Embracing the Tiger

A Horny Man's Guide to Healthy Sexuality

This article features frank and explicit discussion about male sexuality and is intended for an adult audience. If that isn’t for you, please go drink tea and pet a cat instead of reading this article.

In my early twenties, I had a dream that I was facing down a huge, terrifying tiger in a dark London street. This tiger was an archetypal nightmare – a vision from the Taiwanese ink drawings of ferocious beasts my missionary parents hung on their walls when I was a child.

The tiger lunged at me, wrapped his muscled arms around me and sank his claws deep into my back. The terror and physical anguish were excruciating. I did something, then, that surprised me in the dream: I let go. I stopped fighting, and I sank into its terrifying, painful embrace. And when I did, I felt linked with the tiger in a starling intimacy. “I am your brother,” the tiger spoke into my mind. I was the tiger, and he was me. And then I woke up.

The tiger, I realized upon awaking, was my homosexuality. I was struggling mightily at the time with my Christian faith and my homosexual orientation, and I knew that if I fought against this tiger that was part of me, it would tear my life to pieces. The shame, the furtive lust, and the secret sex would all destroy my life. I could only lose in the fight against the beast of my homosexuality. The only way forward, I knew, was to embrace the tiger. That meant, simply, accepting my love and lust for men. It meant being honest with myself about my fantasies, gay porn use, and yes, having sex with men.

Surprisingly, I am once again going through a similar experience of learning to embrace the tiger in my 30s.

Friar meets fuckboy.

For the past seven or so years, I have lived like a large, soft-bodied friar with a rigorous spiritual and scholarly life. I read for hours every week, kept a strict sleep schedule, and meditated every morning. My life was one of philosophical contentment. I was overweight but spiritually and intellectually disciplined.

Gone were the days of rabid horniness and wasting months chasing after sex in my 20s. I was physically fit in my 20s but sexually insatiable. After finding a partner and gaining weight, my libido finally died down. This was a relief: I could live a simple, rigorous life of the mind.

This all started to shift when I went to the doctor recently and she told me that I was in danger of an early death if I didn’t get my health under control. “I don’t want you dying of a heart attack at 40,” she told me.

So, I’ve followed my doctor’s advice and gotten fitter. I no longer eat like a black bear rummaging through a dumpster, I work out, and I ruck or run 3 to 5 times a week. I’m leaner, stronger, happier. But I wasn’t prepared for the horny fuckboy from my 20s to re-emerge. I thought he was in my past, and I couldn’t be more wrong. He was always there, hibernating, ready to re-awaken and completely disrupt my monastic tranquility.

I’ve been on a journey over the past several months of working with and managing my voracious sexual energy which is the direct result of becoming physically healthier.

I confess to sometimes being bitter and frustrated with my sex drive. It is so fierce and distracts me so often that I sympathize with Origen of Alexandria when he decided to castrate himself to avoid carnality. I know many men are in a similar position.

Huge numbers of men have told me that they feel completely out of control with their porn habits, hooking up, and sexting with strangers. They confide in me that they watch too much porn as if confessing to axe murdering their grandmother. Many of them are frustrated with how it seems to waste their time, and they feel enormous shame.

I’ve become particularly worried about guys in the “NoFap” community — a vast movement of young men committed to completely refraining from masturbation and porn. Despair, suicidality, and self-loathing permeate these online cultures.

I’m not a therapist or sexologist, and what follows is not medical advice. I’m just one man who’s figuring out what works for me. I am interested in living a full, compassionate, integrated life. Sacred Tension as a way of life is about the marriage of opposites and the embrace of every part of what makes us human: the carnal and the transcendent, the fuckboy and the friar. This is my personal, preliminary horny man’s guide to embracing the tiger, being an ethical werewolf, and engaging in healthy sexuality.

A moral panic over male sexuality.

