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Dr. James MacArthur The following is a transcript of a live presentation given at the Cyber Secrets Conference on Pornography at Brigham Young University on February 18, 2003. Our chosen standards define us. We choose them, meaning our standards, hopefully thoughtfully and we protect them so that the power of the world cannot get at them and break them down. Your personal standards must have strong meaning for you. I hope you do not feel embarrassed by your personal standards. I asked a class that I was teaching once if they ever felt embarrassed by their standards, and several of them looked kind of shocked, and then actually acknowledged that they kind of did feel embarrassed by their personal standards. If you do feel embarrassed by them, you may abandon them when you need them most as a shield to protect you. Are your standards really personal standards, or are they external standards that originate with somebody else or from some other source so that they don’t belong to you? So you can’t say, “They’re mine.” Well, why did I start it with that idea if I’m talking about love versus lust and healthy intimacy in human beings? Well, I think our moral standards are one of our biggest and most precious choices. In a world of almost total sexual permissiveness, we find ourselves as Latter-day Saints very much defined by our standards. We’re known for our standards, we’re known for our sexual standards. We have standards of morality, and our standards of morality are anti-world standards. They define our sexual participation in the world, so I just think we have to be very clear on them. Since an aspect of my talk today has to do with lust, which I’ll define later, I would say that anyone who expects that my talk will show you how to not have any lust may be surprised to hear me say that I really am not sure how to do that. As I said, I'll define it for you later, but we’re mortals on the earth, and we get caught in lustful thinking and lustful feelings, and I’m going to show you some ways today to work at it, but I don’t honestly know how to make it entirely go away. But regardless of my definition of lust, I know that I must insulate myself from my own temptations by holding on tightly to my personally chosen standards. I may not be able to make the enemies of my divine nature go away, but I know how to fight them, and I fight them with my standards, so I’ve used the word standards quite a few times. I really wish all of you, I don’t care what your age is, that you would write down the standards in words that relate to your sexuality. Write them down and ask yourself if you believe them, if you own them, if they’re truly yours. Now more specifically let me talk about love versus lust. Lust is – here’s the definition you’ve been waiting for, the one you came to hear today – lust is the ravenous wanting of another person that tends to be heavily focused on the physical body and is very sexual in the way that I’ll discuss it today. Now I’m a ten-scale fanatic, and any of you who’ve ever heard me talk before or have been in my classes know that I’m not an either/or person. It’s not either you are lustful or you’re not lustful, as if it’s black and white. We all have our comings and goings with reference to things like this. But just take that definition, lust is the ravenous wanting of another person that tends to be heavily focused on the physical body and is very sexual – so if you’re ten on a ten-scale, then you’re completely enveloped in that, and that you may view people of the opposite sex or even same sex from that perspective. One reason why we are built so strongly sexual, because we are built very strongly sexual, very powerfully sexual, is so that the Lord’s purposes for which he created the earth can be fulfilled. We should not play games with such sexual capacity. Sexuality must be strong and powerful so that the Lord’s sacred purposes may be accomplished. Our sexuality is so strong and it is so powerful that it virtually guarantees that his spirit children will come to the earth, but then once upon our arrival here, then we must cope with that very powerful capacity which brought us here, which is a strong challenge for all of us. But that powerful sexuality can be so strong and so powerful that it can own us and take us over. Does your sexuality own you? Lust, the word lust to me sounds like it says, “My sexuality owns me.” Now that would be higher than seven on a ten-scale. Some people have momentary flashes of lust in which they sexually perceive another who is not their partner nor to whom they have really no commitment – those are very common, everyday experiences for probably the majority of us. But lust’s that seven, eight, nine, ten on a ten-scale is really saying, “My sexuality owns me.” It’s in the area of an addiction. How would your public self answer that question, does your sexuality own you? Now notice how I said that – how would your public self answer that question, and then how would your private self answer that question? Our religious culture at BYU and in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as well as many other religious cultures that are relatively conservative, almost demands that our public self declare our sexuality to be under control. Have you ever – well, you probably don’t walk up to people and say, “How’s your sexuality doing?” You know, you probably don’t do that. But