Is it lust or just admiration?

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ACatholicVirginian

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Hello!

I have a friend who likes to look at images of muscular and athletic women. When I brought up to him that he may be committing the mortal sin of lust, which I have fallen for, he told me that he wasn’t being lustful, he was just admiring how beautiful and athletic they were and how he wished he had a girlfriend like one of them so they could work out together.

He did say that he acknowledges that there are some accounts that, yes, are inappropriate and sexual in nature. He stays away from those, and only follows the accounts where the girls wear somewhat modest gym clothes, and either flex in the mirror or show you how to workout.

He also asked me if it was lustful if he dreamed about his crush. He doesn’t know if she is already taken, and he tells me that the dreams are never sexual, the only thing that is even close to that would be that they hug and kiss each other every once in a while. Nothing naughty right?

Any tips to avoid the sin of lust or anything like that would help him a bunch. I don’t feel that my explanations answered his questions.
 
Does he work out and develop his own body? If so, it could be that he is looking for a woman with that shared interest, but mostly he’s just fascinated by muscle.

Maybe he is uncomfortable looking at male bodybuilders because of the freakish extremes some of them go to.

He knows better than anyone else whether he lusts. If he says it’s admiration and if that’s the way he acts about it, then you can believe it.
 
Lust is the extension of the ego onto another person for the sole purpose of self-gratification. Lust moves a person to commit the act of sexual pleasure if possible and will even try and make arraignments for it to happen.

Admiring a beautiful person is not lust, nor is the desire of an attractive person. Only when it turns into a possessive desire does it become lust.
 
A person can usually tell pretty quickly if something sexually arouses them. If it doesn’t, and if you didn’t look at the pictures with the intention of being aroused, then that’s not the sin of lust.

Nudity is not inherently sinful or pornographic. During the Renaissance period a lot of artists created art that featured highly detailed human nudity, yet it’s considered art and not pornography because it wasn’t meant to titillated. In fact, a lot of this naked art was placed in Churches.
 
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