Sick Sex, D.K. Carter, Way Out Magazine, July 1970

WHAT IS BORN . . DIES. This is a stark truth we don’t like to think about. But all the great traditions of mankind have recognized the importance of the intimate connection of birth and death. Wiertz Painted it in La Belle Rosine. We assume the subject is the beautiful woman, until we notice the label on the skull; “La Belle Rosine.” Both skeleton and woman are “the beautiful Rosine”—two sides of the same coin. The lushest sexuality ends in death. The Buddha’s teaching spells it out most clearly: the sex- bound condition is one of the great dukkhas or “‘ills of life. And sick sex is linked with death in a special way. The power that creates when used in the right way, kills when misused. It kills the higher faculties—intelligence, morality, the sense of responsibility. It sucks the soul to death long before the actual death of the body. Our society makes frantic efforts to deal with sick sex as merely absurd or a matter for sophisticated acceptance, while it suppresses the ancient knowledge that sick sex is horrible—nothing else.

Nearly everybody has something wrong sexually. Almost nobody likes to admit it or work very hard at changing what .is wrong. We usually treat the whole subject with silence, or sniggers. But there really isn’t anything funny about it. To be caught in compulsive sick sex—to know that you are sliding into degeneracy— is a condition almost beyond endurance. But it is the condition of millions of us. Only a few realize there is a way to freedom.

A VERY wise spiritual adviser told me once that “‘practically everybody is mixed up sexually.” He said that to me when I was in the process of first confessing my own sexual misbehavior extending over twenty years, and first beginning to try to change. It was a relief to me at the time to hear that. I knew, of course, that I was not alone in my trouble, but I had somehow assumed that I was part of an ugly minority, toward whom the majority could show legitimate scorn. I had felt like a pariah. Another thing my adviser told me then was that it didn’t make a great deal of difference what kind of sick sex one happened to be indulging. As far as the essential man or woman is concerned, all kinds of sick sex have the same approximate effect. They all degenerate. That is, they all push me from a higher state to .a lower. I have less freedom, less choice, less sanity, less health, and less pleasure, ‘the longer I indulge the sick sex. I am closed off from spiritual possibilities, and closed off from a great many of the ordinary,: legitimate _joys of physical life. I am ridden by guilt, depressed, anxious, and fearful, in varying proportions at different times. Worst of all, I seem condemned to keep on and get steadily worse, because the sick sex J am involved in gets steadily more compulsive. It asks for more of my time and attention every day.

This is true no matter what the variety of sick sex: sadism, masochism, homosexuality, fetishism, pornography addiction, peeping-tomism, any kind of perversion you can think of. And the list doesn’t stop there. In terms of the Way— the central spiritual tradition of mankind —the line defining sick sex includes some more ordinary kinds of sexual behavior that many of us today are inclined to see as not sick, merely optional. In the light of the Way, only responsible procreative sex is sane (see the article Sane Sex). So all the “normal” fornicators, adulterers, and masturbators fall on the sick side of the line, too.

The ‘Way knows that these forms of behavior exist, and that many people are powerfully—compulsively–drawn to them. The Way does not necessarily see sexual misbehavior as the worst form of immorality—greed, treachery, and cowardice can be even more destructive than most sexual failure. The Way is not naive. It knows all about the “pressures of modern life.” But it says that if I want to be on the Way; I must control the sex force—use it responsibly or not at all.

Love (?) the Sinner: There are so many people involved in sick sex today that the whole stance of our society—and the attitudes of virtually all branches of religion—have changed to accommodate that fact. The old -idea—to use religious terms—used to be; love the sinner, hate the sin. The new idea is: -love the sinner, and accept the sin as -part of him— adjust to -the fact of his being “‘that way.” On the surface, this looks all together more loving than old-style Sulphur and brimstone attitudes, but it completely fails to do one thing for -the sinner. It fails to tell him There -is a way. out—not just a way to get by with sick sex, but a way out of it. This is the news that every adulterer, fornicator, masturbator, homosexual, lesbian; masochist, sadist; porno-addict, peeping tom, and all the rest, need to know: There is a way to Stop the whole ugly business, get back on the track of sunlit living, and rejoin the human race. You can change.

Prescription: Stop:

The first move is to stop whatever sick sex you are involved Stop. It is important to believe that this is possible, and that it won’t kill you or drive you crazy. I know plenty of people in the Way whose situation—since they are not married—precludes any sex. They are in great shape. If you find that hard to believe, you perhaps need to look at a piece of important folklore of our era, and decide. If it is time you detached from it. It is virtually an axiom of our time that sex, any old sex, is better than no sex: no sex is sick. This opinion is a kind of chief product of the years since Freud. As it has waxed in popularity, the older view that sick sex is destructive of personal integrity has tended to fade from view. We seem to have almost completely lost sight of the fact that degenerate use of sex is a major cause of personal disaster—moral dereliction of all kinds, including addiction and suicide. A little genuine acquaintance with the seamy side of life will support the older view of the price of degenerate sex. The truth is that all sick sex is ultimately destructive. That is my witness, the wit, ness of many friends, and the witness of a great many people throughout all history. But you will have to make up your own mind. I can present this view, but I cannot and do not want to force it on you.

