. Fsssst Ah, that new-can smell.

Anyway, the sex act is intended to join two people into one, potentially in its ultimate expression of a whole new human being. It’s a faucet of grace available more or less on-demand. It is a symbol of the relationship between God and his Church on Earth, and because it’s sacramental, it affects what it symbolizes. This makes sex a very good thing. However, the better something is, the worse it becomes when misdone. Satan, for example, was originally the highest of the angels. When you take a symbol which is very important and skew it, you change the way you see the symbol in small ways.

I don’t know if that’s helpful, but basically, it reinforces something wrong about sex, which is bad.

 

[katrntogo]

Anyway, I am sorry if I wrote a thread that was inappropriate for this place. Yes I am a single woman. Yes I know that I am supposed to live a life of complete chastity but I am struggling in the sexual purity department and I simply posted this thread for some possible guidance. There are a lot of things, albeit correct, that are so much easier said than done. I have been struggling with porn a few days back, among other things, and my struggles are real. It doesn’t mean that I am substituting this for consulting a priest or anything, I just thought I’d attempt to receive some support and/or comfort about this. I can’t decide if I’m wrong for assuming that.

I still wonder though, that if I had been a single man writing about myself being in overdrive, if the responses would have been different. I don’t know. I could be wrong.

I don’t want to be angry but for some reason I feel that way - but over time it will pass. I thought that since there are so many posts about sex and everything here that my post was not necessarily any more inappropriate than anyone else’s. Sorry if it was.

I thank you for having the courage to post your question. I haven’t read all of the posts yet so don’t know which way this thread is going to go. I, too, am having similar issues with my sex drive. It has always been high, which was not a problem when I was married; however, my husband left me when I converted to Catholicism (long story) so now I’m alone, the divorce isn’t final so I can’t even try to get an annulment & frankly, I’m a long way from ever wanting to date again, so that makes me even farther from being married & being able to have sex, but that certainly doesn’t mean I don’t think about sex. A lot. It’s getting easier with time at least. Fortunately, I have a great priest that gives excellent advice, plus I try to keep very, very busy. If I start to have such thoughts, I grab one of my theology type books to read or jump on my Schwinn Evo-Comp.

 

[CentralFLJames]

I am coming in a tad late but wanted to add my insights.

Is enough consideration given to women’s sex drives?

Answer - probably not.

I’ll admit that as a man it was exciting to discover that in marriage my late wife was every bit as robust as I was and at times even more so in that department. So much for preconceived notions that only we men had these raging almost uncontrollable urges. Since losing my wife a while ago I have started to date again. My Lord was I shocked to see how forward, specific and demanding some of the woman can be these days even in new dating relationships. I won’t go into graphic detail but I met a woman with a real problem that most men would say I am nuts to call it a problem. She was in my opinion the mythical “nympho” that all we males used to joke about wanting to meet some day when we were young men in High School. But it’s a true compulsive disorder and a sickness that is not fun to be around. Its not at all about warmth, tenderness and bonding - though there may be a pretense of that as a necessary facade. Rather it’s all about possessiveness, physical satisfaction, over indulgence, infatuation, excessive selfish pleasure and mental fantasies. Pray you never meet a person like this and if you do pray that they can overcome it since it can preoccupy every aspect of their lives and lead to more relational drama than anyone can imagine.

So, yes, sexual drive transcends gender and does need to be talked about. It appears to me to be getting to be a serious social and societal problem that has definate spiritual as well as psychological dimensions. For all we know it could be related to our meat products being fortified with hormones and growth enhancers? But its plain to me that one can easily become addicted to one’s own hormones. Men often have this problem overcoming the “M” sin and I am hearing that there are more woman admitting to it now too and that they are having trouble stopping.

I personally think that men have by far the largest problem since many men do not need anything more than a low-relational visual cue (initially) to trigger “the drive”. Whereas the super majority of women seem to need at least a reasonable assurance of some level of relational bond to trigger “the drive”; after all they have the natural instinct of child bearing and the need for a support structure to contend with. That is unless they have permitted themselves to become emotionally reprogrammed by the prevailing “object fantasies” and “romance fantasies” that the pop-media have portrayed as what all men want and a woman has become comfortable role playing that image to attract a man.

Younger woman in particular these days seem inclined to want to role play the popular fantasy-girl and femme fatale sort of image that media is pushing in the movies and romance novels. And that puts an over emphasis on sex as a means to nirvana and even to power and control. I have actually dated 1 or 2 younger woman who explicitly asked “do you think I’m hot?” or “do you think I am hotter than that other woman over there?”. And these are woman who are college educated and coming from good upper middle class families and social lifestyles. I am resisting the urge to lampoon the woman’s liberation movement for liberating the wrong thing…

So to a degree I think some of this “over-drive” is not really a natural drive but rather is somewhat manufactured and induced by social pressures and marketing messages that are trying to hook us on our hormones and train us to jump through hoops to “scratch the itch”. It should come as no surprise that “the adult” industry is a $14billion industry and the soft-port industries are perhaps hundreds of billions when we look at all the clothing, life style and general “sex-appeal” markets. Also, I think a lot of excessive drive is a function of over-familiarity with prior licit or illicit intimacy or habitually caving in to the “M” sin - again hormonal addiction and conditioned response.

