Every Young Man's Battle: Stategies for Victory in the Real World of Sexual Temptation: The Every Man Series (19 page)

When your eyes bounce toward a woman’s
attributes, they must bounce away immediately.

But why must the bounce
be immediate? One might argue that a glance is just a glance. A glance
doesn’t linger.

Granted, a glance is different from staring
open-mouthed until drool pools at your feet, but a glance can be more than
enough “eye juice” to give you that little chemical high, that
little pop. In our experience, bouncing away immediately is clean and easy for
the mind to understand and doesn’t give the mind wiggle room to
“lock and load.”

Watch out! As we’ve just said, when
you start bouncing your eyes, your body will fight you in peculiar, unexpected
ways. Since sexual sin has an addictive nature, your body will not give up on
its pleasures without a fight. You’ll have to creatively look for ways to
stay visually pure, and you do that through these two logical steps:

1. Study yourself. How and where are you attacked the most?

2. Design
your defense for each of the greatest enemies you’ve identified.

Your first step is listing your own “greatest enemies.” What
are the most obvious and prolific sources of sensual images coming your way?
Where do you look most often? Where are you weakest?

In choosing them,
remember that they must be areas from which you visually draw sexual
satisfaction. Don’t make the mistake of choosing non-visual weaknesses
for this list, which Justin did. Here’s what this college-age student
jotted as his three big areas of weakness:

1. showers

2.
being home alone

We can all understand why
these can be troublesome. In the shower, you’re nude with warm water
cascading down your body. That can be sensual. When you’re home alone, no
one’s around to discover you if you’re looking at things you
shouldn’t or decide to masturbate. When you’re studying late, you
feel sorry for yourself and need “comfort.”

But such weak
spots needn’t be targeted if you train your eyes to bounce and eliminate
the visual stimuli. With no food for the mental fantasies, the sexual fevers
that draw your mind to sin will dissipate. These situations will lose their
power naturally.

I (Fred) had
no problem coming up with a list of my six biggest areas of weakness. Let me
share how I dealt with them. Granted, I was a bit older than you and married at
the time, but these weaknesses are fairly universal. Besides, I can’t
give you as much detail on the inner fight if I use someone else’s story.
Just incorporate what you learn from these details in dealing with your own
weaknesses. In the next chapters, we’ll share some of the unique
obstacles faced in this battle by other young men like yourself through telling
their stories as well.

1. Defending Against Those Lingerie
Ads

Lingerie advertisements were my worst enemy and
remained difficult to control for quite some time. I know—newspaper ads
of women in their bras and panties wouldn’t appear to hold a candle to
the total nudity you see in
Hustler,
but I would let my imagination
fill in the gaps. That was almost just as fun. From time to time, I hit the
mother lode: a swimsuit feature or an exercise feature illustrated with
bun-fitting spandex all around.

I had to train my eyes to bounce away
when I came upon these images in the newspaper, right? That turned out to be
too difficult, at least in the beginning, so I established a number of rules to
keep these images out of my hands before my eyes had a chance to take them
in.

Rule 1:
When my hand reached for the department store ad
insert (where the bra and panty ads were), I forfeited the right to pick it up
if I sensed in the slightest that my underlying motive was to see something
sensual.

To be honest, this approach didn’t work well at first.
Although sensing my motive was easy, forfeiting my right to pick it up was not.
My flesh simply ignored what was happening. My mind screamed, “Shut up! I
want this, and I’ll have it!” My flesh won continually, but as I
began to succeed elsewhere in blocking my eyes, my hatred for the sin grew and
my will and discipline grew stronger. I never gave up, and there came a day
when the lingerie ads finally failed to ensnare me.

