How Sexual Repression Turns Men Into Evil, Horny Monsters

The two heads of man and the iron cock cage of rationality

I don’t believe in Hell but if I did, there’s one motherfucker I’d love to send there: St. Augustine.

Before he became the most influential theologian in Christian history, he was a repressed, horny man with bizarre opinions on sexuality. He believed that before Adam sinned, men could make themselves erect with willpower—and the subsequent loss of this control was divine punishment for disobedience. Now, men are locked in perpetual conflict with physiology because sex–even loving sex–is sinful, apparently.

“Lord grant me chastity and self control - but not yet,” he prayed.

There it is, the whole neurotic project in ten words. A man begging his judgmental sky daddy to remove the desire he cannot stop indulging, while asking permission to keep indulging just a little longer.

This prayer cursed us all with 2,000 years of sexual shame. Augustine taught that desire is dangerous, that the body is a tomb, that the only legitimate sex is procreative sex inside marriage. And even then, you probably shouldn’t enjoy it too much.

Augustine was an early soldier in an internal war that men have been fighting for a very long time. A war against sexuality itself. A war that men are losing, but everyone becomes a casualty. Some casualties are conservative men like Bryon Noem who get hypnotized into becoming transgender sissy bimbos. Other casualties are wives of good Christian men who end up dead when their husband’s sadistic sexual fantasies become manifest.

It is a war that cannot be won, because it is a war that should not be fought and the casualties will keep mounting until we figure this out.

The Two Heads of Man

Here is a simple, anatomical fact that explains about 90% of human history: men have two heads.

Head #1 rests securely above the shoulders. It shows up to work on time, it uses reason and logic, it misreads Nietzsche and congratulates itself for being well-read.

Then, there is head #2. And this head, my friend, does not think at all. It wants. It desires. It fantasizes about things that would make head #1 recoil in disgust. Where head #1 is visible to all, head #2 dangles freely out of sight.

Most men are terrified of head #2 because you cannot control what it likes. You cannot reason with an erection or debate a fetish. You cannot pray away a kink. Sexuality is the one domain of human experience where willpower collapses completely, forever terrifying men like Augustine. Your conscious mind—head #1—can make all the resolutions it wants. Head #2 will nod along politely and then, at 2 a.m. when you’re alone and the shame has worn thin, it will go looking for exactly what it craves.

This is horrifying if you are the kind of person who needs to believe you are in control. And that describes an enormous number of men, including basically every religious fundamentalist and political strongman who ever lived. They cannot accept that we are animals. And just like all other animals, we have needs. The urge for sexual pleasure is as natural and normal as eating or drinking or sleeping. But for some fucking reason we decided to listen to sexually repressed weirdos like Augustine and built an entire civilization on pretending otherwise.

We are powerless against head #2, against our own animalistic desires—so we pray. We pray that God will take away the desire itself, which makes about as much sense as praying away the need to eat or sleep.

Within the domain of our internal worlds, we stuff head #2 into what I call the iron cock cage of rationality. It’s kind of like Weber’s iron cage of rationality where bureaucratic social systems trap people in cold, calculating efficiency. But this is hornier. Much, much hornier. The cage restricts freedom to act. But instead of optimizing for bureaucratic efficiency, we’re caging our cocks for some imaginary morality points.

Basically all “traditional” sexual morality is an iron cock cage. Abstinence, purity, and praying away the desire when that doesn’t work. If you’ve ever caged an animal, you know what happens. It grows lean, mean, and hungry—ever so hungry. It paces back and forth, awaiting its great escape. It licks the bars of the cage. It drools. It howls. And one day it breaks free and—to everyone’s horror—someone innocent gets eaten alive.

When the Cage Breaks

I moved to a small town in the American Bible Belt a few years ago, and began attending church in a vain attempt to assimilate.

You know how, in high school, the people who talk about sex obsessively are the people not having it (which is mostly everyone)? Well, imagine that exact atmosphere but across an entire population. Sexual repression is the air we breathe. It’s never discussed openly. But sex is ever-present just beneath the surface. Pay attention to the jokes they tell. What they find funny is almost always a play on some obviously repressed sexual desire. But those jokes are the tip of the iceberg, and what you find when you dig just a little deeper—is something genuinely horrifying.

I know a deacon in this church. He is the stereotype you’d expect: a holier-than-thou superego wearing a grumpy old man suit who hides his contempt for women in scripture. One time he took the podium and said women shouldn’t be educated—called them bitches. He believes in the most regressive possible interpretation of Christianity. He opposes sexual education on religious grounds. And he raised a son who spent many years in prison. Let’s talk about why.

One night many years ago, his adult son got a baseball bat, wrapped it in barbed wire, and used it to sexually assault his wife. It killed her.

