Honestly Addressing Sexuality

For my friend and I it was important to us to agree that a sexual thought is just a thought, and a desire is just a desire. We took a "let's face it--this is what I was thinking and feeling" approach and refrained from moral judgments about thoughts being "right" or "wrong". We decided that simple honesty is a very high virtue in itself, and what we were trying to do was to be honest with ourselves about a very sensitive but important subject--men's sexual attraction to women.

I told my friend that, since we started to open up and discuss these experiences, I felt like a man who had lived most of his life in a kind of prison, and had just recently been let out--or rather, let myself out. Or, I said, "I thought I was going to die without ever having had a thorough, honest self disclosure about my own awareness of my sexuality."

The result of this effort, and it has taken time--one evening a week "coffee and soup" at a chain restaurant over the past five years--to get to the bottom of all this. I noticed that I am much more comfortable dealing with sexual moments that occur in the here and now. I am less inclined to suppress them, and less inclined to act as if my thought was anything other than a rather normal and healthy experience. What a relief.

Healthier behavior leads to a healthier kind of self esteem. I have begun to notice that I am in the process of dropping my pattern of being attracted to abusive and controlling women and starting to believe that what I need and deserve is someone who is respectful. Respect begets respect.

But the best result of all is that I am becoming totally comfortable with the understanding that it is perfectly normal for me to have many sexual moments during the typical day and better yet if I share some of the more prominent ones with a self aware friend. Finding a group of men who are standing together and telling dirty jokes doesn't work--and it never has.

Article written by Bob Faust.

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