Loose Lips	Loose Lips Archive

Miss Poubelle was visiting her local coffee shop last week and went to the magazine rack for something to read along with her drink. There wasn't much to choose from, so she grabbed something called New Man and took it back to her table.

To her surprise, New Man turned out to be a Christian men's magazine, and the topics discussed in New Man were so remote from Blanche's ordinary reading material as to be quite fascinating.

One long portion of the magazine was about accountability partners, a new concept for Blanche. Among a certain segment of Christian men, there is a wide-spread practice where men form partnerships devoted to keeping each other on the straight and narrow-- and I do mean straight and narrow. Two men who have pledged to be each other's accountability partner are supposed to talk on a daily basis about all the temptations they face in trying to lead a Christian life, and to confess to each other all their failings.

View our poll archive

It will probably come as no surprise that an enormous number of the temptations and failings have to do with sex. A man is supposed to confess to his accountability partner any episodes of masturbation, as well as any fantasies or sexual attraction to someone other than his wife.

New Man cites the verse in the New Testament that caused so much controversy for Jimmy Carter twenty years ago, which says "anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart." Since opportunities for looking lustfully at women have perhaps never been so easily available, a prime area of concern for the accountability partners is the Internet.

A number of other Christian websites and magazines are also devoted to persuading men not to look at Internet pornography-- Guide readers might also find sites like pureintimacy.org eye-opening. Several of these organizations recommend that Christians get accountability software, which will essentially spy on Internet usage and send a report of every web site visited to a man's accountability partner on some regular basis. One accountability partner is then supposed to look through the sites and make sure that the other partner hasn't been watching the Paris Hilton video, or looking at one of the thousands of other titillating things available at the fingertips. One company that produces such software, Covenant Eyes, charges $6.95 a month for its product, which has been dubbed tattleware-- software designed to report computer usage to another person.

The language of accountability partners and the Christian antiporn movement shows some similarities to that of the twelve-step movements which help people overcome alcohol, drugs, gambling, and many other debilitating addictions. Accountability partners are very much like sponsors in Alcoholics Anonymous, and many Christian sources are quite explicit in viewing sexual arousal outside of marriage as being an addiction. Some sources even claim that masturbating to images of naked people causes chemical changes in the brain that will make it permanently impossible to enjoy a happy married life.

How bleak life must seem to those who actually believe this! For few things in life are more constant than hunger, thirst, and lust. Trying to lead a life without lust must be like being on a diet for the rest of your life-- spending every day denying yourself what your body craves. In the case of dangerous addictions like heroin or alcohol for some, it is clear that the cravings are destructive, and that overcoming them is the only way to have a normal life.

Blanche can even accept that some people behave in dangerous and sexually compulsive ways that require intervention and help. But what is remarkable about this segment of Christianity is how it tries to make ordinary sexual desire into something pathological and sinful.

Miss Poubelle would be surprised to find much overlap in the readership of The Guide and New Man magazine. Guide readers, like most Americans (and even most Christians), view sexual desire as a normal and healthy part of life. Some of us may choose to make monogamous commitments to a partner, but even then we don't decide that all sexual attraction to other people is supposed to stop. We think of sexual desire as a positive, enlivening force in our lives, rather than a danger to our souls.

Miss Poubelle thinks that lust is one of the things that make life worth living, like a spring that refreshes the rest of a life that is too often parched. How much healthier and happier it is to celebrate our sexuality than it is to view it as a corrosive acid which can only be sealed in a marriage and policed with tattleware....