if you did, do you really think that anyone would say, to give you a particularly honest public response to that? There are people in the world who would, because the expression of their sexuality’s not an issue, but in our culture it is, it’s a major issue, so for us, we need to look as if we’re in compliance there. And so publicly we would probably say it’s under control, so I wonder, however, how anyone’s private inner self would honestly answer that question. I wonder if maybe you struggle with aspects of your sexuality. And the problem with our public shutting down of our dialogue on it is that we can’t help each other. Some of you tire at our incessant request for personal modesty in how you dress. I wonder if women know how the private self of a male sexually responds to your immodest dress. You notice I said the private male. How does the private male respond to your immodest dress? I know women are also affected by men’s immodest dress, but men’s response to female immodesty in dress is more instantaneous and more aggressive. So it worries me more. In our religious culture, we can’t tell you publicly we feel lust when your tight clothes, bare skin, and revealing clothing cause us to privately wrestle with our standards. Women, men need your help: you must dress modestly to help us be true to our standards. If it’s up to us – it is up to us. I’m not trying to put the responsibility on women for men’s responses, so it is up to us. But you can help us. To clarify, I really don’t want to put the burden on women for men’s choices to lust, but it’s a precarious thing for men. Men are also quite isolated by not being able to – they really don’t talk to each other very much about it. In our religious culture, the communication regarding sexual topics is quite limited, almost nonexistent, and so we can’t talk, men can’t talk to each other very well about getting some help with this, and certainly they aren’t going to talk to women about these things. So I’m here today giving a talk, and you came to listen. And so I’m asking the women of the group to understand the standards and the values of our culture, and yet to know that men have this instantaneous, almost instantaneous sexual response that is so apparent when you are dressed to where your skin can be seen and your clothes are tight and your bodily curves are very revealing. This really is a very, very difficult thing for men to deal with, and then they feel guilty, because they want to be true to their standards and their values and their beliefs, but there’s this gripping, screaming maniac that lives inside of them that really likes the way you look. But then there’s this other part that says, “But it’s wrong, and I shouldn’t go there, and yet I feel so compelled to.” So we need help. Do you hear that? Men need help. Lust, let’s go back to lust. People who are very lustful are really saying, “Lust is for me; however, love is mutual. Love is for both of us. There’s something in it for both of us.” Whereas lust is not that way – lust is a one-way street. Lust declares, “What I want is physical and sexual. I’m thinking of myself and what I want. What I want is narrow, just physical and sexual. I only want a part of you, to use it to satisfy me. How my sexual wants affect you, the object of my sexual desires, is to some degree irrelevant to me. As a matter of fact, it isn’t you I’m interested in, only what your body can do for me.” Good, huh? Thank you. That is why pictures of your body work. I don’t need you as a person; I just need your body. Now if a person who’s, if a man particularly, because men get caught up in this way more, if a man who’s eight, nine, or ten on my little lust scale, if I were to say, “Read this to me,” they would gag. They would say, “That’s awful; I don’t feel that way.” And yet I would come back with, “Not so quick.” I mean, let’s be honest here. You’re really not interested in the person when you’re lustful; you’re interested in their sexuality, and you can isolate that. You can even do that in a picture. Now some argue with me and say that what they say is intense love which is legitimately sexual, so it’s not love, it’s deep love. Nope. Anytime your love disregards another person’s values, standards, character – in other words, disregards all the rest of them by excessively focusing on their body for sexual stimulation, then it is not love. If it ever was love, it now has taken on a clearly lustful identity. At best, it is counterfeit love. It looks like love, but it isn’t. Love is a two-way street; it has permanence and endures. Think of that: love is a two-way street; it has permanence and endures. Lust is a one-way street: “I get what I want quickly, and I am gone.” That is why pornography satisfies lust. Lust is for me ultimately, lust takes the other person’s person out of the picture entirely. But love is for both of us ultimately. So let me put those together for you: lust is for me ultimately, and love is for both of us ultimately. You see that, you see the difference? Unhealthy loving is based on getting. So now I’ve kind of moved into a little bit different area. Lust is sort of the greedy, selfish aspect of sexuality. And now I have this new one I’m calling unhealthy loving. Because you may find some situations where there is sort of a two-way street and you do love each other, but watch out for unhealthy loving, because it’s based on getting. Have you ever heard of the concept of