Porn Addiction and Transvestic Fetish Addiction Core similarities

Fallen Sparrow: "What I Wish I'd Known Before Watching Porn" has an article on pornography that I brings a few relevant themes together for those of us dealing with transvestic fetish addictions and are the focus of my blog. Those themes are:

1. That our perverse desires have their roots in pain and hurt in our past.
2. Fantisizing or acting out our desires leads us down the slippery slope of every more extreme forms of induglement
3. That this evil is a privation of the good within us
4. That this evil must be fought with spiritual weapons, prayer, mass, confession.

A few choice quotes:

"I wish someone would have told me that the kind of pornography you're most turned on by is usually linked to a corresponding hurtful event in your life, further injuring your brokenness"

"I emerged from that realizing I wanted, above all things, to be liberated from the slavery and tyranny of sin, and that frequent, valid reception of the Sacraments was assurance of that liberation. I needed Christ, His forgiveness and mercy. I still struggled with my fantasies over the years; I came to see that my relationships, my relationship with B., and my fantasies were intimately tied to experiences from earlier in my life."

"In an article unrelated to pornography, but centrally discussing morality in general, Anthony Esolen reminds us that

"evil is like a progressive and deadly disease. To engage in an evil act, again and again, is more than the acquisition of a habit, which will make the same act easier and easier to commit, but which has no effect upon the person otherwise. If we accept the insight of the ancient Platonists—that evil as a thing-in-itself does not exist, but is instead a privation or a corruption of a good that should be there—then the turn toward evil is a turn toward non-being. To embrace evil at the core is, as it were, to riddle oneself with unreason, with nonexistence. It is to warp, to rot. "

The causes of Transvestic Fetishism Part I Idolatory

I am the Lord Your God, thou shalt not have strange Gods before me.

Idolatory and the Transvestic Fetish

In my experience one of the causes of my transvestic fetish was an idolatry of the female form. My way out of the fetish addiction was strongly connected to abandoning my idolatry and worshipping God from the heart again.

Before I give you the details, my friend, I want you to know that of course the female form is beautiful and I don’t advocate that you never look and appreciate the beauty of a female. Just don’t do so in such a way that you burn with lust, that it does not blind you to the deeper realities of your existence of who you are and where you are going.

You shall love God with all your heart all your mind and all your strength and you shall love your neighbour as yourself..

We must not forget our real identity for a fraud based on a lust. We must remember that we are men of great value made in the image and likeness of God.  To him is owed homage first before all creatures and things.

Sowing Lust, Reaping the Disorder of Idolatory

Dwelling excessively on the image of the female is what the idolater does. In his head he has made an image of an idealized female form to be the supreme good. Everything else including his God takes second place. This does not happen in a day or from one direct decision but slowly and imperceptibly by the thoughts and acts and the values he ascribes to things in the world. It is greatly speeded up by the imagery that goes on in the mind.

For surely, it is what comes out of our hearts that defiles us. Jesus taught that we should not even look at a woman lustfully. Our Lord Jesus Christ counselled that doing so is a sin of the same gravity of adultery. As we sow so shall we reap.  We have sown bad images and thoughts in our mind and have reaped an addiction. We have treated the image as a God, a councillor, a healer when it was none of those things. Therefore let us cast off all dependency on the image and trust only in God himself.

We become slaves to what we love, Love Wisely Then!

This malady, this affliction starts with Lust, an unhealthy longing to possess the object of desire, rapidly descends to sexual addiction and finally idolatry. The subject will dwell inordinately on the female form seeing in it some kind of ultimate end. He will use the image as a panacea for all his anger, anxieties and difficulties. Pornography masturbation and fantasies will in the beginning be a soothing medication from difficulties. Soon though he will lose control and eventually progress to idolatory. What do we mean by idolatry? We mean that:

The transvestism fetishist fantasizes about not only possessing what he desires but also becoming what he desires.

In short his perverse desire to possess means that he becomes possessed. St. Augustine said we have as many masters as we have vices. Sin is slavery. The Transvestic Fetishist loses possession of himself because he loves something more than himself. But the only object worthy of loving more than himself is God (and through God his neighbour)

It seems to be a universal law that we become like what we love. As the intensity of our love increases so do we become a slave to what we love. We worship what we love. Let us be cautious then about what we love and always give it an importance according to its true worth. God does not need our worship but it is good for us to worship him as he is our greatest good.

Let us love wisely then, let our first thoughts be about God and after true charity to our brothers and sisters.