Did God make us men a bunch of sex hounds who want to jump on every pretty woman we see? In a way...yes. Yes he did. The male sex drive isn’t a tame lion. I’m not going to sanitize it. It’s not just about love and connection with someone special. It’s raw, hungry, and aggressive. There’s a famous story where President Calvin Coolidge and his wife were visiting a chicken farm. Seeing a rooster mounting a hen right in front of her, the first lady asked the attendant, “how often does he mate?” She was told, “dozens of times a day.” She grinned, “tell that to the President!” Not to be outdone, the President asked, “is it the same hen every time?” to which the attendant replied, “Oh no, Mr. President, a different hen each time.” President Coolidge gave a mischievous smile and said, “tell that to the first lady.” Researchers call this “the Coolidge effect”—the insatiable appetite of males for new females. If you drop a female rat in with a male, he’ll immediately mate with her several times in a row. But he’ll lose interest over time and mate less and less often. However, add a new female to the cage, and the male will immediately drop everything he’s doing and jump on her. If you keep adding new females, the male will mate himself into an unconscious stupor. His sexual desire is stronger than his little rat body. You’re not a rat, but can you relate? Your primal drive is spontaneous. A pretty woman walks into the room, catches your eye, and your shaft gets hard and points toward the thing it wants to mate with. Your rational mind may not want to marry her or raise children with her, but your primal mind doesn’t care. He yells out loud and clear: “mating opportunity at twelve o’clock, let’s go get her!” Your primal mind doesn’t seem very moral! But actually, he’s trying to obey God in his own simplistic way. In Genesis 1, God commanded every living thing to “be fruitful and multiply,” and to mankind added the command to “fill the earth and subdue it.” This is our “cultural mandate” from God, to build families, societies, civilizations. Our bodies (and those of the animals) don’t think about the command consciously—the instinct to follow it is just built into our essence. Your primal mind sees a chance for fruitfulness and jumps at it. If you let him go at it aimlessly, you’ll be that fire that burns the entire landscape. The result throughout history? Sexual assault. Single mothers. Fatherless children. Jealousy. Adultery. Broken homes. Ruined marriages. Murderous rivalry with other men. Without wisdom, your primal mind’s innate desire to obey the cultural mandate will end up destroying families, societies, and even civilizations. The Cost of Being Careful Since male sexual power can be so destructive, it makes sense that people try to tie it down. You can’t grab every pretty woman you see. Without a moral outlet for his desire, every Christian man can feel faced with a constant battle. It may seem that the price of virtue is eternal vigilance. I once heard a sermon by a megachurch pastor who talked about lust. At any point he could stumble into sexual scandal, which would jeopardize his entire ministry. His solution? Stay away from anything that could tempt him. His phone was so locked down that he couldn’t even do a search for a hot air balloon ride. His wife and his staff had all the passwords. He admitted that it might seem extreme, but would you welcome a tiger into your home and just hope it doesn’t attack your family? He asked the congregation, “what do I lose by being careful?” The pastor saw his own virility as a stalking predator, with his soul as the prey. A chance circumstance landing him alone in a room with a woman would be an emergency. A new ipad out of the box might as well be a pit viper. To protect himself from the capacity to do harm, he became someone else’s responsibility to manage. Another child to his wife, and a burden to his staff. Christ said that the gates of Hell would not prevail against his church. That implies that we are on the offense against the forces of darkness. We’re coming to batter down the gates and set slaves free. But in this man’s framework, he’s the one under siege, frantically running from defense to defense, and hoping the devil doesn’t get through. This is no way to live. One little chink in the defenses and the whole thing comes crumbling down. There’s no keeping the tiger away when the tiger is you. But even if he succeeded, what then? What sort of frame does a man have who truly believes he can’t trust himself? What power does a man have for life and ministry, when he is terrified by his own primal drive? What did he lose by being careful? His manhood. If you live like this, you’ll be the guy frantically chasing new outbreaks of an underground fire. Your energy will be spent reacting to crises, rather than chasing your goals. You’ll always be vulnerable to unexpected slips. And if you do finally quench your fire, the landscape you preserve will be cold and cheerless. The journey of Christian discipleship isn’t about becoming a nice boy, but a good man. By “good” I don’t just mean morally the opposite of evil. I mean “good” like in “Good Friday.” Faithful, dependable, reliable—“all the knots held good.” And that means being trustworthy with power. A man doesn’t delegate the management of his own passions to his staff, his wife, or his mother. The buck stops with him. The Primal Hunt You’ve seen two approaches to your sex drive that don’t work. Now I’ll show you the one that does. You don’t have to learn some sophisticated technique to do it either—it’s as natural as breathing. We can understand our instincts better if we see them in their original context. Masculinity and femininity weren’t created first and foremost for life in the modern world. So let’s imagine a young man growing up in a tribe of several hundred people living off the land—like the camp of the Biblical patriarch Isaac. Our young hero is fourteen years old and puberty has arrived. He’s growing taller, his voice is cracking, and he gets erections. He’s sexually attracted to the young ladies in the