giving to get? There are people who give to get. Their goal isn’t to give and leave their gift with you; their goal is to give with an ulterior motive, which is to get something back. Giving to get in this unhealthy love domain is giving to get something sexual. And there’s those who seek to give to get something sexual are manipulative. And if they’re disappointed in their ultimate sexual goal, if they’re disappointed in their ultimate sexual objective, then you’ll find heavy negative emotion generally results. So in that area, you are being used to gratify someone else sexually. Now you shouldn’t allow that to happen. But those of you who would perpetrate that ought to think about it and think about why would you want to use another human being to gratify yourself in any way, but particularly in this area of supremely important sacredness. I’ve taught many of my classes the concept of, I've talked about competition among Church members. I’ve said, “How could you compete on a personal basis with your brothers and sisters? How could you do that? How could you compete on a personal basis with your brothers and sisters, to want to outdo them, to rise above them, to be better than they are?” That’s the whole story of the Book of Mormon – the downfall of the Nephite nation occurred because the Nephite nation was caught up in this ultimate desire to rise above even their own citizenry. They competed in terms of clothing, fine clothing, jewelry, money, having things – just read the story, over and over and over they went up and down and up and down based upon their competitiveness with each other, and you have to think about this. It says within the Church – go back and read in Helaman and in 3 Nephi where it says in the Church. It says it – in the Church they did this, they competed with each other and they wanted to climb above one another, and so they would use each other. The only way I can be higher than you is if I can keep you below me. So in what way would you want as brothers and sisters in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to keep your brothers and sisters below you? Permanently they must stay below you so that you can be higher. How would you even think that way? Why would you want to think that way? Now add to that this area: I not only want to compete with you and dominate you and be over you and higher than you and better than you, although I won’t publicly say it – we don’t ever publicly say that, but privately do we do it? Privately are we in competition with each other? Sure we are. I’ve taught here for 30 years; I’ve asked hundreds of classes, “Tell me the truth. Do you feel competition, do you see competition among your parents?” Eighty percent of the hands go up, ninety percent of the hands go up. They’re absolutely convinced of it. So now in this area we add to it, “Would you also use one of your sisters to gratify you sexually and disrespect their person, not interested in their person, only interested in that one single aspect of their sexuality, and it’s only in existence to gratify you?” See, if you own that, if you own that possibility, I think it’s a shock. It’s a shock to me to think that I could ever think that, I could ever operate that way in my relationship to another person who is my brother or sister. So now to the other part of the talk I’m giving, what is the heart of healthy human intimacy then? We’ve talked about what lust is. What is the heart of healthy human intimacy? First, intimacy is not synonymous with sexual or sexuality. Sexuality may be an aspect of the intimacy two people share, but not always. Many wonderful stories of beautiful intimacy between two people with no sexuality, between men and between women, between men and women, different sexes, with no sexuality involved whatsoever. Intimacy is true human connecting. Intimacy is true human connecting. Two people come together emotionally and personally and only sometimes sexually. But the key concept regarding intimacy is the word “connect.” Lives connect. Now did you notice how I said that? What connects? Lives connect. People connect. I didn’t say bodies connect. Now that again can be an aspect of a larger view of intimacy, but the fundamental core concept of intimacy is that lives connect and people connect, not just that bodies connect. So on a ten-scale, how would you rate yourself on capacity for intimacy, the coming together with another personally and emotionally but not necessarily sexually? How would you rate yourself? If you’re extremely good at it, you would rate it up closer to ten. If you’re very poor at it, you would rate it lower. It’s interesting to do a self- assessment on your capacity for personal, non-sexual intimacy. How good are you at getting close to emotionally and personally another person? Can you be close to others without touching physically? I would encourage you to take a little time and study this in yourself, list down your strengths and weaknesses regarding intimacy. You may find as you try to write down your strengths and weaknesses with reference to intimacy that you aren’t even sure what goes into intimacy. I’m only telling you a broad view of it, that it’s a personal and emotional connecting. You might think, “What goes into personal and emotional connecting? Am I afraid of that, or am I shy in terms of that? Do I hurry into it too quickly?” It would be interesting just to see what would come to your mind. But you might ask