“I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1)
As part of my pledge of purity, I made a “covenant with my eyes.” That is, I promised not to look lustfully at a woman. Thinking naughty thoughts about Rachel in English class? Take those thoughts captive. Staring at the blonde in a miniskirt? Avert my eyes. Smitten with the buxom Dallas Cowboys cheerleader on TV? Change the channel.
I failed, of course. I tried. I tried to suppress those thoughts, to find freedom from lust. I’d have small victories. Then a peek of cleavage, and I’d succumb to concupiscence. A feeling of shame engulfed me as my cock hardened.
But I still couldn’t stop looking.
The female form enraptures me. It invites my gaze.
And my lust.
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot.
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
all falls aside but myself and it….
– Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”
I’m not the only one.
And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon (2 Sam 11:2).
“Woman’s billowy body reflects the surging sea of chthonian nature,” Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae. Feminists object to objectification and religious moralists condemn lust, but the female body is a locus of desire.
She sits across from me as we ride into the city. Long blonde tresses frame her pretty face. She’s intently reading her book. Light is reflected off her nail polish. She shatters my cool reserve. I try not to stare. My eyes dart from my phone to her presence.
She crosses her legs.
Her boots almost go up to her knees. Her skirt drapes her thigh. Dark stockings cover the rest of her legs.
“Legs are the gateway to what lays between them.”
“The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex,” one female psychologist notes.
In the Sumerian myth of Enlil and Ninlil, the god Enlil spies Ninhil bathing and is struck with lust at the sight of her naked body. His desire is then consummated in sexual intercourse with her. The myth affirms that the female body is visually attractive and sexually alluring, seductive and irresistible to the male gaze.
The inherent eroticism of a woman’s body dooms, for me at least, any covenant I may make with my eyes. Erasmus in his Enchiridion Militis Christiani identified the female body as a provocation for lust. In Whitman’s words, “what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed” by the appearance of the female form.
Lutheran Guilt 