I believe our culture despises male sexuality and the simple wants of male bodies. Porn has been declared a public health crisis in 16 US states, and the stats on porn consumption make this a veiled moral panic about male sexuality since men account for the majority of porn consumption.

This does not, of course, suggest a masculine deficiency in men who don’t watch porn or have a lower-than-average sex drive. Individuals are diverse. But, at the population level, porn is a male preoccupation.

In an interview I did with Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, he had this to say about the moral panic over men’s use of pornography:

Here’s why I really think there’s this moral panic about porn, and why it’s called a “public health emergency” in several US states. I’ve thought about this whenever someone has been caught, like the Jeffrey Toobin thing, the New Yorker writer who was famously caught masturbating during a break from a Zoom call. The reason I think you get that reaction to him but also to porn is that it reveals in really stark and vivid ways what men are like when it comes to sex. I think for a lot of women especially the idea that you could just take five minutes out of your day, log onto Pornhub, maybe masturbate and then go back to the spreadsheets you were working on – they find that just incomprehensible and a bit disgusting, because that’s very different to female sexuality on average. What I think porn does in some ways is shine a light on an aspect of male sexuality that a lot of people just don’t like. I think a lot of women don’t like it, but I also think that conservatives don’t like it generally. It is a fact about male sexuality that is uncomfortable, and porn makes it quite visceral and visible.

I have heard a huge number of otherwise smart and decent people describe men writ large as animals, filthy, perverted. Some people have expressed disgust at the very fact that penises exist at all.

If you are a man, you have likely internalized this cultural disgust, which results in guilt, shame, and secrecy. There is a high likelihood that you are frightened of your howling lust.

Werewolfing

Lust is indeed fearsome. You are a masterfully calibrated breeding machine. In the throes of horniness, evolution has designed you to relax, lower inhibition, turn off disgust, and breed like Genghis Kahn. Nature made you so, and for good reason.

Sex worker and writer Aella calls this male transformation into sex maniac “werewolfing”:

As an escort, I'd have dinner with an intelligent, perceptive man - a CEO or something - and I'd think, no way he's a werewolf. When we end up in bed, he'll remain himself, conscious, alert. But no; they transformed every time into an unrecognizable sex creature.

It was really startling for me. I thought I'd get some kind of continuity between the man and the wolf. I thought at least some men wouldn't have wolves at all. I'd had sex with a lot of women, and they don't become wolves! But the men became different, felt different.

It was as if their soul had left their body, like the perception and intelligence vanished, and they went from a competent, suited, Wall Street king to a sweaty, slightly pink body hungrily groping you, eyes half-lidded, breathing heavy "baby you like that?" directly in your ear.

When you aren’t horny, I’m sure you are a pleasant, thoughtful, self-disciplined guy. When you are werewolfing, you are a naked, snarling man-beast who just spent hundreds of dollars purchasing anime tentacle porn on OnlyFans.

Because you are a decent guy who has a self-conception of not being a werewolf, you are often confused and horrified by your actions once the post-nut clarity sets in. So, you push it away. You pretend it didn’t happen. Until, inevitably, it happens again.

As Reeves told me,

You can’t wish it away. Sometimes it takes on some of the feel of original sin. It’s quite akin to those puritan ideals – there’s something defective at the heart of each one of us, and part of that is this sexuality. Part of that is this non-relational sexuality that men seem to have more than women. So, I do think that’s why it’s seen as yucky or defective. I don’t think any of that is necessary. I think it just is. And the question is what do you do about it?

The 2014 film The Babadook is an exploration of grief and how, when we deny it’s reality, it possesses us. This grief is represented in the monster the Babadook, which gets bigger, scarier, and more violent the more the characters fight against it.

It was only recently that I made the connection to sexuality, which can also become a Babadook. As the rhyme from the movie says, “If it's in a word, or if it's in a book /
you can't get rid of the Babadook.”