another, ask two or three or four or five people that you know fairly well, are there abilities, are there attitudes? How good are you at this personal, non-sexual intimacy? What do you think is in it? Ask several others that you trust what’s in it. When I counsel young couples in love - we have thousands of them at BYU, usually about a week after they meet – when I counsel young couples in love but not married, I try to help them actually define what they can be and do in the relationship that’s non-sexual. If they get married, the sexual aspect of their relationship can be added. Later it will be added in according to the Lord’s standards and according to the Lord’s commandments. As a matter of fact, the wonderful two-way sexual aspect of their relationship is a unique symbol of the fact that the relationship they have belongs only to the two of them. I remember a number of years ago working with a young teenage girl in the community – she doesn’t live here anymore, you wouldn’t know her – who was very sexually promiscuous, and she said, “Why not? I like it; they like it. I have lots of people interested and noticing me, so why not? I can’t think of one reason why not.” Well, as you can imagine, we had quite an interaction over that whole question, but in the process I said to her, “In the world today when you think of the beautiful, strong, powerful, committed relationship of marriage, which we don’t see very much anymore, I think it needs a symbol.” The beautiful, strong, committed relationship of marriage, which 60 percent of them are failing in the country, and too many even in temple marriages are failing, and I said, “I think that committed relationship needs a symbol, and one of the few things that’s symbolic of that relationship is the sexual relationship, is the sexual aspect of it.” If you look at people that you admire that have healthy, committed, loving, strong marital relationships, they only communicate sexually with one other human being on earth, and that’s their spouse. It’s a symbol of that unique, beautiful, strong relationship. So the sexual part that’s added in means something to that unique relationship, because it’s a part of that unique relationship. Nobody else can have it, nobody. You can shake hands with anybody, you can hug people, you can give cards to people, you can laugh and talk and bowl and drink root beer – you can do all those things with others, you can do pretty much almost anything with anybody else, but symbolically you say to your partner that one of the symbols, maybe the symbol, of our unique relationship is the sexual part of it. That’s what it ought to be for, not for a toy that we play with. Not for this physical satisfaction of our sexual hunger. It’s got to be symbolically way more than that. So, anyway, back to what I say to these young couples, I say, “What are you and what do you do in this inner-connected relationship with each other that you call love that’s non-sexual?” Sometimes they go. I say, “Well, that sounds like a one-way trip to the bishop.” But let me give you a few suggestions here. What about reading a book together? Have you ever read a book with the person that you love? It’s really a neat, at the core, kind of a spiritual, enlivening, bonding – it’s a bonding thing. What do you think, and what do you think about ideas and knowledge that’s there? You share this back and forth. What about reading the scriptures together? What about going to a cultural or artistic activity together and listening to music or seeing an art show and sharing your thoughts and your feelings and sharing who you are and what you think and what means something to you and what your purposes are – deeper things. What about just talking together without physical contact? What about serving together in a place where others need help, serving the sick and the needy? What if you went to the soup kitchen or to a hospital or to visit someone sick in your family or in your ward, and you ministered to people together, and you just minister? What if you went and ministered together? So there’s this core spirit-to-spirit, person-to-person exchange that happens in the intimate, close bonding of two human souls. Exercising together in a sport or an activity which is a physically enhancing but non-sexual experience. What about just learning, what about learning together? Just pick a subject and read together, watch a video on some subject and talk about how you feel about learning and how you feel about that learning. What about visiting family members and providing love and service and help to them, visiting the grandmother of one of the two, or the grandfather, or an uncle, a brother or a sister, or babysitting? You know, going to babysit for your brother or your sister so they can go out to dinner? What about just doing these things together? It gives so much meaning to who you are and what you’re about and what you care about. Do you see what I mean, do you see how these two human souls are suddenly engaged in – how many did I give you, seven or eight different just quick off the top of my head possibilities of where two human souls come together in terms of what life can be and meaning and purpose and scope and spirit, and your souls come together and intertwine rather than your bodies? True intimacy, in my opinion, requires self-knowledge and self-awareness so that you know who you are giving to the other person. True intimacy requires self-knowledge