Kimberly Steele

At face value, lust is about sex and sex alone. I would argue that construing lust as exclusively about sexual desire is a grave mistake. Lust is about appetites, and for this reason, it crosses hairs with Greed and Envy. Lust is trickier than its brothers Greed and Envy though because an excess or dearth of lust isn't as cut and dried as the other two sins. Lust takes a more sustaining role in our existence: without it, we become pale shadows who waste away, or worse, who get picked off by predators who have stronger appetites than we do. Lust is the foodaholic's dilemma: they want to stop overeating, but they must eat the addictive substance every day in order to stay alive.

A Tale of Two Sex Addicts

I know a couple of people who are addicted to sex. One is a woman and one is a man; both are well beyond what is considered their sexual peaks. The woman was raised in a fanatic Christian setting. Her mother was like the non-cartoon, not-quite-as-violent version of the mother of Carrie in Stephen King's novel of the same title. The woman became a nymphomaniac a few years after puberty, catching a venereal disease before having two children, and then having a hysterectomy, yet still going on to compulsively marry over a dozen men, a few of whom she divorced and married again. Her appetite for sex has always been a life-ruining curse. Her Christian upbringing prevented her from doing the logical thing: becoming a highly paid escort. Nowadays, she seems to have gotten her act together and she has stopped her marriage habit.

The other sex addict, the man, was raised in a Catholic in name only, non-churchgoing household. He was a late bloomer who lost his virginity to a woman at eighteen and short time later to a man. He knew himself to be gay from a young age. He felt tormented for his gayness and was depressed for decades over being made fun of for his slightly effeminate bearing in school. Once he felt sufficiently free to do so, he began to compulsively bed different men to the tune of three or four per month. Like in the case of the woman, he ended up with a common venereal disease. For him, the illicit thrill of "getting away with it" has compelled him to cheat while in committed relationships. Unlike her, he still compulsively seeks sex via apps like Tindr -- though I imagine now that he is nowhere near as attractive as he once was, I would not be surprised if he was paying for sex. Sex addictions are the ultimate in diminishing returns.

Satiety

Speaking of diminishing returns, the lust for food is a rough ride. I dated a food addict once, and I was in just about the wrongest of wrong places to be intimately involved with a food addict at that time in my life. Perhaps because I starved to death previously in other lifetimes, I have never been able to sustain a personal addiction to food. I leave chocolate in the cupboard until it gets chalky on the edges. This is not out of willpower; I just don't care enough about it to eat it in the middle of the night. I have never met another woman who does this, including the skinny type of woman who watches her waistline. My food addict boyfriend thought about food all the time. There was never a moment when he wasn't peckish -- I don't think he ever said "I'm too full to eat anything else," not even after a feast.

The problem with excessive lust is that it makes you want to go in a thousand directions at once. All of the lusty people mentioned above are exceptionally creative and self-motivated individuals. Their misfortune is to have lust spill over into areas that earn them venereal diseases and hundreds of pounds of adipose tissue. Lust and creativity have the same driving force, I am convinced, and that is why lust is a key to perpetuating the human species.

I was terrified of getting pregnant from age 12 until age 31, when I was sterilized by my request on the operating table while undergoing a routine uterine surgery. Though I knew better as an adolescent, I always had the paranoid suspicion one could somehow get pregnant from a toilet seat. My predicament while young was to want sex with a boy yet to be profoundly disgusted and disappointed by the burden of fear I would have to carry on my shoulders as a result. When you fear getting pregnant as I did, there is no joy in sex and it is impossible to relax.

I learned early on that lust has dire consequences. As a female child of the Professional Managerial Class, it was instilled in me at an early age that certain paths led to surefire ruin. One of those dark avenues was drugs: I came of age in the fried egg, This Is Your Brain on Drugs era, and my superstitious fear of them was almost as ridiculous as my trepidation about toilet seats. I was also told that having a baby before my late twenties or early thirties was life-ruining doom. I was supposed to have a career, you see, and to do that, I had to go to college. I was supposed to have lust in the proper order, for my degree, my career, and then my lawfully-wedded salary class husband. I was supposed to join the ranks of mostly-barren thirty-something women who jacked themselves up on pricey fertility treatments.  All so I could have kids graduating college just as I collected my first social security payout...  