camp, but none of them notice him. And so his virility feels like a frustrating irritation. He’s moody and antsy. How can he let out his sexual fire with no woman in his life? Then one day the burly Esau walks by, and invites him to join the men on the hunt. The young man is intimidated. He doesn’t want to look bad in front of the men. But all of that pent-up virility propels him forward. In the moment that matters, he overcomes his fears, and takes down his first kill. Walking back into the camp, the successful hunter has his head held high with the kill slung over his shoulders. Esau punches his arm and says, “not bad for your first hunt.” He’s not feeling sexual frustration at all. He’s on top of the world. And it’s at this point that one of the pretty young ladies attending Rebecca asks a friend, “Who is that young man? I’ve never noticed him before.” Sexual Transmutation Our hero just experienced “sexual transmutation.” That’s an esoteric word, but it just means responding to sexual arousal by using your virility for a non-sexual purpose. He started off sexually frustrated and channeled that energy into hunting. What was the result? His success satiated his drive while raising his status in the tribe. That’s why I started the book with the word “virility”—because your sexual drive and your status drive are fundamentally the same power. Notice that the cultural mandate includes both procreation and conquest, “be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.” Think of the hunt as a kind of sexual conquest. The young man exerted his strength and fertilized reality with his will. This brought forth fruit (food for the tribe) and raised his status. Sexual energy built up his frame. It goes the other way too. This non-sexual pursuit was the young man’s clearest path to sexual abundance. If he had gone after the young ladies of the tribe as a nobody, they wouldn’t have been interested. But now that stalemate has been outflanked. There are new opportunities for courtship. The ladies love a conquering hero. It’s a totally natural thing for any guy to do. Here’s an example from married life. I remember feeling sexually frustrated one evening after an argument with my wife. I stormed out to the garage, and it was a disaster. I snapped. In a fury, I started organizing the area around my workbench. It felt like a battle. How dare these intruding objects be out of place in my garage—I’ll show them! By the time I was finished, I wasn’t frustrated or horny anymore. I was pleased with a job well done. My wife noticed the shift in me, we made up, and we made love. In that example, my sexual frustration was channeled into conquest energy. It wasn’t just that I distracted myself from being horny. Rather, going to war with the forces of chaos in the garage is what I did with those horny feelings. Virility was exerted and Primal was satisfied. Here’s another example. Last summer, I was with my kids at a waterpark. While climbing a slide, I looked up and found a woman’s bikini-clad rear right in my face. Before I understood how virility works, I would have tied myself in knots trying not to stare. Instead, I relaxed, took a deep breath, and realized I already had all I needed. I thanked Primal for his powerful drive, and shifted the energy into jumping that much higher into the water with my boys. After that, there was no internal pull to ogle, nor any resentment towards the woman for “tempting” me. Fuel for Mission Some guys have trouble imagining how to channel sexual energy into anything besides sexual release—orgasm through masturbation or sex. The solution is simple: you need to be OK with the feeling of sexual arousal. In a way, both indulgence and repression are forms of resistance—they’re both trying to get rid of the arousal. But is being horny really such a bad feeling? You get an erection. Your heart beats faster. Your body feels charged, like it’s humming with energy. There’s a tingling heat under your skin, a kind of restless aliveness. What if you just let yourself feel that? Sexual transmutation isn’t about reducing desire—it’s about moving forward with it. Being OK with that sensation and doing something purposeful while it’s still running hot in your system. Once you get the hang of directing your virility, you’ll experience sexual arousal as a gift and not a nuisance. It’s your “fuel for mission.” For me with my wife, that mission may be sexual, but most of the time it’s not. Maybe you’re looking forward to married life as this oasis of sex on demand. You may be shocked to discover that, in a given week, I spend more waking hours not having sex than having sex! My sexual desire far exceeds sexual opportunities, even in a passionate marriage. But that’s OK, because there are other conquests in my life that require virility. There’s a spiritual component to the “Coolidge effect.” If you dig a little, you’ll find high desires hidden in the base ones. Behind the desire to couple with every beautiful woman sits the desire to read every great book, to explore every wilderness, to understand every mystery of science and nature, to embark on every worthy adventure, and to express the infinite fullness of God himself. The cultural mandate, as its sights aim higher, merges with the great commandment, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.” That means a virile man who is clear in his frame before God makes love to life. Train yourself to welcome a tinge of sexual energy when you feel it. And then look for ways to bring a virile charge to whatever you are doing. Type like you’re laying bricks—building a cathedral one keystroke at a time. Turn the doorknob like you're entering a space that was waiting for your presence. Walk down the street with a swagger as a member of God’s vanguard on the earth, with each footstep marking your territory. Feel an electric energy as you fertilize that exam with the lead of your pencil. Plant the seed of excellence in the work that you do. Bear fruit with your intentions. Multiply your efforts. Fill your sphere of influence. Subdue your goals. From THE WAY OF MEN WITH MAIDS 👇