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Sophia's avatar

Ooh, I can't think how I missed the original conversation, but this reminds me of one of the themes of a Lenten journal I just finished (Sr Miriam Heidland's Restore, would highly recommend, prepare to cry buckets) which quotes Dr Bob Schuchts as saying, “Behind every disordered desire is a good and holy desire, an unmet need, an unhealed wound, and a hidden pattern of sin.”

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Matthew Loftus's avatar

I'm sorry that I somehow missed Eve's contribution -- I thought Substack would notify me about other comments, not just responses to my own! I do appreciate what she had to say, and I think it does depend an awful, awful lot on which desires it is we're talking about. That definitely shaped my comment. And if gender stereotyping is allowed, I'll go out on a limb and say that the average female set of desires is, uh, far less disordered than the average male set of desires. That is, that while women can and do have all sorts of sinful sexual desires, they're more likely to be the sorts of longing that can be reshaped and expressed in a healthy way whereas men are not To use the tamest example I can think of, a woman is more likely to want to indulge in a trashy erotic novel that celebrates monogamous mutual affection, whereas a man is more likely to want to take a second wife who is younger and more attractive than the mother of his children. And male desires do often deform towards violence and s/m stuff specifically, which I am still scratching my head about in terms of how to turn that ugly, poisonous, spiky caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly. But maybe I just need to dig in to Eve's archives some more on that one.

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