There Can Be Only One

Lust is a condition of appetites. You want to go down every path because of it, to screw and/or marry every sexual partner, to eat one of each at the buffet and then vomit and do it all again. You want to be Aleister Crowley, gobbling up experiences and shoveling money and your reputation into the roaring fire with abandon. But the path of any single Lust is the Highlander: there can be only one. You can't take every path; this is the predicament of being human. Sleeping with the guy in high school or college (without tons of prophylactics and birth control drugs) means pregnancy and a baby human to whom you must relinquish your freedom. Eating the marijuana brownie means hanging out with the crowd that eventually does heroin, so best to opt out while you still can.

From Bad To Worse: Chastity

The absence of Lust is perverse too -- Elmer Milquetoast, who subsists upon the bland pablum of other's castoffs and what is already put in place. As much as I abused by my overeater boyfriend, I would have treated an Elmer Milquetoast far worse. For the life of me, when I was young, I could not empathize at all with a person of diminished appetites. There are plenty of these people: mamma's boys and girls content to shuffle along, collecting the privileges and prizes of life without fighting for them, doing exactly what is expected of them and nothing more. There are also vast classes of people who give up too early: settling for less in love, in work, in the place where they are situated.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

When people reject their appetites, the result is cowardice. The well of integrity is the same one from which appetites stem. Anorexia is a study in fear of the appetite. The anorexic seeks an excess measure of control because their normal appetite for food scares them. Had I rejected my truth and settled and married my overeater boyfriend, who was an is a very decent guy, I would have done so because I thought I could control what I wanted to want.

The sexually lusty are often drawn to the Catholic priesthood or nunneries because they crave a system of order for their appetites. This is a "from the frying pan into the fire" situation most of the time because it fails to deal with the astral plane conditions that drive desire.  Channeling lust in such a direction is one of the reasons priests have such awful reputations for being pederasts and why nuns have reputations for being cruel and mean.

Balance: Enjoyment

I don't think I could have achieved a balance of my lusts as a young person. I narrowly avoided the life-ruining pregnancies and addictions that I feared, and had I been forced to face them by having a baby or becoming addicted to crack, I don't know whether it would have helped or hurt. It is only on the other side of libido and sterilization that I am able to look at my younger years with a critical eye.

Like many in this culture, I rarely enjoyed myself when I was young, despite having a good home, plenty of money, and oodles of entertainment designed to amuse me.  I was too preoccupied with either guilt or wanting to get to the next thing to enjoy the moment.  That's our culture: when you are doing a thing, always think of the next thing!  Progress!  And if you have any extra, you'd better hoard it and save it because you wouldn't want anyone else getting in on that action.  It's no wonder I was so stunted when it came to normal human stuff like enjoying time with friends or working behind a sales counter.  I had no idea how to enjoy any part of my life.  

Our materialistic culture insists we must always be the pawns in a push-pull game of denial and indulgence.  Financial gurus shame us for buying a latte while commercials goad us into thinking we need to have one in hand in order to be hip.  My thoughts are that if you want a latte, just buy one and be done with it; nobody can reasonably be held accountable for every purchase.  Poverty's root cause is not the occasional four dollar drink and beating oneself over it is pointless.  

Enjoyment is a balance of the way one perceives time.  The lusty perceive time as fleeting and scarce, so that's why they have the urge to jam an entire apple pie down their throat in one sitting or to boink the entire football team because they can.  The chaste shrink in fear from the idea of having a sliver of pie or kissing the star quarterback despite the fact he asked.  The chaste don't suspect time will run out and they wouldn't want to take a risk.  They are masters of delaying gratification, and they end up missing the opportunity for it altogether.  Balance takes into account the moment as ephemeral.  Kissing the quarterback behind the bleachers may not be the wisest idea, and the piece of pie might cause a couple pounds on the thighs, but since some moments only happen once, you go for it, damn the consequences.