Not all men of course - just the disordered ones.
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I've known a lot of guys who maybe could have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, although I'm pretty sure their problem had more to do with religious fundamentalist tendencies and excessive moral rigidity, than anything clinical. Although maybe not, since the problem played out more like an obsessive compulsive disorder regarding romance and sexuality - and not like a virgin, rather like a Puritan. I suppose a confessor or spiritual director would call it scrupulosity.
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With some guys it is just a phase in spiritual development - shortly after one's conversion some guys seem to be almost overcome at times with sexual temptation - and obsessing over it, they frequently fall. Boing! After a fall they become even more rigid and severe - like a Puritan. Gradually they believe they can repress even the least movement to lust - but the tension builds. Boing!
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However, as a bit self-mastery increases, some of us can become rather smug about our successes in the battle - while becoming rather moralistic regarding everyone else. It's a fine balance, beset with many temptations - especially to pride, yet there is nothing like humility to obtain grace in abundance - as well as that balance.
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That said, a friend alerted me to a rather good post on the subject of real men and their romantic/sexual disorders. At least that's how I would term it. It's a woman's perspective on tradsters and their personal regime, and I think some readers may recognize someone they know here. Especially those guys who are bound and determined to replicate an earlier ideal of family life, such as the perfect Father Knows Best style family. (No one ever actually lived like that BTW.)
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Real men.
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When, after a lackadaisical childhood catechesis, years spent doing my own thing, and a dramatic conversion experience, I came back to the Catholic Church in 2002, I found that there was a New York City subculture I had never known existed: the subculture of young orthodox and Traditionalist Catholics. Many of this subculture’s adherents were actively looking for a mate, and I dated a few of them, which was an experience unlike anything I was familiar with from my own long romantic struggles.
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Many of the men in this subculture were what I can only call essentially wounded in their masculinity. It was as if their self-identification as men had been haphazardly constructed out of subversive images of masculinity refracted to them from the culture; as if, finding certain norms of masculinity repellent (not without reason, it must be said), and not having had male role models to demonstrate for them any ontological qualities of manhood, these young men had skirted around the edges of male behavior, and had finished by taking affect for essence. Their own masculinity seemed to have been forged in opposition and negation, cobbled together out of strong, oppositional attitudes to what repelled them culturally, rather than out of any positive attitudes, such as the wish to take on essential male roles -- engaging, for instance, in meaningful ways in the existential struggle to fight real enemies, and providing for and protecting the vulnerable, including women and children. In addition, some of these men seemed to have self-consciously adopted certain styles, tastes, hobbies, and mannerisms associated with other times and places than twenty-first-century New York, identifying themselves more with, say, Europe before World War I, or fin-de-siècle Paris, or the New York of the Gilded Age. One man from this set whom I dated asked me seriously once whether I considered myself American (he didn’t, in spite of the fact that, like me, he was).
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[...]
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I have no answers to the problems of wounded masculinity and femininity in the Church. We are all essentially broken, after all. Nonetheless, when one of us is wounded in this fundamental way, and acts out of his woundedness, and does damage to others as a result of it, the entire Mystical Body of Christ suffers. I hope and pray that priests and laypeople may work together to heal the wounded -- i.e., our brothers and sisters and ourselves -- which I think would go a long way towards healing relationships between Catholic men and women. - Pentimento
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I think the lady got it right.
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Image: German Nationalist Socialist art - the ideal Aryan family.
