Sheila Gregoire recently posted this question on her social media,
“ A guy is getting out of the Every Man’s Battle mentality and truly trying to put porn & lust behind him. He’s doing the work. He’s seeing a counselor.The problem is that he still battles with lustful thoughts when he sees women, and so he feels that, on this healing journey, “bouncing his eyes” away from women would still be the right thing to do to help him heal and respect women. I replied–actually, no. Because when you refuse to look at a woman, turn away when you see her or refuse to interact with her, you transfer your shame onto her. And she doesn’t deserve that. The number of women I have talked to who say that the men in the church treat them like they’re invisible or have leprosy or something is so depressing. So what should these men do? How should they interact in public in a way that WON’T cause shame to women? What should they do if they feel fixated on a woman’s figure?”
This got me thinking. This approach has been the go-to strategy for overcoming sex and lust within the Christian community and recovery circles for decades. “Men, just bounce your eyes and walk away.” I heard this countless times growing up in my Southern Baptist youth group. There was no in-depth analysis of sexuality, desire, or arousal; just run away if you feel the blood rushing toward your groan, and you will have victory over the big bad “sexuality” monster. That was it; those were the tools given to become sexually healthy men, but it didn’t work.
I remember hearing a story of a pastor sharing how he had a victory and avoided sexual temptation. He saw a beautiful woman in public who approached him to converse. He immediately started yelling out loud at this woman, “Whore of Babylon, Whore of Babylon!” directly staring at her until she ran away in horror. Seriously… This was told from a pulpit heralded as a victory from sexual temptation. But what about that woman? The searing shame of that moment is forever marked within her body. The psychological abuse that this woman endured will take years to overcome, all because this pastor didn’t know how to handle his arousal. He projected futility and rage onto this woman rather than doing the hard work of understanding it for himself. Often, men become so focused on their recovery that they forget that their actions or non-actions directly impact those who they are in relationship with. I understand that the example above is extreme, yet is it really much different from the “Every Man’s Battle/bounce your eyes approach” to overcoming lust? When we avoid women’s eyes and treat them like objects of our desire (even in our avoidance of them), then we are yelling “Whore of Babylon” at them in our way. They can interpret our avoidance of them as something wrong with them instead of something broken inside us. We cannot ignore or indulge when it comes to our sexual arousal. To ignore or “run away” does nothing to get to the core of the “why” of our arousal and deeper understanding of our sexuality. To indulge means to consume and devour beauty, also getting no closer to our sexual healing or knowledge of our sexual template and arousal structures.
The classic “bounce your eyes” approach to handling “lust” is selfish; it is only for the man’s sake, not for the woman’s. It’s for his sake to “feel” like he is fighting sexual temptation without actually doing any deep digging into his own sexual story or sexual brokenness. He gets to “feel” like he is experiencing growth and resurrection but without the pain of his crucifixion. He is merely doing behavioral management and white-knuckling recovery rather than dealing with the core wounds (what he most fears) that are causing him to continue to objectify and abuse women.
The “bounce your eyes approach” to healing is simply a shallow, cowardly approach that does not work long-term for men and is wholly objectifying toward women. Our work here at the CCC is to teach men how to engage with beauty, not by running from it, not objectifying or devouring it, but by honoring and delighting in what God created us for. As men, we should be offended that we have been given such elementary tools to engage our sexuality and know we are capable of much more.
