Lewis on The Great Lie About Sex

Lewis writes,

Our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so 'natural', so 'healthy', and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them.

Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth ,frankness and good humor. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on the truth - the truth that sex in itself (apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown around it) is normal and healthy, and all the rest of it.

The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health, good humor and frankness. For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary; so the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing.

Every sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others. One man does this on Christian principles, another on hygienic principles, another on sociological principles.

The real conflict is not between Christianity and natural desire, but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of natural desires. For our natural desires will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life.