Are Steve Lyston’s hands clean?
IF THESE are the times that try men’s souls, I was granted a reprieve from life’s daily wrath after reading Steve Lyston’s Gleaner article (May 22), ‘Masturbation will pollute your mind’.
In his other articles, he sometimes uses the descriptor ‘apostle’, but even so, his article is riddled with religious dogma. My first response after glancing at the title was to say to myself, ‘Oh, so that explains me’. Then at just about the same time, I had one extended belly laugh. Chupski read it and almost choked with laughter and disbelief.
According to Lyston, God wants the body and the mind to be in a kind of purity synch. That I have no problem with, but when Lyston writes, “What about the person who does your hair, nails, massages you who may be masturbating? There will be a transfer of an unclean spirit to you, and, at some point, you may find yourself doing it, too.”
So that explains the beginning. I caught it off my barber in my teens. In the 1970s, I read a joke in Playboy magazine. A group of nervous but eager army recruits is gathered to face their drill sergeant for the first time. The voice of the drill sergeant booms: “I want to see a show of hands to this question. How many of you here masturbate?”
One brave recruit gingerly sticks up a hand. The drill sergeant bellows, “Put down your hand! Now hear this! Ninety per cent of you masturbate and the rest of you are liars!”
According to Steve Lyston, as he makes an imaginary trip into people’s bedrooms, “People who engage in masturbation will have serious psychological effects that lead to isolation, abuse, and competing with their spouses. If a person is single, it takes longer to get to the point of marriage, and it would bring serious problems and pain after marriage.”
Huh? Is this for real? There is no serious body of sexual research that points to this wild conclusion, which Lyston seems to have clutched out of thin air. In fact, among many women who have difficulty reaching an orgasm the ‘normal’ way, a patient husband and joyful experimentation can often lead her to climbing her mountaintop of pleasure.
Lyston goes off wild again and draws for myth long spun into nothingness: “Most people who are involved in masturbation have restless nights in enjoying their sexual relationships with their spouse. It also opens the door for unclean spirits – named incubus and succubus – that attack them in their dreams, and the result is what many know as wet dreams.” Say, what! This is just so patently untrue – that part about restless nights and one’s spouse. The rest about incubus and succubus is, well, his mind deep in the mix of religious dogma and duppy business.
His article is reminiscent of what must have been the teachings of the elders in the early Church. Take the pleasures of life unto ourselves and deny our flock of those too-earthly pleasures. Like a feudal lord to his serfs.
Steve Lyston contorts reality to suit the purposes of penning an article that is worth little more than comedic relief. But I really do believe that he believes the stuff he writes. That there are others who share his belief is a scary thought.
In his world, sex is like Sunday dinner, and grace must be said. He writes, “The diversion from the natural purpose of what God intended sex to be will bring pollution, especially of the mind and spirit.”
In his world, all the parts must be in the right place, like the cutlery and the plates at the dinner table. He creates an unreal place and begs us to inhabit it. And if we do not, we will be polluting our souls. What utterly mindless reasoning!
He ends his article with a real doozy. “Sex is good, but beyond the context of what God said, it pollutes us, and what God designed for us to be a blessing, we, by our actions, make it a curse. When people are masturbating, they have to think about other people, and so that, in itself, will pollute your mind, especially if you are in a marriage.”
Tell me one person who has never used his or her imagination during the sex act. Does that in anyway defile the beauty of the blend of mind and body?
As long as no names are shouted.