and self-awareness so you know who you are giving to the other person. Here’s a little exercise I’ve done a lot in premarital counseling that I’ve found is really interesting to do right with the couple in my office. I say to them, “If you were to choose five words – no more, no less – to describe yourself completely and thoroughly to another person, what would they be?” So I had them just do it very quickly. I say you have five minutes. I give them five minutes to write down these five words, just five words that would completely – they don’t have to all be positive – but they would completely describe who they are to the other person. And then the other person does the same for them. So then I have them dialogue through those. I say, “Okay Bob, Mary – Mary, you go first. Just walk Bob through these five words. What do they mean? Why did you choose them? Who are you? What are you about? Who is Bob caring about here? Who is Mary caring about here? Illuminate yourself. These five words are the essence of who you are.” Then I let them go home and spend a week toying around with those five and they can change them any way they want. Or put them in priority order. That’s really a hoot – put them in priority order. Why would number one be number one and number five be number five? That tells you a lot about somebody. The core of a person matters to both of you, there is much less focus on the vehicle that you run around in if you know that. So then you’re able to see if the two persons can interconnect for mutually satisfying purposes. What are we bringing these two people together for? They might get married and do what married people do. They might parent. They might serve together in some capacity, they might work together in a career situation together. There’s lots of reasons for intimacy, lots of reasons for knowing another human being. Of the common objectives that you may have together, there’s many more reasons for intimacy than sex. So if you had two people doing the five-word exercise, suppose they came up with this. Person A, here’s the five words: strong, complex, intelligent, impatient, active. What if they said, if you knew those, if you knew the story behind those five words, you would really know the core of me: strong, complex, intelligent, impatient, active. It’s really interesting to see if people will put a negative word in their top five, because we’re taught not to do that, but if you’re honest and if it’s complete, you may very well have one or two. Person B, what if they said, “My five are sensitive, simple, stressed, private, and intuitive.” Now what if you put Person A and Person B together: strong, complex, intelligent, impatient, and active together with sensitive, simple, stressed, private, and intuitive? Now I could put you in groups and we could talk about that one, huh? Wouldn’t that be interesting? But what if you and the person you love did that? Some of you’ve been married for many years who are here today. Some of you who will be listening to this broadcast on another date have been married for many years. This is really fascinating to do. You have five words – not six and not four – and you write down those five, and they have to be words that if you were to grasp the story – hear this – the story behind them, you would know the core of me. I just threw those together – I wasn’t trying to describe any particular person. But I just think of active, impatient, complex dealing with private. Woo! How would these two people come together, independent of their sexuality at first? Maybe they would get married and then sexuality would be part of that relationship. But maybe not. Maybe these would be two people who worked together in the Church. These might be two people that worked together at BYU or in their career, in their work. I don’t know that you’re going to sit down and do this with every person that you meet, but to some degree this is a fascinating investigation into the inner workings of a person. Now if you possess such a thoughtful sense of self-perception and self-understanding, can lust then enter the picture? Well, it can, but it has to fight for a place among the other aspects of who you are, do you see what I’m saying? When you know another person along the lines of what I just described for you, if you know the key elements that make them them and you know the story behind it, you know what they’re about and who they are and you see it and you know it and you value it and you sense it – it’s a spiritual connection – then you want to introduce lust into this? Then you have to cancel all that out. You have to move all that out of the way in order for lust to just focus on the sexual part of the person. You see what I mean? You have to exclude all this and move it out of the way. You follow me? Well, once this is in your mind and in your heart and in your awareness of a person, it’s very hard to just think of them sexually in that brutal, demeaning way that we do in the word called lust. You have to demean them past all that stuff that you know. I find that we don’t do that very often. So here’s an interesting question for us to ask ourselves: does this driving sexual objectifying have a place in me, especially with this person that I know so deeply now? Does this driving sexual objectifying have a place in me? Does it? Rate that on a ten-scale. Well, without you possessing such self-understanding about yourself and knowing the