Jocks for 1000

A few years ago, I attended a men’s retreat where one of the sessions focused on sexual shame. Each man was given the opportunity of standing before the group to explain the shame he carried from sexual sin. Many men expressed remorse over premarital sexual encounters and only a few reported infidelity.

At some point one of the guys mentioned the number of women with whom he had been sexually intimate before marriage. The number was perhaps in the teens and didn’t raise any flags for me. Soon, one guy after another confessed his particular estimate of the number of women he’d been with, and before long it was a freefall. The estimates just got higher and higher until one of the guys hit the jackpot with a number in the four-digit range.

My amazement reached its peak at this point. The sheer size of these estimates was mind-numbing, and I struggled to grasp how so many men could cycle through so many women given their relative youth. The final confession, mentioned above, was beyond belief. I thought for certain that he had miscalculated, or had fudged to win the prize (which there was none).

After 45 years living as an adult, I still have been intimate with only one woman. I was a virgin when I married so you can imagine how difficult it was for me to comprehend how a man could enjoy being intimate with a thousand women. Eventually the act itself must become nothing more than a tiresome series of muscle contractions. Can there be any profundity in an experience that is repeated hundreds of times with strangers for mere physical pleasure?

This man, this implausibly high achiever, must have been a master of the art of seduction to have accumulated so many notches on his belt, which apparently, he rarely buckled. And what is seduction? It is the deception that draws a woman away from protecting her body against a selfish advance. A man who seduces a woman is a man who also abandons the woman when the deed is done.

In the circle-up I felt like a veritable prude among these insatiable dudes. They were practically conquerors when it came to sexual prowess while I was barely even an armor bearer. I nearly felt ashamed of myself that I had not taken advantage of any woman before marriage, but as I listened to the men that false shame vanished. Every single man who had sexual shame in the area of seduction was deeply contrite and full of regret. Not only had they used and discarded scores of women for their own pleasure, they also had shattered their own capacity for shameless intimacy with their wives. The guilt from their many exploits was for many a burden too great to bear.

I shouldn’t be surprised that so many of the men at the retreat shared the same experience of seduction, or even at the inconceivable number of encounters the men confessed. I am surprised, however, that our culture continues to define a man as masculine only if he can recount multiple sexual exploits before marriage. How have we come to believe that a man becomes a man when he’s seduced a robust number of women?

How can a culture bent on hooking up at every opportunity return to a more chaste society? Even Christians are contributing to this moral demise. I know of a woman (a virgin) who regularly dates single men she finds on a Christian dating service. She makes it clear to the men (who admit they are just as religiously committed as she) that there will be no sex while they’re dating. The men agree at first, but she says after the fifth or sixth date the men begin to push her boundary in the hopes it will vanish. She says this happens regularly. And when she says no the men stop returning her messages, and the dating is over. On to the next man.

There will be no turning back the sexual pressure men place on women until men begin to see themselves and their masculinity in a different light. There is no virtue in being a sexual conquistador before marriage. Sexual encounters (conquests) should not be considered a right of passage for any man.

I recognize I live in a different world from the one I lived in as a boy. Boundaries are illusory if they exist at all. Value systems have morphed into a protocol of unbounded desire where moral relativism dictates everything about sexual intimacy. The dysfunctional conscience of a nation allows the moral framework that permits a man to bed a thousand women as easily as it is for him to shop online. That same framework rewards such excess by reinforcing the message that manly men cannot deny their sexual urges because that’s what makes them manly.

I could not feel sorry for these men at the retreat. They had exhausted themselves in bed after bed and felt blackened to the core. There was no running away from the guilt and shame. These were embedded deep in each man’s soul and they knew the self-deprecating taunts would haunt them for the rest of their lives. It was double jeopardy. They put their reputations at risk for momentary trysts only to squander their self-respect.