Summarizing - I really think a lot of sex drive is nothing more than self hormonal addiction and internalization of fantasies that tend to heighten and overly focus the pleasure centers of the brain to intensify the natural physical response. There are some that will say the brain is the largest sex organ in the human body. On one physical level it’s all simple ADDICTION - often with an underlying emotional need or imbalance that competes with our spirituality. This however I know from personal experience can be stopped cold with highly disciplined prayer, self denial and certain reasonable precautions.

Pray, pray, pray and try to break habits that lead to the same patterns of behavior (avoiding the near occasion of sin). All the old Catholic formulas work - we just need to use them.

Hope that helps some,
James

 

[nannygirl]

I am coming in a tad late but wanted to add my insights.

Is enough consideration given to women’s sex drives?

Answer - probably not.

I’ll admit that as a man it was exciting to discover that in marriage my late wife was every bit as robust as I was and at times even more so in that department. So much for preconceived notions that only we men had these raging almost uncontrollable urges. Since losing my wife a while ago I have started to date again. My Lord was I shocked to see how forward, specific and demanding some of the woman can be these days even in new dating relationships. I won’t go into graphic detail but I met a woman with a real problem that most men would say I am nuts to call it a problem. She was in my opinion the mythical “nympho” that all we males used to joke about wanting to meet some day when we were young men in High School. But it’s a true compulsive disorder and a sickness that is not fun to be around. Its not at all about warmth, tenderness and bonding - though there may be a pretense of that as a necessary facade. Rather it’s all about possessiveness, physical satisfaction, over indulgence, infatuation, excessive selfish pleasure and mental fantasies. Pray you never meet a person like this and if you do pray that they can overcome it since it can preoccupy every aspect of their lives and lead to more relational drama than anyone can imagine.

So, yes, sexual drive transcends gender and does need to be talked about. It appears to me to be getting to be a serious social and societal problem that has definate spiritual as well as psychological dimensions. For all we know it could be related to our meat products being fortified with hormones and growth enhancers? But its plain to me that one can easily become addicted to one’s own hormones. Men often have this problem overcoming the “M” sin and I am hearing that there are more woman admitting to it now too and that they are having trouble stopping.

I personally think that men have by far the largest problem since many men do not need anything more than a low-relational visual cue (initially) to trigger “the drive”. Whereas the super majority of women seem to need at least a reasonable assurance of some level of relational bond to trigger “the drive”; after all they have the natural instinct of child bearing and the need for a support structure to contend with. That is unless they have permitted themselves to become emotionally reprogrammed by the prevailing “object fantasies” and “romance fantasies” that the pop-media have portrayed as what all men want and a woman has become comfortable role playing that image to attract a man.

Younger woman in particular these days seem inclined to want to role play the popular fantasy-girl and femme fatale sort of image that media is pushing in the movies and romance novels. And that puts an over emphasis on sex as a means to nirvana and even to power and control. I have actually dated 1 or 2 younger woman who explicitly asked “do you think I’m hot?” or “do you think I am hotter than that other woman over there?”. And these are woman who are college educated and coming from good upper middle class families and social lifestyles. I am resisting the urge to lampoon the woman’s liberation movement for liberating the wrong thing…

So to a degree I think some of this “over-drive” is not really a natural drive but rather is somewhat manufactured and induced by social pressures and marketing messages that are trying to hook us on our hormones and train us to jump through hoops to “scratch the itch”. It should come as no surprise that “the adult” industry is a $14billion industry and the soft-port industries are perhaps hundreds of billions when we look at all the clothing, life style and general “sex-appeal” markets. Also, I think a lot of excessive drive is a function of over-familiarity with prior licit or illicit intimacy or habitually caving in to the “M” sin - again hormonal addiction and conditioned response.

Summarizing - I really think a lot of sex drive is nothing more than self hormonal addiction and internalization of fantasies that tend to heighten and overly focus the pleasure centers of the brain to intensify the natural physical response. There are some that will say the brain is the largest sex organ in the human body. On one physical level it’s all simple ADDICTION - often with an underlying emotional need or imbalance that competes with our spirituality. This however I know from personal experience can be stopped cold with highly disciplined prayer, self denial and certain reasonable precautions.

Pray, pray, pray and try to break habits that lead to the same patterns of behavior (avoiding the near occasion of sin). All the old Catholic formulas work - we just need to use them.

Hope that helps some,
James

Good insight!