Running away only makes it more violent, more compulsive, and a greater source of despair. It’s only when I feel most ashamed of my sexuality that I fall into self-destructive despair and self-loathing.

This applies to your kinks and fantasies, too. If you have a fetish for being walked on by BDSM nuns in high heels, those nuns will haunt you until you integrate your kink into your life and accept it as a shameless and even sacred aspect of your fantasy life. The more you deny it, the more you will slavishly stay up till 4 AM hunting down every nun-related video on Pornhub, and the more it will disrupt the workings of your daily life.

You do not have to be good.

I am happy to confess that I am a 100% purebred werewolf. I also know from my battle with sexual orientation that I can’t get rid of the Babadook. So, what do I do?

I practice the mindfulness I have learned in non-dual meditation. I stay fully present to the ferocity of my sexual appetite. I take my spiritual practice of mindful awareness into watching porn, sex with my partner, or the thrill I feel at seeing someone beautiful.

“You do not have to be good,” wrote Mary Oliver in her poem Wild Geese, “You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean acting on your wildest desires, which may clash with the life you have built for yourself. Fantasy isn’t destiny, and will always be legal, safe, and consensual as long as it exists within the theater of the mind. Most of us live with wild fantasies but vanilla sex lives, and that is ok. Instead, I am encouraging a relinquishing of shame over fantasy and a willingness to befriend our kinks.

I am also not discussing criminal paraphilias (beastiality and pedophilia) or real-world non-consensual sexual violence. These are beyond the scope of my article and require trained, professional help. I am only discussing sexuality between consenting adults, and the everyday lust most men experience.

The soft animal of my body loves sex. Lots of sex. It also loves beautiful bodies, sexual novelty, and gorgeous men. There is a high likelihood that you are in the same boat, minus the gorgeous men part. You aren’t a sex addict, a deviant, or a monster for feeling lust. You aren’t disordered for masturbating daily or watching lots of porn. You are merely human, and you don’t have to be good — not good by the standards of a culture that says male lust is innately disgusting.

This mindful acceptance is the first step to healthy sexuality, but it requires discipline, courage, and taking off your armor of self-loathing. It requires a dedicated practice of honesty that you can bring into the roiling North Sea of your sexuality.

This ongoing mindful acceptance of my sexuality has led me to make some deliberate choices so that I can be a responsible werewolf. I’ve sidestepped concerns about abuse and exploitation in porn by paying OnlyFans creators I respect for the content they make. I’ve also set boundaries with digital media – just like I have with YouTube, video games, and social media — so that sex doesn’t distract me from living a full life and work that needs to be done (like writing this article.)

Embracing the tiger has helped me think deliberately about my sexual boundaries and morals. I’ve had long conversations with friends working through my feelings, and I’ve had many conversations with my partner about what we are comfortable with and not, what we enjoy in sex, and what we yearn to indulge in.

If you are struggling with your male lust and have absorbed messages about what it means to be a man, I encourage you to consider that thoughtful, active cooperation with your lust doesn’t mean you are weak or unmasculine. Too often in male-dominated spaces, the only solution on offer is a vision of masculinity that is honed through white-knuckled chastity. But this is folly.

Instead, embrace the tiger. That is strength, courage, and perhaps even heroism. It is the project of a lifetime. Your evolution-created werewolf is as much a part of you as breathing, sleeping, and defecating. it is as sacred as your yearning for God, self-transcendence, or worship. This isn’t something you can wish away; it is only the soft animal of your body loving what it loves.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and I might feature them in an upcoming post. Subscribe if you haven’t already, share this post with friends to rise on the leaderboard, and join the cult … I mean Discord server.

P.S. – In 2024, I plan on returning to my roots and writing at length about sexuality and spirituality. Don’t worry, I will keep non-horny content in the mix, like religion, meditation, philosophical liberalism, and more. But expect a lot more work on sex in the coming months. If there are any topics regarding sexuality and spirituality you would like me to cover, please let me know!