My interpretation—and it is just that, my interpretation—is that this son was a byproduct of the dysfunctional social environment he was raised in. Sexual education was kept as far away from him as possible. He was taught abstinence, purity, to pray the desire away—kind of like Augustine did. If he learned anything at all about sexuality it came from pornography, which is honestly worse than nothing at all.

Pornography, being the only place desire was allowed to exist, became a rogue laboratory where his sexuality developed in total darkness, like a basement leak that turns into black mold. All those twisted fantasies, amplified over years of isolation, with no one to talk to, no language to understand them, no way to separate fantasy from reality. Just a boy carrying an ocean of shame and guilt, fighting a war against his own body every single night.

You cannot cage an animal forever. One day, it broke free. And his wife was eaten alive.

I want to be clear about my claim: I am not excusing what he did. It was monstrous. It was blatantly misogynistic. I wish he were still in prison. But monsters are made, not born, and this monster was manufactured in a wooden assembly line of sexual repression.

If this man had been educated about his own sexuality—given even the most basic understanding that desire is normal, that fantasies can be discussed and processed safely, that there are consensual outlets for even unusual impulses—this almost certainly would not have happened.

Sexual repression removes the avenues for safely and consensually experiencing sexual pleasure.

Sexuality is a lot like hunger. It can be suppressed, ignored for a while. But sooner or later, the inner animal takes control. Think about how many stories of shipwrecks or plane crashes end with people resorting to cannibalism. We aren’t surprised when it happens because we understand the human instinct of self-preservation eventually overrides every civilized inhibition. In times of deprivation, cages are easily broken.

Starve a person long enough, and they will eat whatever is available. Starve a person’s sexuality long enough, and it will devour whatever it can get. For this monster who murdered his wife, the inner animal metastasized more every time he tried to pray his desire away. It didn’t just vanish–it built momentum until it was powerful enough to kill. And I can imagine him, during the act, somewhere deep in whatever was left of his conscious mind, praying the prayer: Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet.

The prayer is the alibi the superego gives itself while the id does its work. Head #1 prays away head #2 while making the problem worse. The prayer lets you commit the atrocity while telling yourself you are still a man of God.

The Shadow Never Forgets

At this point I need to bring in Carl Jung, because what I’ve been describing in crude anatomical terms is exactly what Jung called the shadow.

The shadow is everything about yourself that you refuse to acknowledge: the desires, the envy, the rage, the perversions, the weakness. You shove it into the basement of your psyche and build a respectable McMansion on top. You become, in Jung’s words, someone who believes they are what they pretend to be. A mask that swallows the face.

Sexuality is taboo by its very nature, and has been a thorn in the side of head #1 going back to the founding of civilization itself. Sexuality is a primary candidate for shadow repression. Head #2 wants what it wants. There’s something, frankly, terrifying about that. And what so many men do is drive their sexuality into the basement of their psyche.

Jung wrote that the dark characteristics constituting the shadow have an emotional nature and a kind of autonomy, an obsessive or possessive quality. The shadow does not politely request expression. It possesses you. Whatever you have hidden from yourself will haunt you all the more violently.

Which brings me to what might be the most hilarious, yet illustrative example. Kristi Noem, who served as the head of the DHS under Trump, has a husband named Bryon. Just weeks ago, a scandal erupted: Bryon Noem had been carrying on an extended internet affair with a left wing dominatrix. His fetish? Being hypnotized into becoming a sissy transgender bimbo, a slave and servant to this domme, all while insulting his wife.

‘So much better than your wife, aren’t I?’ she asked.

‘You’re so much better,’ he said.

Now, I actually do not think this should be much of a scandal. He paid good money to a consenting adult sex worker. No one was physically harmed. The only real ethical problem was the infidelity, which is between him and his wife. But the political world exploded, because the image of a conservative power couple’s husband begging to be turned into a sissy bimbo by a leftist domme is too perfect, too on-the-nose. It would be parody if it weren’t real.

Bryon Noem is a man who has been wearing the mask his entire life. The mask of the strong conservative family man. He works in a world of performative toughness. He is married to a woman who embodies the conservative ideal of steely, unyielding womanhood. And somewhere inside him, probably since adolescence, there has been a desire that looks nothing like that mask. A desire to be weak, to be feminine, to be controlled, to be transformed. He did not choose this desire. None of us choose our desires. But for years he could not find a way to make it a healthy part of his life, because the world he inhabited would ridicule and destroy him for it—which is exactly what happened later anyway. So he hid his true desires.

Jung saw this coming from a mile away. He wrote that identifications with a social role are a fruitful source of neuroses, and that a man cannot get rid of himself in favor of an artificial personality without punishment. The socially “strong man,” he observed, is in private often a mere child where his feelings are concerned—so much so that “the hero comes under the heel of his wife’s slipper.” Jung may as well have been writing about Bryon, though I guess it wasn’t his wife’s slipper lol.

