Masturbation with CS Lewis
What a load of wank. First off, let’s get real: masturbation is fun—it is not “a prison”; in fact, masturbation is one of the few pleasures available to prisoners. It’s a bad metaphor to call it “a prison”—and the same goes for heroin and whores: “I was on an all-time high all day and lived in a dream world, and it was a prison” (it was awesome) “I was surrounded by dozens of tarty sexually available women, it was Hell” (it was freakin’ awesome). For sure, condemn an activity if you want, but don’t be so manipulative as to say that it’s “a prison” or “terrible” when it’s actually fun—it’s just a contrived lie. To say, “It was great fun, but ultimately over-indulgence is bad for you,” would be closer to the mark.
“Over-indulgence” is the key, for as Doctor-Professor Paracelsus said, “Whether an activity is good or bad is a matter of degree—just as arsenic can cure in tiny amounts, or kill if the amount is increased by a very small degree.” So absolutists, such as CS Lewis, are in fact people who create genuine evil. “All masturbation is bad, all pre-martial sex is bad,” is the necessary corollary to, “I’m a sex-positive feminist, we need to talk about sex more—more sex education is required in the schools.” Usually these people end up debating each other on the telly, another totally unreal world—really, they should just fuck already.
Puritans swing both ways, if you like, in that they are absolutists: the joyless minister who makes his schoolboy charges feel bad because they bash the bishop (he gets a little thrill as he thinks about his boys tugging on their members) and the feminist harridan who goes on and on about how she can “do it like a dude” and laid dozens of men in a sex-positive manner are the same thing; it’s absolute—no sex, all sex (no degree involved); total licence, total restriction. Totally unreal.
Lewis barely even puts forward the traditional Christian objection to masturbation (because he was not a Christian): the standard Christian objection to masturbation is from Onan (as in onanism)—he spilt his seed on the ground and that was a waste, he could have been procreative and not sterile. So the standard Christian objection to masturbation is that masturbation stops you from being fruitful and multiplying—from being a patriarch like Abraham. What Lewis presents here is some extract from a women’s magazine about how masturbation stops you from finding your “true soulmate” and “fully knowing” a woman; and this is because Lewis was a feminist in spirit—he worshipped women, not men; and certainly not the Big Dog. Indeed, he was sterile himself: he had no children and instead raised the son of his Jewish-Communist wife (unnatural, cucked)—perhaps if he had deployed his five-man crew (the male hand is not a harem, it is a crew) and tugged one out he would have been more procreative.
If you read Lewis, you will find he was very much about control—and this extract is not about the Big Dog, it is about control; it is about unctuous smarmy look-how-holy-I-am moral superiority (“You’re bad, you’re dirty—I’m good, I’m holy; except I like to think about naughty boys touching themselves in their dorms at night, all sweaty under the white sheets. Ooohh I feel all funny inside). This is about showing off and making your prayers in public—it is moral masturbation over a topic. It is also, notice, against imagination—Lewis doesn’t like the fact that you could imagine your own sexual partner in your head (or perhaps you don’t even think about women when you masturbate, is it then still a sexual act?) because Lewis is about control.
He fears people might use their imaginations, whereas really Lewis should control their imaginations (the author’s temptation)—Lewis the Official Spokesman for Jesus Christ. Yet what Lewis promotes is against nature, he never “fully knew a woman”—he was too much a manipulative and sadistic woman himself to “know a woman”. If you said to him, “Women are whores—and Madonnas; each woman is a Madonna and a whore,” he would probably say, “A frightful and shocking and unChristian sentiment blah-de-blah-de-I’m-so-good-I’m-so-clean-I’m-so-pure-you-must-obey-me.” Yet it is the truth about women: women are all whores, women are all Madonnas.
To return to an earlier point, people like Lewis belong on “serious social affairs programs” where “public intellectuals” debate the “issues of the day”; and, as noted, nothing real is ever said on these shows—it’s all an act to show off how “good” you are, whether Christian or progressive liberal, and to utilise your probity to control others. Just like Lewis, it is all joyless—Lewis was never a joyful man; he read Lucretius at university and became a convinced atheist and he remained that way for good—to know the Big Dog he would have had to be honest and non-hypocritical but that stuffy Oxford world he moved in was totally hypocritical and full of bullshit, had been for years.
They were already, even in the 1930s, worshipping women—just as Lewis worships women here; and he tries to manipulate you like a woman too, to make everything about shame and weakness. Ugh. This was why his fiction features extensive sadism as well, it lingers over the lesbian secret police chief who burns the hero’s girlfriend with a cigarette while she’s tied up. “Why, Mr. Lewis, your wholesome Christian book reads awful like a porno I watched at nineteen called HOT LESBO burns young SLUT with cigarette,” and it reads that way because Lewis is the pervy prep-school master in his patched tweed teaching jacket rubbing one out under the desk while he says, “Boys, I want you to remember *ugh* the mortal danger to your *sweat drips off his forehead* souls from *ugh* self-abuse *uggggggggggggh*.” He came. Basically, touch it—just not so much it falls off.