I remember well enough from my own years of sick sex what my attitude was then: ‘I’ll muddle through. I’ll figure, this thing out by myself. No/ need to hit. panic buttons yet. Certainly, no need to tell anybody, or ask for help. I’ll stop tomorrow, or soon thereafter. Meanwhile, one can get by. It really isn’t so bad. Other people are worse. A reasoning process like that helps the adulterer, male or female, extend an affair one day at a time rather than stop it. It is the way a youth (or an adult) defends masturbation to himself. Behind the argument are a couple of facts we usually do not bring up for review when we are going through our rationale for bad behavior:

1. What I am doing is great pleasure. I really do not want to stop. And anyway __
   
2. I do not know how to stop.
   

I am not aware that very. much has been written about how to stop. It is not an easy subject to deal with, especially if one has to start off by admitting one’s own misbehavior. Much religious and/ or therapeutic writing in this area is hypocritical, because the writers represent themselves as above the battle, and tend to reach out to include the reader in the stance of having avoided “excesses.” I have wanted to make it clear here that I once had a big investment in sick sex and now have a big investment in being willing to share my experience with others who may find it useful. Being ready to share this way is required of me by the Way under the Sixth Essential—willingness to help my brother. My entire story is really a special instance of the application of the Six Essentials of the Way. For severe sexual problems, it won’t work to bring up only one or two or three of the big guns. You will need to work all of the Essentials. (That is why they are called Essentials.) I did not have the precise formulation of these Essentials, as WAY OUT Magazine presents them, to work with at the time of the events I am writing about. This was several years ago. I was working with the same principles as they are stated in AA’s Twelve Steps. I had managed to get sober by means of the AA program. Now I set out to apply the same ideas to my sexual problems.

My first goal was to cut out a habit of intermittent, short-lived adulterous liaisons. These were the sequel in my marriage to the promiscuous sexual activity of my pre-marriage years. Right through my years of promiscuity, of marriage, and of adultery, I was also a compulsive masturbator. The indulgence was sometimes more and sometimes less frequent, but I was never free of it, as best I can recall, for more than a week or ten days at a time, and rarely that long. Talk about being shackled. I was in lock-step with living death. I remember reading, with a tremendous sense of loss and envy, something Eric Gill wrote about his own boyhood: how he and some friends had tried masturbation on some occasion, and he had seen at once that something so pleasurable was not for casual or frequent use. He pulled back from the brink I went over. Still, I felt it was necessary to set a goal of stopping my adultery before the masturbation. I did not think I could do both at once. I was working closely with a spiritual adviser—not a priest or minister but a man with deep and real experience in helping others out of such jams. He agreed with the order of battle. There is an obvious logic in the effort to clean up one’s life. It makes sense to deal with the more serious matters first. It doesn’t make sense to try to give up cigarettes while I am drinking like an alcoholic, or to try to stop compulsive masturbation while I am running an adulterous affair or engaging in homosexual activities. Why concentrate on putting out a fire in a wastebasket if the entire house is burning down?

When I had made a commitment that the adulteries were behind me, and that henceforth I would be faithful to my marriage, and when enough time had gone by for me to think that with God’s help I was going to keep this commitment, I decided to try to apply the same principles to the problem of masturbation. I had, of course, been working for some years on the intellectual side of the problem. I had gradually moved from the view that masturbation is essentially harmless, and in any case unavoidable, to the position that it was very harmful to me, my wife, and our marriage, and could be avoided. The easy part of this change was concluding that masturbation was harmful. My notions about its harmlessness were never deeply rooted. The truth is, I had always felt it was shameful, and what is shameful is harmful. I still felt it was shameful despite years of trying to accept modern reasonings about its naturalness and ordinariness. There are people around, I know, who claim to have completely conquered this old “puritanical” (as they See it) feeling. I doubt them. I think they are blustering, and kidding themselves.

