Summer 2025

Rowan Coffee, West Asheville.
She walks in. My eyes get caught on her. A white skirt. Long legs. High heels that accentuate her calves.

Some moments tend to get etched permanently in my visual memory. This is one of them.

In these moments, time seems to slow down. A heightened attunement develops towards the environment. It’s as if I’m tapping into supersensory perception. Aware, for a brief yet elongated moment, that I do have more than 5 senses. That time is not as linear as it appears to be. That I’m never surrounded by strangers. Everything happens for a reason.

In these moments, I notice the dawning of those senses from the back of my head, fanning outwards. The hair on my neck flare out. I am seeing from the pores of my skin. It’s the same sense that activates when you can tell someone is looking at you, and you turn your head around and they look away. The subtlest of a connection between two strangers.

This lady seemed to be adhering quite well to presently dominant societal standards of what it means to present as a hot woman. “She must be a realtor”, I thought. Certain professions seem to adhere stronger to dominant standards than others.

I spent most of my life in strong adherence to dominant societal beauty standards. I briefly glimpsed her face. She had make-up on and seemed a bit anxious. “What does she really look like?", I wondered.

In that moment as she walked in and my eyes got caught, I noticed a very clear difference in how my body responded now to how it might have responded a few years ago…

Back then, I had a tendency to feel the heat build up in my loins in such a moment. That was just normal for me. It is normal, for a lot of men. It’s a normal male response just like how trauma is normal.

Back then, such stray erections would pent energy up in my loins. Anxiety masking itself as excitement, that would eventually beg for a release.

I would periodically release. I would enjoy my periodic releases, often to images of women online. Women who adhered very well to dominant beauty standards.

At some point in this journey, I started noticing how it didn’t seem like I was in control of this cycle, and yet I continued enjoying it.

I started noticing that I was most moved when I’d feel the love between the man and woman that I saw copulating on the screen. I wanted that for myself.

I started noticing the similarities between the facial or physical features of the digital woman being made love to and the physical woman I had passed by a few days ago that I felt hooked and aroused by.

If I wanted that for myself and I had just passed by a woman in real life who represented that, why did I not pursue her and instead find myself here with a digital replica being taken by someone else, while I spectated?

Ah! There was a behavioral pattern in me that was diverting my desire away from the physical onto the virtual.

I began to notice how deathly afraid I was of approaching women that evoked desire in me.

Desire finds a way though and I had, unknowingly, cultivated this entire alternative pathway for that Desire. Moments would come up in life where I felt drawn to a woman. Many moments every week. I would freeze, allow the Desire to be pent up in my loins, and then break under its upsurge opening up the floodgates in the safety of the virtual world.

The more I engaged in this alternate pathway, the more it strengthened my freeze. I noticed that I would freeze in work conversations sometimes if there was an attractive female colleague in the room.

The entirety of my true erotic relationship to women was restricted to the secret, safe virtual world of porn. In the dangerous physical world, I was pursuing women who did not set my loins on fire.

I made a commitment to myself. It was a moment of Erotic Integrity. It may not sound as such when you read it because Integrity is often presented as this Big Thing. But truly, integrity is an alignment in speech, thought and action, in every little aspect of your life. I decided I won’t pursue a woman unless she was someone I’d be drawn to during my secret, safe virtual escapades.

I was finally in Integrity with my loins.

As humans, we are gifted with the power to Witness. To observe. To notice. To track. It is a gift from God, who is forever lovingly witnessing our lives.

God sees you because you matter to Him. He is with you even in the most secretive of your compulsions, ready to respond at a moment’s notice. He has been with you in every cycle of escape, knowing that the release you are truly seeking is not something that can be wrung from tension and discharge, but something that can be received freely, by grace, the moment you turn and ask.

Align your speech with your thought. Align your actions with your speech. When you find yourself slipping, ask directly for your Father’s grace and support, and oh, does He show up! He loves Integrity. He yearns for you to be integrated. For your healing journey to be complete. For you to be whole. So you can live out your purpose!

There is great potency in noticing the behavioral patterns that you have grown accustomed to. Noticing the pattern breaks the first link of the chain that keeps you subconsciously enslaved to it. It may not seem like much but it is truly, the first whiff of victory.

Once you notice the Pattern, you get a good sense of where it is rooted. And so instead of endlessly whacking away at the heads of the Hydra, only to find two more growing back, you now have the ability to cauterize her stump to finish her off once and for all.

So if you find yourself—

• Adding friction to access
• Searching for “better” or “cleaner” versions
• Reframing the habit as self-care
• Paying to introduce a barrier
• Making it relational and consensual to remove secrecy
• Ritualizing it to control frequency

I exhort you to stop whacking away at the heads of the Hydra.

If you are single,
Only pursue a woman when your mind, heart and loins are in alignment in their desire for her. Break through the freezing fear with your breath, the first gift from your Father. Breathe fear up. Breathe the charge up, so the loins are no longer left to carry it alone. Let it rise along your spine and pour out your back, a warm, cleansing fire lighting you from within.

Walk up to her. Turn back if you just passed her by. Say hello. Talk to her. Get to know her. Pursue her as long as your mind, heart and loins maintain their alignment. Let the living world, not the virtual, carry your Eros.

If you are in a relationship,
Close your erotic field to all others. Avert your gaze when needed. Devote your Eros wholly to your wife and notice how your devotion blooms her into the sum of all the women you once scattered your attention across.

That is how you cleanly cauterize the stump.