My Masculine Beauty Manifesto: Part Two
In my previous blog about masculine beauty, I discussed the blessing in perceiving beauty in men. In this follow-up, I discuss the complications that can come along with that capacity.
We now get to the part I didn’t want to rush to, because so many of us who grew up in the church have been rushing here all our lives. Another reality we have to face is that we are fallen creatures prone to sin.
We can take that initial spark of wonder and delight for men, and carry it different places. We can let it stir up worship for the creator, as it’s intended to. We can see a beautiful person at Costco or wherever and take the moment to say to God, “Ah! What a blessing! You’ve done so well! You are the source of this beauty — let me drink deeply of your beauty that you are offering to me within yourself!”
But another thing we can easily do is carry delight for masculine beauty into lust. If appreciating the beauty of a person is standing on the beach in awe of the ocean, lust is pretending I own the ocean.
It’s like walking into a cathedral and demanding to buy the stained glass windows. There’s a sense of claiming, entitlement, and ownership in lust that’s fraudulent, a lie to myself. The moment I do so, I start to make the beauty point to me.
Could that be why I’m most tempted to lust when I’m also feeling the most insecure, the most uncertain about my worth? Am I attempting to find self-worth in owning and controlling beauty? Whatever the underlying motive, it’s ultimately a prideful way to comport myself.
Why lust is bad, and what problems lust can lead to, are well-explored topics that I don’t feel the need to expound upon here with this audience. But please be assured that even as I write this, I take the problem of lust seriously and I also want you to.
Harboring lust snuffs that spark of wonder and delight, replacing its self-forgetfulness with self-centeredness. It ruins a gift.
So, how can we take that spark of wonder and delight and stoke it toward a right response, and not toward lust? If lust is ultimately a prideful response, I suspect the key to enjoying and appreciating the created beauty in men without lusting is humility — that is, remembering that while the correct response to beauty in creation is wonder and delight, this beauty was not created for me any more than the Grand Canyon was.
I might stand on the rim of the Grand Canyon, a small creature drinking deeply of wonder, but its beauty will never point to me.
When I see an attractive man at the grocery store, perhaps that means schooling my heart to humbly let go control over whether I see him again (like, not following him up and down the aisles like a weirdo). When I see a man on a screen seemingly explicitly inviting me into his sexuality, it means reminding myself that his sexuality is beautiful — but it’s not for me, and I shouldn’t pretend to partake of it.
It takes a lot of growth to reflexively lean into this humility, and I’m still working on it!
An important point about lust is that it is not an over-appreciation of beauty, but rather a mismanagement of our response to beauty.
How much I appreciate the beauty I see in a painting actually doesn’t hold much bearing on whether I feel an impulse to steal it and put it in my house. You can imagine a true connoisseur being moved to tears by the same painting in a museum on a weekly basis and being desperately thankful he doesn’t own it, so it can reside in the museum and be enjoyed by countless others.
On the flip side, you can imagine a person with the barest appreciation of art, seeing a painting like that and saying, “That looks neat; if only I had it in my living room — everyone would think I was so sophisticated!”
You wouldn’t tell the former person, “Careful! If you’re moved any more deeply by this painting you won’t be able to resist the urge to steal it!” Likewise, you wouldn’t tell the latter, “Your problem is you see too much beauty in this art. You need to find less delight in it.”
I have a hard time believing that in the end, the true answer to lust is to admit less beauty into our vision.
I see men in our space still doing this, however. I think they’re carrying that old purity culture shame, and treating their capacity to experience beauty with crippling suspicion. But the suspicion doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Do you open yourself up to temptation when you let yourself delight in a man’s beauty? Sure. Do I always do this well, without lusting? Nope.
But you also open yourself up to temptation every time you decide to leave the house, and in fact, every time you decide not to leave the house. Temptation is always with us, in our hearts. Let’s not deprive ourselves of the pointers God has left us to draw us into longing for him in a misguided attempt to cure our lust.
Finally, the freedom to perceive and appreciate beauty in people doesn’t give us license to sort the world into beautiful people and ugly people, treating the beautiful people with more value and dignity. God sees immeasurable beauty and worth in each person he’s created.
The deepest growth in this area is to feel wonder and delight at normal, everyday people with normal, everyday bodies, feeling the same wonder and delight that God does when he looks at each of us. Is it particularly virtuous to feel awe at the Grand Canyon? A middle-schooler will look up from TikTok, or whatever, to marvel at it for a few minutes.
No, what’s virtuous is to become attentive to and receptive to the beauty in all people and in all things. I want to become the kind of person who is moved at the sight of a daisy by the side of the road, and the kind of person who is stirred to reverence in Umstead State Park on the other side of town, which is basically a few dozen acres of forest by the airport.
Once again, the answer isn’t to perceive less beauty; growth looks like experiencing beauty more, and carrying that experience rightly.
Where have you struggled to find this line between delight in masculine beauty and lust for it? Where have you seen growth in healthy appreciation of masculine beauty rather than being driven into lust?