Subtle Poison: In the group work that I have been doing for some years, in the course of which many people unburden themselves of old sexual guilt, I have never met one masturbator who was not ashamed of it when his bravado was punctured. Something I would not have credited early on, but now firmly believe, is that masturbation spoils a marriage that might otherwise have very little wrong with it. Just as surely as adultery does, masturbation takes something away from one’s mate, whether she (or he) knows it is going on or not. ‘The sexual union of man and wife is sacred. Diversion of the sexuality of either partner is damaging, by definition. The damage goes on subverbally, subliminally. It is the damage we do when we surround someone with subtle lies. The very air is poisoned. Everything rots. With such reflections, I finally came to see that masturbation was wrong for me. But I still could not see how to stop, because by now I knew something about myself. I had absolutely no will power in this area. I was a victim, not a criminal. I couldn’t help myself. I had never been able to help myself, not from the earliest years. It seemed to me that my whole cast of personality had come out of this initial failure to break free of sexual compulsion. Ever after, I was a sitting duck for every addiction that came along, starting with chewing my fingernails and ending up with slugging down terpinhydrate with codeine. How had I stopped drinking? And how had I stopped adultery? Both by the process of giving up the fight, and asking God’s help, and the help of friends who would share my confidences while I worked against these compulsions. Why not try the same steps? But be extra careful, because this one is a great deal more tenacious than almost any other form of addiction or compulsion. Take the beast seriously.

I was in touch with some people who were working with spiritual— Way—principles. I had been meeting with them, one or two at a time, perhaps every month or so. I had admitted the truth about my sexual behavior, and this had helped me to cut back the incidence of it, but I had not stopped. It became convenient to meet with these people every day for a while. Now I could do something. I made a commitment not to masturbate for one day, I renewed this commitment for another day at 8 o’clock the next morning, when we met to start the day. And another day, and another. A week or two went by. The thing no longer looked impossible. I began to feel a quiet exhilaration at the possibility that at long last I was out of the trap. Great!

The celebration was a little premature. I slipped. Bad show. It turned out I was indulging fantasy. Now here was something new to be learned. I began to see that the real problem was these perpetual movies running in my head. And sometimes, more often than I ever had admitted to myself before, I helped the movies along with some pornography. I wasn’t a porno-addict, you understand, but every once in a while I was into one of those bookstores. Not very attractive behavior, but I owned up to it in my meetings, and made a commitment not to go into the bookstores, on top of renewing the commitment one day at a time not to masturbate. With the help of my friends on the Way, I worked out some penalties to pay if I broke either commitment. (The idea here is to figure out something that really nicks the vanity, something we don’t want to do. An example: giving away a really stiff sum of money or giving up television for a month. Something that fits your own situation.) In the course of the next six to nine months I did pretty well, but once again grew overconfident and careless, and ended up breaking both commitments once. I paid the penalty. and renewed both in the form of a blanket commitment not to indulge in irresponsible sex, which includes indulging fantasy. Early on I needed the daily renewal of the commitment, and I needed to know that if I chose not to, on any given day, I did not have to renew it. That way I kept the sense that this was something I wanted to do; nobody was forcing me. Later on, the open-end commitment was convenient. The idea is that I have the commitment not to masturbate or indulge fantasy until I come back to the people I am working with, and tell them I want to be released from it.

Extraordinary Effect: What one becomes aware of in this process is the need for self-observation—alertness to what one is up to inside oneself. I cannot expect to be drifting and dreaming off into sexual fantasy and stay out of trouble. It was important to develop a hygiene—at the onset of fantasy, remember my commitment,
and start praying. I was using repetitive prayer; it worked extremely well as a way to nip fantasy in the bud. It is hard to believe, until you have it happen to you, how quickly this use of prayer develops some spiritual muscles. The effect on me of the reduction of time and energy spent in sexual fantasy and illicit expression was extraordinary. I see now that the condition of being almost always under sexual stimulation is exhausting and quite stupid, if for no other reason than that it spoils real sex. The fantasist and the onanist is by definition a poor mate. Typically he thinks he is being cheated by his mate, thus his need for substitutes. The sad truth is more apt to be the other way around; he has settled for substitutes and so alienated his mate.

Several years have gone by. I am still in danger from fantasy and the occasional urge to masturbate. But my situation is really quite comfortable none the less. Practically everybody in sound mind and body is in danger from sexual temptation all the time. That makes me one of the mob, and that’s all right. But I have at last learned that I do not have to act off—that is, succumb to—these temptations, and that makes me part of a much smaller grouping of human beings. I feel very lucky. It is wonderful to find oneself free of ancient shackles. I had grown accustomed to the idea that the shackles would fall off only with age—really old age at that. The Way is freedom. Try it and see for yourself. As you begin to change, the particular kind of behavior you want to stop will move from being fatally attractive, to less attractive, to not attractive at all. The speed and thoroughness of this transition will vary a great deal from person to person. And you will almost certainly find that the kind of behavior you are stopping will always remain possible for you. A homosexual need not, for example, expect to find himself turned into a raging hetero, sexual incapable of his former leanings. But there is, when you have turned to the Way, an influx of unaccustomed power to resist old cravings. you begin to see that you are actually breaking free of your former compulsion, the word miracle will occur to you, and will seem the only one strong enough for the extraordinary experience of escape.