Why am I such an insufferable prude?

                First of all a prude is a contraction referring to someone who is prudent.  I truly aspire to be a prude, much more than I am. 

PRUDENCE: The virtue which disposes a person to discern the good and choose the correct means to accomplish it. One of the cardinal moral virtues that dispose the Christian to live according to the law of Christ, prudence provides the proximate guidance for the judgment of conscience (1806). Catechism of the Catholic Church

                Prudence has become a contraction, prude, which refers specifically to one’s disposition towards sex.  Prudes are individuals who are uptight and unwilling to see sex as simply a way to have a good time.  It’s as if prudes see sex as inseparable from the consequences which are becoming more and more inevitable; these include but are by no means limited to: STDs, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, fatal blood clots due to oral contraceptives, and depression as the oxytocin intended to bond persons together has to be ignored, as if one could truly ignore a neuromodulating hormone, not to mention all the other disordered personality development individuals sink into the development of a “sexual self”.

                  Society at large has become more and more affected by persons pushing their disordered sexual perceptions.  One who has a disordered relationship with sex tends to blame a lack of social tolerance for the high suicide rate associated with their behavior.  As I have stated before one cannot effectively manipulate one’s neromodulating hormones or neurotransmitters for that matter; they react regardless of a nebulous desire but according to our solid actions.  We get stuck in a rut of firing neurons whose plasticity becomes more concrete as the behaviors which are intended to save become more and more a tightening noose.

                They keep on pushing until the television is unwatchable and fashion is more completely exploitative than ever.  Fashion which creates Jours Après Lunes’ lingerie for four year olds and Abercrombie Kids push up bikini bras for seven year olds; an industry which pushes disordered views of female sexuality and body consciousness which the young girls marketed to could not understand consciously, for they cannot understand sex and sexuality, but only as an issue which will obstruct them from happiness, for they simply want to be socialized individuals.  They only feel the effects of that objectification from their earliest moments and throughout their lives as they bring those raw feelings into adulthood and into unhappy relationships with the unstable and destabilizing men which appreciate the artifice the now women had consumed since they were girls.  They may in turn blame prudes for their unhappiness.

                 Boys of course suffer from the introduction of sexual stimulus in different ways; I haven’t seen boys in short shorts for instance.  Boys have to be taught to defend and protect because that same energy is capable of destruction.  If boys aren’t taught to treat women with respect they will use them.  Many will use their drive to compete in inappropriate ways; it is no wonder to me that one in four teenage girls has an STD. 

                Boys’ story, just like girls’, is individual and varied but all are touched in a negative way.  Since this essay is entitled “Why am I such an insufferable prude?” I feel I should tell you a little about myself.  I was a very, very shy boy who was both infatuated with and with only very few exceptions scared to death of girls.  In fact I wasn’t totally comfortable with the few exceptions.  I have always been one who will withdraw into myself and try not to deal with the world around me.  Finding pornography to me only further insolated my world and caused me to be more antisocial.  Whereas this may not impact women as much in the broad world it has impacted my wife every day.  She has been the light of Christ drawing me out of myself, my beacon of hope, that I can be fully healed. I pray I am and each day I have to get ready; because that’s what is prudent in this climate.  It would be like wearing shorts in a blizzard to think one can simply leave the house without having prayed for the grace to focus not on the world but on servicing others today, a service which must reach from my eyes to my heart.

                I read a good article by a retired Marine which said if you are taking fire what one wishes to do is the very thing which will get you killed; which is duck and hide and try to hug the earth until it’s over.  What we must do is mount a counter attack as quickly as one can and throw everything we have into it.  We may be wounded we may be almost dead but to stop and coward is to accept that death.  As Catholics we can literally start lobbing “Hail Mary’s”!  Our mother wears combat boots and she would never leave you alone to perish, after all she fights with the tenacity of a mother for her children.

                So what is prudent?  We must fight until there are no words on the bottom of our girl’s sweatpants!  We must fight until all underwear is worn under some other wear.  We must fight like the souls of countless children depend upon what we do!  We must pray my friends, we must pray, because as we pray we fight selfishness with love.  May God bless you in your fight.  Please pray for me.