The face of Jesus, detail of Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece, c. 1515
1,062 words
How does Christian sexphobia influence youth unsoundly in the choice of a mate?
In the first place, by a persistent adverse selection against people normally sexed, it has produced a people largely deficient in genetic instincts and has thus substantially reduced human happiness.
Secondly, by making youth ashamed of their own sexual promptings (hence the enormous amount of repression, nervous debility, and auto-eroticism), it has also made them apprehensive of marked signs of sexuality in the sexual object, so that in England and countries like it the asexual type, male and female, has come to be regarded as the desirable type.
Recently, this influence has led to a tendency in men to seek the boyish or infantile girl, with a minimum of sexual development, and a tendency in girls to select the meek, rather soft and gentle type of youth. In men it also leads to a preference for the girl ‘who has no nonsense about her’—i.e., who can stand an unlimited amount of the stimulation of male companionship without becoming inflamed. This means that she is probably below par sexually. In girls it also leads to a preference for the male who ‘does not remind them that they are women’ or, as I recently heard a misguided girl declare, ‘who does not look upon me as a woman’. This means an oblique bias in favor of low sexuality in mating, which necessarily causes great unhappiness in marriage, quite apart from its deleterious effect on the race.
The same bias also creates a phobia against beauty because, since sexual intercourse with a healthy, good-looking specimen is of course known to be more enjoyable than with an ugly, unhealthy specimen, it is felt to be more sinful. Hence the slanders flung at beauty by all Christian fanatics . . .
Thirdly, Christian sexphobia has so poisoned the art of life that for the first time in history a generation of men has arisen which, by its lack of sex-mastery, has weaned woman from her primary and fundamental pastime. Getting no ‘kick’ out of sex (a fact they will admit in private), they naturally turn to other interests.
Fourthly, in Anglo-Saxon countries, which have suffered most from Christianity, there has been no attempt to organize suitable conditions to enable young men of all classes to enjoy safe sex-experience before marriage. Most young men consequently postpone their first normal heterosexual intercourse much too long, sometimes until marriage.
This has a threefold effect:
'The Resurrection' (detail) by El Greco 1596-1600, Museo del Prado, Madrid
(a) It rears monsters who may be guaranteed to alienate the most passionate girl from sex after their first twenty-four hours of clumsy, ignorant experimentation upon her. In fact, it makes sexual congress as unattractive as the most rabid puritan could wish to have it.
(b) It leads to an enormous amount of auto-eroticism, which again causes matrimonial misery. For the girl who gets one of these chaste young men usually marries an habitual masturbator.
(c) It makes healthy young men too eager in love, so that they grossly exaggerate the desirability of a particular sexual object. Horrified by his choice, and unable to see the girl through the sex-starved man’s transfiguring glasses, his friends and relatives exclaim, ‘Love is indeed blind’. But this is ignorance. It is not love, but lack of love, that is blind. Tumescence is blind, especially when it has not been relieved except guiltily for years and years.
This of course leads to a good deal of dysgenic and ill-assorted mating. The boy thinks the girl a goddess, but he is not really sane. The subjective momentum in him, driving him to the sexual object, is so powerful that those about him, not suffering from his unrelieved tumescence, cannot understand his mania, and are not surprised when later on he comes round to their adverse view of the girl. But this of course means a disastrous marriage.
Now, normal pre-nuptial intercourse would obviously remove this evil, but it is important to insist that such sexual experience should not destroy the fillip that desire for a particular girl, chosen with greater sanity, gives to ambition in young men. And it should not jeopardize their health.
What about girls?
In a young nubile female, inexperienced in sex, there is no such thing as chronic mechanical tension aching for relief. There is a subjective momentum towards the male, but it becomes rather less than more discriminate with sexual intercourse. Indeed, the danger with the female is that the first sexual experience with an undesirable and unequal mate may increase rather than lessen her attachment. Besides which, when once the process of procreation is engaged, the instinct is gratified . . .