building blocks that make you you and the building blocks that make her her or him him, then lust is standing in the wings, just waiting for you. Lust is just a raging fire that has nothing to keep it in check, no way to keep it in perspective. See, when I think the knowing and the sharing and the integrating of two souls who share themselves with each other, what that does is it puts both of you in a position to where you have to deny all that in order to go to lust and to take advantage of a person sexually, because you don’t have perspective on that other person. Okay, now I need to talk, and I just have a few minutes left, let me talk about sexual honesty. This will be my last topic within the larger topic. Sexual honesty – I wish we could find an appropriate way to acknowledge our normal sexual feelings so they don’t turn into hungry lust. I wish we could more easily say, “I have sexual feelings. I like it. It feels good.” Now I think a lot of people could do the first one. You might struggle a bit to say, “I have sexual feelings,” but to say, “I like it and it feels good” – oh, gag! You know, that’s just so hard to get those words out of your mouth. It’s hard for us to communicate honestly and openly about sexual feelings because I think we’re afraid of them. But keeping them secret adds a dimension of excitement, intrigue, and thrill to our normal sexuality. Somehow in our families, please note that I said that so that I don’t get in trouble for what I’m saying here, somehow in our families we must help each other understand sexuality and what it is and what is good and okay about it. We also need to communicate in our families the trouble that comes along with it when it becomes too prominent in our lives and relationships. Parents need to have sexuality be a normal part of family education. Help your children learn the difference between love and lust and to know even the difference between intimacy and sex. It amazes how many people won’t say the word intimacy because they think it’s spelled S-E-X. And we need to understand why our sexual powers, when they’re unattended, unmanaged, uncorralled, they’re like a hurricane in your backyard and have destroyed whole societies, many marriages, many families, and many individuals. Unchecked, uncorralled, unmanaged. But the beautiful side of human sexuality, which can only be understood properly as one aspect of our total self, must also be understood, and the Lord has taught us its true purposes and meaning, so I think there’s no real debate about that. Teach your children to ask, “When I love another person, what is the object of my love in that person?” What do you love in a person when you say, “I love them”? In other words, I love what? If it is love instead of lust, it usually has a number or a variety of answers: I love many things in another person. If it is more inclined toward lust, you disregard the total person and all the complex, beautiful aspects of who they are, and objectify the body and its sexuality. You use another person to satisfy your own sexual desires, and it cheapens all life and all people when you do that. Lust aims at one thing, and love reveres, respects, values, and cherishes many things in another person. You see that? What a wonderful thing to be able to describe in the person that you love all of the faces of love that you see in them. I was just recently sitting in the family room of our home with my wife – we’ve been married for just about 35 years – and our children are all gone. Ten of them, gone. When we took our youngest child to kindergarten many years ago, we decided to go together to take her to kindergarten because then she was the youngest of ten. We were leaving the school and we ran into some people from our neighborhood who said, “Gosh, you must be depressed, putting your youngest child in school,” and Sherry and I looked at each other with these huge smiles on our faces and said, “Do we look depressed?” That’s the way it is when you sit together and hold hands in your family room when all your kids are gone. And I was just looking at her thinking, “Well, neither one of us look much like we used to.” Midriff bulge and wrinkles, and hair’s falling off the top of my head, and my ankles look funny. I’m not going to comment on her, because this is on tape. It would be the last talk I ever give as a married man. But truly I was holding her hand and I looked at her and I thought, I wonder if someone asked me to make a list of what I love about her – I don’t think anyone would have enough time. There’s so many faces of love, and those have developed over the years, over the 35 years that we’ve been married, so many more things than when I was a young simpleminded man who didn’t have the capability to understand the many, many faces of real and deep and abiding love that you could have for another person. And then you think of the simplistic and demeaning idea of reducing a person to sexuality and objectify them for the purposes of satisfying your sexual needs, to minimize them so deeply, then you see that lust is sad. It’s so incomplete. It’s so reducing, and it’s so sad. Well, the Lord has taught us the true purposes of our eternal relationships and the beauty of a sexual relationship within the context of that eternal relationship. I pray that we will always remember what he’s taught us and be faithful and true to those things in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. |