For the Love of Lust

Someone accused me recently of being obsessed with sex. It’s not a new accusation: I write a lot about sexuality, LGBTQ issues, NFP, and so forth and I also have the dubious honour of being a person who Catholics feel they can write to with really private sexual questions. Naturally, people who never write about sex (and who would be mortified if they had to get up and talk about it in front of large groups of people) conclude that I must have an obsession. What other explanation could there be?

Well, the explanation is actually nothing you would ever think of. I wanted to write a massive five volume work of aesthetic criticial theory expanding on the work of Joseph Campbell, going beyond the monomyth in order to adequately account for stories with female leads, villainous leads, and so forth.

Since I don’t have a PhD in English, or even, for that matter, a BA in anything, there’s no way I could convince anyone to be interested in publishing such a work. But lots of nice Catholic folks kept telling me that I should write a book about homosexuality. Eventually I said, “All right, God. I’ll write a book about gay stuff for you.” Somehow in my head writing a Catholic book about sex was going to lead to the ability to publish whatever I wanted…just like performing in porn leads to Hollywood. Hey, I was naive.

What actually happened is that I wrote my book, and then I had to promote it. That meant blogging, speaking, writing supporting articles, doing TV and radio appearances. Those led to correspondence and contact with human beings. Contact with human beings led me to rethink some of what I’d said when I was thinking about this stuff in my basement with my nose in a book. And it all just spiraled out of control from there. Or rather, it spiraled out of my control. I suspect Someone Else of being at the helm.

So it’s true that I do write, and think, a lot about sex and sexuality but my reasons for doing so have very little to do with lust or obsession. As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m not actually especially interested in sex in practice most of the time. Intellectually I think human sexuality is a fascinating field of study. Pastorally, I think it’s a really important area where the Church needs to come up with better approaches in order to effectively communicate the beauty of chastity to an age that really doesn’t get it. But in the reality of my own bedroom, I don’t particularly struggle with unbridled lust.

My primary reason, then, for spending so much time on this particular subject is that I encounter hurting people and they offer me their stories, a little piece of their hearts. They invite me to put my fingers in their wounds so that I can recognize Christ there. I consider this to be a very great gift, and I feel that I have a responsibility of stewardship over the things that people share with me. This responsibility includes advocacy, standing up for people against those who stand ready to condemn them.

My secondary reason for blogging so much about sex is infinitely more banal. I have bills to pay. Some of my ideas that have nothing to do with sex often sell to markets like Aleteia and OSV Newsweekly. But when I write blog posts that aren’t about sex they don’t get a lot of clicks on Patheos. In particular, the people who seem most convinced that I’m obsessed with sex only ever seem to comment on my posts that are about sex. Based on what they say in these comments I can only assume that they haven’t read my posts about faith, or beauty,or atheism, or stoicism, or death, or money, or fiction, or baby gadgets, or ducks, or boardgames, or…

Now the truth is, most people don’t read those posts. Most people click on the posts about sex, and read the posts about sex, and share the posts about sex. Not because most people are obsessed with it, but because at this particular moment in time we’re having a very important cultural conversation about sexuality. What is it for? What does it mean? When is it good? What laws should govern it? How do we understand desire? How do we account for gender variance?

These questions are at the centre of so much popular discourse because major shifts in our technology and our society have brought them to the fore. The conversation may at times be painful, but even those who wish that it would just go away seem to be aware that it’s not going to, and that it must be had. So I blog about sexuality, and my readers read about it. None of them are coming to my blog to be titillated by pornographic excursions into the lascivious world of Catholic sexual ethics. They’re coming because they think that I have something interesting to add to the conversation.

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