This is not to say that women are less sensual or less able to enjoy sexual intercourse than men, although these conclusions have been quite unjustifiably drawn by many from the circumstance that the unspoilt virgin does not consciously pursue the male for sexual relief. Woman is normally just as sexual as man; often, in my opinion, more so. She is just as able to enjoy her sex experience and no less seriously injured than he is by a long wait after puberty before normal functioning begins. (The Choice of a Mate, pp. 30–5)
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The feet of Jesus, detail from Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece, c. 1515
As I have shown . . . the Christian regards beauty as dangerous because it is a lure to life and the pleasures of life. A beautiful woman, like a fine man, stimulates the instincts of procreation. Now this is of course very wicked, according to Christian notions . . . The consequence is that, wherever Christianity has prevailed, ugly people have been favored and regarded as particularly safe and holy, because in them there was no emphatic lure to sin, to life, to procreation. Inevitably, therefore, Christianity was bound to imagine its own highest man, Christ, as ugly, and . . . it did not scruple to do this. In this way, Christianity has exerted a powerful influence in favor of ugliness, and hence in favor of degeneracy and disease. (The Choice of a Mate, p. 165)
From The Lost Philosopher: The Best of Anthony M. Ludovici, ed. John V. Day (Berkeley, Cal.: ETSF, 2003), available for purchase here.
6 Comments
Ludovici can say that Christianity repressed sex because it regarded chastity as a positive good, but Christianity also enforced monogamy. The enforcement of monogamy allowed many men to get a great deal of sex for as long as they were physically capable of fulfilling the marital duty.
I am not convinced that other religions, such as Daoist paganism, or ancient Athenian worship of Olympian gods, produced sexual utopias. Even the matrilineal system, without any marital obligation, only provided plentiful sex for the fortunate few.
If the white capacity to build advanced civilizations depends in any way on sexual repression, then Ludovici’s critique needs to be amended.
I would venture to say that Western monogamy represses the female sexual drive more than the male. By forcing respectable women to give their attentions only to their husbands, monogamy represses the female instinct to lavish attention on whatever male is temporarily desirable.
However, because monogamy gives the majority of men a stake in the success of the group, it can produce very successful groups.
If sensual beauty is the ideal, then incarnate existence is a slow descent into suffering, as old age will diminish our physical capacities. If there is some ideal more eternal than sensual beauty, then that ideal will (I suspect) tend to repress sensuality.
I may not believe in the existence of a personal God, but I found myself surprised with an article like this in Counter-currents publishing. What we need is, oh irony of ironies, a Nietzschean revaluation of values but this time a revaluation that breaks away from a 21st century influenced by the 1960s, to the 50s. We don’t need further attacks on Christianity from a quasi-liberal POV.
When I studied in a U.K. house with lots of students from every part of Europe it stroke me that a non-religious Bulgarian girl with old-fashioned values (e.g., faithful to her husband in Bulgaria) was the most gracious and sanest of all.
This is pretty exaggerated, and probably only applies to a certain (post-)Victorian/puritan conception of sexuality during Ludovico’s time, but not to Christianity in general.
Keep venturing, buddy. You’ll get there one day.
I think Ludovici makes some good points about the Christian notion of beauty, versus the Classical/Indo-European notion. A religion that panders to the weak, sickly, ugly, and downtrodden will obviously uphold different standards.
Whatever was going on south of the Alps when Xianity made the scene, monogamy was the norm in the North, as it most probably was amongst all early Indo-European peoples.
Prior to Nicea, there were ‘christian’ sects and doctrine that would prefer that men not even associate with women. There’s apocryphal stuff that states that not only women, but even those men who think lustfully for women will not get into the kingdom of heaven. Sounds pretty gay to me. I’d rather be in Hell with women and normal guys.
The title of this article was very interesting to me, but I was very disappointed with the content…even though I usually like Ludovici. I think his thoughts in this area are rather undeveloped, not taking many things into consideration. Although I agree that Christianity is and was a very bad thing for the West (and dysgenic in more ways than one), I do not like the lines in which Ludovici argued his point. As someone else mentioned, it sounded rather like a 1960s liberal analysis.