What does mindset have to do with sex?
I think it has a lot more to do with sex than we realize, especially in how we engage and enjoy it.
Sex is powerful and the Catholic Church celebrates sex and recognizes the power it has to be a renewal of the wedding vows made by the couple. Graces flow through sex. It can be a place of great joy, intimacy, and vulnerability.
We are also very human and very much capable of having sin enter sex so easily due to our proneness to sin (concupiscence), which is because of original sin.
This shift in their relationship, this DIS-integration, wrecks havoc on future generations. And, there’s no way to avoid this possibility of disordered desire & domination.
We see this in our own stories, in other stories, and in the history of humanity, the movements towards rights and freedom, and the struggle for equality in the brokenness of sin.
We need to understand this as we seek to more deeply understand the story of redemption and mercy of Jesus Christ.
We need to understand and sit with the injustice and the pain of what we have lost because it is huge and impactful to our relationship with our spouse and with the opposite sex.
And, we need this foundational awareness in order to understand how mindset fits into all of this.
Margaret Sanger urged many women to protect themselves from their husbands. Granted, there were many injustices to women and the threat of domination was often prominent in relationships and laws in the ways women were viewed and treated. It did not respect the dignity of woman.
There’s a particular scene from “Little Women” (2019) where Amy describes the challenges of women and how “marrying for love” would never be an advantageous solution for her or for her future children. She needed an economic proposition that offered security and protection.
These responses are not unreasonable when women feel their dignity affronted, disrespected, and challenged.
The nuance in this is not EVERY MAN was bad at this time in history or were incapable of loving their wives. However, without an understanding of the goodness of women and the truth of scripture and the story of our faith, a marital relationship could quickly go sideways and miss the mark.
If a woman’s response to these laws, social structures, and cultural beliefs were to protect their hearts and bodies from ache, hurt, and abuse, it’s quite possible these beliefs impacted the very mindsets of these women in how they loved their husbands and in how they received their husbands, too.
As we continue the narrative in feminism and the women’s rights movement, we missed a critical component that needed to be addressed: man’s role and his domination.
We didn’t expect more from men.
We chose to address woman’s desire for her husband and a response to the brokenness, guilt, and shame we may feel from our desires (ordered or disordered) was to protect ourselves from our husbands.
What we also needed to address was the domination of men’s hearts and the disordered response of “love”, which more often than not was lust and abuse. Remember, lust & abuse are on a spectrum and we don’t need to think of the most horrendous offense against the human person to experience wounding in relationships.
St. John Paul II writes in Theology of the Body that man’s job in particular is to protect the gift (sex) and to protect woman as a whole (the entirety of the gift is woman fully realized in her personhood), to master his desires, and to protect himself against the temptation of domination. He is to see woman in her beauty, her glory, and in her goodness and LOVE her, not lust after her. To see her, not simply look at her. To embrace her, not abuse her desire.
“It seems that the second creation account has assigned ot the man “from the beginning” the function of the one who above all receives the gift (see Gen 2:23). The woman has “from the beginning” been entrusted to his eyes, to his consciousness, to his sensibility, to his “heart”; he, by contrast, must in some way ensure the very process of the exchange of the gift, the reciprocal interpenetration of giving and receiving the gift, which, precisely through its reciprocity, creates an authentic communion of persons.”
Men & Women He Created Them, General Audience 33, section 6
The disordered nature of both woman’s desire and man’s domination requires a solution that addresses both aspects. Without both, only one is addressed and the solution is lopsided and may seem unfair or unjust. In a sense, it is. Both man and woman must be held accountable. Both men and women must be aware of their proneness to sin and the ability to negatively impact relationships (romantic or not). We can’t shift our mindset until we see and recognize what has taken place for men and women culturally, historically, and theologically. This doesn’t mean we need to be experts in each arena. It DOES mean that we need to be aware of the impact these areas of life have on our understanding of ourselves and the opposite sex.
- In what ways do you see these aspects impacting how you view sex?
- How can you learn from this?
- What comes up for you in your heart that requires your curiosity to grow & learn?
An excerpt from the prayer, “I Thirst”: But I tell you again that I love you, not for what you have or ceased to do, I love you for you, for the beauty and the dignity my Father gave you by creating you in His own image. It is a dignity you have often forgotten, a beauty you have tarnished by sin. But I love you as you are, and I have shed my blood to rescue you. If you only ask Me with faith, My grace will touch all that needs changing in your life: I will give you the strength to free yourself from sin and from all its destructive power.
