In lust, the man becomes self-seeking and casts
the pleasure which is supposed
to be an intermediate good as an end in itself.

Look but don’t touch?
By Tony Montanaro

n When a pretty woman comes along I will often hear a man say, “You can look but you can’t touch.” I have also heard Jesus’ words in the Gospel saying if you look at a woman with lust you commit adultery in your heart (Matt. 5:27-28). It’s easy to see that Jesus would not approve of the first saying, but like a lot of men, I want to know why, since it is not immediately obvious what harm mere looking does.

More practically, why doesn’t anyone identify what it means specifically to look on a woman with lust? Is it any and every kind of enjoyable viewing of a woman? If not, just how far can I go before it becomes lust? Precisely what is lust, anyway? As a relatively typical, red-blooded male of the modern world, I can say that I have seen plenty of lust—regrettably by personal involvement as much as by external observation. Maybe I could have avoided some of that had I known better what lust really is. Hopefully, addressing the above questions will enable some men to avoid the kind of confusion about this that plays into the hands of Satan.

Disordered desire
I suppose most of us will recognize that lust is defined as a disordered desire,1 but what is so bad about desiring sex if we don’t actually do anything about it? It may be helpful first to consider how the desires are supposed to be ordered. If we recall what the gifts of original justice and preternatural grace gave to Adam, we see a man in whom the free will was perfectly attuned to God, the faculties of the soul were perfectly obedient to the will,2 and “all bodily members would have been equally moved by the will.”3 This means, that (hard as is it is for us to imagine) he desired something only after perceiving that thing as in agreement with God’s will and willing to desire it. He would not get hungry unless he saw that now would be a fitting time to eat. Likewise, in his perfection he would not have a sexual desire except when he saw that it would be proper to fulfill that desire in union with his wife.

What then is the proper sexual desire? The Church teaches us that God gave us our gift of sexuality for two purposes that are so intimately joined as to be inseparable: to perfect the union of friendship with our spouse by a total giving of self, and to extend that self-giving to the generation of new persons capable of loving and being loved.4 It is only thus that sexual acts become truly human, rising above mere animal behavior. Here we see that human sexual acts are fundamentally other-centered. Even though in sexual activity a man expects and desires the pleasure it brings, as a human (i.e., as a being made for love) he ought to desire it principally as a correlative of the delight he wants to give his wife. As friendship implies a love of the other’s good, he cannot truly desire her good or satisfy her without a mutuality that gives her equal opportunity to please him, and so both his joy and hers in sex arise ideally in the perfect sharing of delights for each other.5

Here arises the first element of disorder in lust—it is self-centered. It makes a man desire the sexual act principally for his own pleasure. It twists the act away from being a union wherein each finds delight in pleasing the other, to one where the man subjects his spouse to a servant’s role in providing his own pleasure. Instead of an act of love, it becomes an act of a beast. Yet it falls lower than the level of beasts: while it is good for animals to engage in sex without love, in a human it is devoid of the good it is designed to have.

The second part of sex is due to God’s plan for creation of new persons. On a physical level, he provided that we give to children the matter from which he forms the new person in the culmination of the very act in which we give ourselves totally (including physically) to our spouse.6 On a psychological plane, he provided that the generation of a new person occurs within the very act that most perfectly expresses and cements our love for our spouse.

Clearly he intended the new person to be intimately tied to the permanent community of persons that is formed in marriage because it is essential both for the child and for the married pair. It is essential for the child because he needs to belong to a community of love (which is an image of the Triune God whose love is a Third Person) as his home so he can learn his vocation to be a person capable of love. And it is essential for the married couple because it is in extending their love beyond themselves that they complete their development as loving persons (which is a reflection of God as Creator).7

Here arises the second disorder of lust: with lust the man has no regard for the potential new person implied by the act’s very purpose. In his lust a man corrupts his ability and need to extend his love further to new persons, and so he becomes a stunted, psychologically and spiritually deformed human. Worse, he usually invites or demands that his wife (or sexual partner) join his defection from good, thereby ensuring her malformation as well. So far from desiring her good, his act is as harmful as if it came from hatred. It can hardly be surprising that divorce among couples that use contraception is much higher than among those who do not: their choice to contracept is so damaging to themselves and their relationship that it hardly has a chance to last. Also, this makes it apparent that lust is possible in marriage as well as outside of it.

The pleasure of sex is supposed to be at the service of the love between the husband and wife, and the love between them and any potential child. In the marital act open to procreation the couple complete their development as loving persons made in the image of God, whose love for us is creative. In lust, the man becomes self-seeking and casts the pleasure which is supposed to be an intermediate good as an end in itself. He thus harms himself, his partner, and the potential child.

Appreciating the beautiful
This makes it easier to see why Jesus condemns lust. But it doesn’t tell us when men commit this sin, when they have stepped over the line. Men still ask “How far can I go before it is lust?” All too often, it seems as if the Church is telling us we can’t even look at a woman without committing a sin. But this can’t be true—the Church approves of courtship, which is impossible unless a man looks at a woman, and further considers her as a possible future wife. We intuitively feel that merely looking with the eyes is not itself a sin, so where is the cut off point? To answer that, we have to take a close look at what happens inside a man in the act of desire. The problem is that there are several levels of activity, and they interact so quickly that it can be difficult to distinguish all of what happens. Let’s follow a typical man, Harry, in the course of an act of lust.