Rule 2:
If
a magazine had an overtly sensual babe on the cover, I tore off the cover and
threw it away. Mail-order clothing catalogs or magazines with sensual cover
pictures can hang around a house for a long time, drawing your eyes all month
long. Now I ask you this: What if a full-breasted woman in a teensy-weensy
bikini came to your room and sat down on your desk and said, “I’ll
just sit here awhile, but I promise to leave by the end of the month”?
Would you let her stay to catch your eye every time you walked into the room? I
don’t think so. So why do you leave her there in picture form?

Rule 3:
Regarding department store inserts, I would allow myself
to pick one up if I was genuinely looking for sale prices on computer equipment
or auto parts, but I forced myself to start looking from the back.

Don’t ask me how I found out, but the lingerie ads were usually
placed on pages two and three. The camping, automotive, and computer ads were
relegated to the back half of the insert. By opening the insert from the rear,
I avoided seeing the young, nubile models entirely. As time moved on, if I
happened to come upon a sensual image where I didn’t expect it (lurking
in the local news section, for instance), I kept the normal covenant to bounce
my eyes immediately.

2. Un-Fixating on Female
Joggers

Whenever I approached a roadside jogger while
driving, my eyes fixed on her like heat-seeking missiles. I had to move
quickly—or I would soon pass her! But trying to look away from a jogger
created a problem: I couldn’t drive safely if I was concentrating on
not
looking out for her. That could be dangerous, even on the country
roads of Iowa. After all, I didn’t want to run over anyone.

Studying the situation, I found a solution. Rather than look completely
away, I turned my gaze to the opposite side of the road and kept the jogger at
the edge of my peripheral vision. She wasn’t completely out of sight, but
she was out of mind.

My body began to fight back in some interesting
ways. First, my brain argued fiercely with me:
If you keep this up,
you’ll cause a wreck or run over somebody.
I considered this
argument then answered,
You know and I know that’s highly unlikely.
Believe me, I can handle a car.

My body’s second attempt to
stop me was very peculiar. Whenever I saw a jogger and reflexively looked away,
my mind tricked me into believing I recognized the individual, prompting a
second look. My mind was so nimble that nearly every female jogger reminded me
of someone I knew. Talk about irritating! It took awhile for me to stop falling
for that ruse.

My brain tried one last trick. As I passed the jogger
without a direct look, I would momentarily relax. In the same moment, my brain
took advantage of my lowered guard by ordering my eyes to glance into the
rearview mirror for a more direct look. Depending on whether she was coming or
going, I scored on that one. But then I caught on to what was happening, and
that really burned me up! I had to learn not to drop my guard after passing
her, and in time that trick faded away as well.

Whenever I fell for one
of those tricks, I’d bark to myself, “You’ve made a covenant
with your eyes! You can’t do that anymore.” In the first two weeks,
I must have said that a million times, but the repeated confession of truth
eventually worked a transformation in me.

3. Bouncing the
Billboards

Those big signboards along the highway are
notorious for featuring some long, tall, slinky, sexy woman lying across a car
hood. She whispers, “C’mon, big boy, buy this muscle car and
you’ll get me, too!” I know of one giant billboard for a rock radio
station that showed a closeup of bikini-clad breasts with this tag line:
“What a pair!”

My defense mechanism, of course, was to
bounce my eyes. But I took it a step further by remembering where the sensual
billboards were placed along my commute. You should do the same on your route
to school or work. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

When designing my
defense against billboards, I thought of my teenage experience in driving a
hotel van. We had a contract with the airlines to drive the pilots and flight
attendants from the airport to the hotel. The contract required that we
complete the trip within ten minutes. Only one route from the airport was short
enough to make the time limit—an unpaved road with a billion potholes. I
painfully learned of the direct correlation between the number of potholes I
hit and the size of my tip, so I memorized every pothole on that road along
with the driving angles necessary to miss most of them. Eventually, I became
proficient enough to drive that road blindfolded and hit very few of those
teeth-rattling craters.

With the billboards, it’s easier to
memorize their locations and avoid visual contact entirely than it is to look
and then bounce the eyes.