At first, when Harry looks at a beautiful woman, he takes a delight in the object of vision, through the faculty that enjoys pretty things. This is not the power of sight itself, but the same power that delights in a beautiful sunset, a grand horse, or a catchy melody. This delight is not limited to males and is found in children. It is both innocent and appropriate, at least in principle if not always in practice, as we shall see later. After his immediate sense level enjoyment, Harry’s visual perception of the girl gives rise to two separate actions. One is an intellectual appraisal and enjoyment of the beautiful simply as beauty, which taken by itself is free from moral problems. The beautiful is a kind of good—actually, it is goodness itself under another aspect. This appreciation is the natural fulfillment of part of Harry’s intellect.

Seeking a mate
The other activity which arises directly out of the visual perception of the beautiful girl is—in males past childhood—a reaction to the girl’s female qualities, an apprehension of her precisely insofar as she is a potential mate.8 This event, having virtually nothing to do with the intellect at this point, is a response of an animal whose nature directs it to seek a mate. Harry will seek a mate both with his mind and his body, but he usually follows with an intellectual appraisal only after the animal part of him reacts and says: “potential mate material!”

A girl is trying to bring this about when she dresses attractively—the human correlative of birds showing off their plumage, for example. This response is also used when a woman dresses provocatively: the strength of the eventual desire Harry is subject to depends on how well she matches his ideal of mate, and how available she appears (i.e., how easily the potential appears to be realizable). The more suggestively she dresses, the more fully he apprehends her as available, and the stronger the later response. The apprehension of a possible mate is a natural and necessary activity: it is the normal preliminary to obtaining a mate. It is how Harry acts upon this kind of apprehension that matters.

Due to original sin, his desires do not follow after the directives of his mind or will, and immediately after apprehending a girl as a potential mate, Harry’s desire for sexual pleasure starts up, regardless of any concerns about whether the sex so desired is truly good. “The first movement of sensuality has nothing sinful in it,”9 being involuntary, but it is usually disordered because it does not follow the order of God’s plan for sex. Yet that first instant of desire presents him with an immediate choice: does he consent to the desire, or reject it? Before this point he may be free to consent to the sense pleasure and the intellectual enjoyment, since these are goods simply and are not disordered in themselves (though qualifications are discussed later). But a desire for sexual pleasure outside of the context of marriage is objectively disordered and must be rejected.

Consenting to selfish pleasure
Herein lies the first element of sin, the essence of the act of lust: upon an initial motion of desire for a good of the body (sexual pleasure) that occurs without regard to its being truly good for the person, Harry consents to the desire and makes it not only a motion of the concupiscible appetite but of the will as well. As a result of the consent, he encourages the desire, and both the desire and the resulting sexual arousal are themselves pleasurable in a certain degree.10 So even though Harry has no intention of actually having sex, he has consented to use his sexual power for a pleasure that relates solely to himself. Thus using the woman (internally at this point) as an object for himself, Harry has already sown the seeds of all the other evils that accompany adultery, and Jesus says he has committed adultery in his heart. On the other hand because of the fact that Harry’s desires are not subject to his will, even if he does reject the initial motion of desire by refusing to consent to it, he may still continue to feel desire, and experience some level of sexual arousal. On this account, it can be very difficult for Harry to distinguish whether he has in fact rejected the whole temptation rather than giving in for a few moments, or perhaps just deliberating upon the temptation longer than necessary.

Avoiding temptation
Although the earlier parts of the process are not morally wrong considered in themselves, they are often involved in the action of lust. For example, although the intellectual enjoyment of the beautiful is a natural good, it leads Harry to extend his viewing of the beautiful object. This naturally tends to perfect the apprehension of a potential mate and strengthen the initial desire that poses a temptation. If our appetites were ordered to follow our reason, this intellectual delight would not be a problem. But since our appetite does not follow reason, we are presenting our appetite with an object that is going to cause a temptation to consent to a disordered desire. Thus original sin corrupts what ought to be a natural good into an occasion of sin. It is to avoid this occasion of sin that older spiritual books urge us to practice custody of the eyes, whereby we choose to avoid looking at those objects, naturally good themselves, which are now a cause of temptation due to our corrupted natures.

Likewise, the apprehension of a female as a possibility for being a mate is itself not wrong—it has a naturally good purpose. Yet it tends to lead us to an act of the concupiscible appetite that does not recognize the order demanded by God’s plan, and so it is usually a cause of temptation. Further, many men encourage this operation, making it stronger (e.g., by mentally undressing the girl before them, thus creating a phantasm in the imagination which increases the appearances of availability and desirability) for the very purpose of encouraging the desire that will follow. This is an abuse of the power.

It would appear that the only males for whom this act is useful are those who are becoming ready for marriage and involved in seeking a wife. Those in early teens who are remotely preparing for a future that may include marriage will find themselves subject to the apprehension of many potential mates around them, but they have no proximate (licit) use for this operation, and would do best to ignore it except as the motive for a normal development as sexual persons in non-sexual relationships.11 Married men have already accomplished the primary objective for which the apprehension exists in them, and so should discourage it and avoid it except insofar as it leads them to appreciate their own wives more.

So, is it acceptable to look if you don’t touch? A sense level delight in the pretty, an intellectual appreciation of the beautiful, and an apprehension of the sex potential of a girl are all non-sinful considered in themselves. Yet on account of our fallen natures they all lead to an almost certain temptation to sin. Worse, they are often encouraged on account of their usual result. The direct result of them, an initial motion of desire, is not itself sinful but is commonly disordered and presents an immediate demand of either acceptance or rejection, a direct temptation to sin. Trying to fool ourselves, we pretend that looking at a woman doesn’t cause any real harm, as long as it doesn’t go any further, but that is just self-delusion. Looking at a woman with the expectation that it will produce desire is the common situation, which we must beware of and avoid to remain properly oriented toward self-giving love.

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