4. Saying Bye-Bye to
Beer-and-Bikini Commercials

No red-blooded American male
can watch a major sporting event these days without being assaulted by
temptation. That’s because the sports shows come packaged with
commercials showing the typical bunch of half-naked women cavorting on some
beach with some beer-soaked yahoos. What’s a young man to do?

The answer is to maintain command of the remote control and zap those
commercials! When you’re armed with a remote, you can do anything!
Phasers set to kill, Worf.
All sexy babes get zapped by the clicker as
you hit on ESPN or Fox News during the commercial break. (If your father hogs
the clicker, as fathers love to do, have him read this section of the book. He
should zap the beer-and-bikini commercials for himself too.)

5. Staying Motivated at the Movies Too

Teens and young men are in a tough spot when it comes to the latest movie
releases from Hollywood. That’s because the studios have painted a big
bull’s-eye right on your chest (or elsewhere). It’s no secret that
today’s new releases are targeted toward the biggest ticket-buying
audience, which happens to be you young people. To sell more tickets and make
more money, the Hollywood crowd has found that “pushing the
envelope” can pack them in on Friday and Saturday
evenings—“date night.”

This is where you need to
educate yourself about what’s playing. Hollywood releases “horny
teen” movies with regularity, and they’re filled with sexual
innuendo, girls taking their tops off, simulated sex acts, and tons of randy
behavior.

This is an area that’s up to you, because many teens
live with parents who don’t care what they see at the local cineplex or
when they’re home alone. For you young men living on your own, nothing is
keeping you from buying a ticket. The question is this: Are you going to be
authentic? A Christian lives like a Christian when no one else is around.

I didn’t have trouble with “horny teen” movies since I
was married and had a family when I began my new ways. But cable movies on the
road caused me to get weak in the knees. My job involved regular overnight
travel, so I’d check into a hotel when the business day was over. That
left me with
hours
with nothing to do in the hotel room. I was
obviously vulnerable to watching cable movies, and I fell for them again and
again.

I tried a variation of my “motive rule” with
magazine advertisements to beat these sexually charged movies. When I reached
for the clicker to turn it on, I would check my motives. If they were clean, I
would allow myself to turn on the TV, usually sticking with the news or ESPN.
The trouble was, I would get bored and, without thinking, start channel
surfing.

The “motive rule” worked better with magazine ads,
because once I forfeited the right to look at them, I could get up and go
elsewhere and find something else to do. Not so with the hotel TV; I still had
hours alone in the room with the blank screen staring back at me, saying,
“Come on over, Big Boy!”

Let me tell you—it was hard
grounding myself from hotel TV. But that’s what I did, deciding that
I’d lost my privileges and wasn’t allowed to turn it on for a
while. Sound drastic? I’ve had some traveling salesmen tell me that they
put blankets over their TVs to keep them out of sight. Others call the front
desk and ask them to “block” the pay-per-view soft-core
movies.

Whatever you have to do, do it.

If you live alone,
you’ll have the same problem with your TV, especially if you subscribe to
a premium movie channel like HBO. You might want to rethink that subscription.
If you’re still living with parents and siblings, then only watch TV when
you have some company. If you’re home alone, be careful.

6. Respecting
Receptionists—
Promptly!

Sometimes when I enter office buildings, the receptionist is standing.
When I tell her my name, she’ll typically bend over to use the phone to
announce my arrival. Often her loose-fitting, silky blouse falls open to reveal
everything.

It had never occurred to me to turn away; I simply figured
it was my lucky day. But when I began my search for purity, I realized this had
to stop. The defense was simple. Before, when I came in and saw the
receptionist standing, I knew what might happen, and I looked for it. Now I use
this same knowledge to my advantage. When I see her standing, I avert my eyes
even before she bends over. Or, if I see her walking toward a file cabinet, I
avert my eyes before she bends over for that file. Of all the weaknesses, this
one was addressed most easily. I now naturally turn away.