The shadow waited. And waited. And eventually, it found a dominatrix on the internet who would, for a large fee, tell him he was a good little sissy bimbo while he masturbated and insulted his wife. The details that emerged are almost too rich: at one point he spent over $7,000 in a single month on “talking time.” Seven thousand dollars. This is not a casual hobby. This is a man starving to death, finally finding food, and gorging himself until he was sick. The domme eventually had to end the relationship because he was too needy.

And think about the specific content of the fetish. He wanted to be hypnotized. He wanted to lose control. He wanted his agency taken away. This is the shadow’s revenge on the iron cock cage in its purest form: a fetish for the very loss of control that his conservative, hyper-masculine persona had been fighting his whole life.

The fantasy is the cage breaking—except in a safe, negotiated, consensual space. The tragedy is he could not find that space openly with his wife. He had to hide it, which made it shameful, which made the shame itself part of the turn-on, which fed the cycle, which led to him hemorrhaging money and eventually getting publicly exposed.

I find myself feeling sympathy for him, which is not the reaction I am supposed to have. This man’s political world wants to erase people like the one he was paying to become. Transgender people have been the center of the culture war for years now, more than environmentalism, more than affordability, more than anything. Conservative men scream about trans people in public. And then, in private—well, let’s just say Mr. Noem is not the only one. Red states consistently rank highest in online searches for transgender porn.

This sexual fetish maps directly onto the culture war. Bryon’s sex scandal, these porn searches, and the right’s political obsession with transgender people are three heads of the same beast: the shadow’s revenge. At this point, it is undeniable. Remember when I wrote about the right’s favorite slur? Same energy.

The conservative apparatus is simply Augustine’s prayer, repeated on loop forever: “Lord grant me chastity and self control—but not yet.”

The Spiritual Battle Beneath Everything

What if I told you that the two heads of man isn’t my silly invention, but actually the spiritual battle at the heart of civilization for thousands of years?

Camille Paglia, in Sexual Personae, spends six hundred pages tracing the war between Apollo and Dionysus through all of Western art and culture. Apollo is the principle of order, boundary, individuation, hierarchy, the cold eye that objectifies and separates.

Dionysus is the principle of energy, ecstasy, fusion, promiscuity, the body that dissolves boundaries and the urge to merge. Paglia writes that Apollo makes the boundary lines that are civilization but that lead to convention, constraint, oppression. Dionysus is energy unbound, mad, callous, destructive, wasteful.

Head number one is Apollo. Head number two is Dionysus. The iron cock cage is an Apollonian invention, an attempt to impose order on the body that forgets it is a body. It never works. Every Apollonian empire in history has eventually been torn apart by a Dionysian eruption from below—whether that eruption looks like a slave revolt, a sexual revolution, or a man in a suit paying an internet dominatrix to call him a bimbo.

What I want to suggest is that the sexual is political. When a society becomes rigidly Apollonian—when it builds strict hierarchies, valorizes the family patriarch, enforces gender roles with violence, and wraps it all in religion—it is doing to the collective body exactly what the repressive individual does to his own psyche. It is building an iron cock cage at scale. And the result, historically, is always the same: an explosion.

You can see it in the cycle of empires. A culture rises, codifies its norms, grows powerful and orderly and sexually repressed. It preaches chastity while its elites visit brothels in secret. It worships the virgin and the martyr. Then, gradually, the pressure builds. The Dionysian forces that have been suppressed—in women, in the lower classes, in colonized peoples, in the human body itself—begin to seep through the cracks. At first it looks like decadence: art becomes sensual, religion loses its grip, young people dance in ways that horrify their elders. Then it accelerates. Revolutions happen. Sometimes the empire falls. And a new order rises that will eventually become just as repressive as the old one, and the cycle begins again.

This is not just about sex. It is about the human inability to accept that we are creatures, not machines. Wendell Berry wrote that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines. The Apollonian impulse, at its extreme, wants to be a machine. It wants to abolish its own humanity entirely.

No wonder the cages keep breaking. No wonder the shadow keeps erupting into public view in the most humiliating ways imaginable.

Creatures, Not Machines

I said I wanted to send Augustine to hell. The truth is, I want to send the whole project of sexual shame to hell. That prayer is a curse, the sound of a species that cannot make peace with its own nature.

We are animals who have big brains and language and the ability to imagine gods who watch and judge us. That combination is lethal. It produces the iron cock cage. It produces the deacon’s son and murdered wives. It produces Bryon Noem begging to be hypnotized into the identity his political party wants to eradicate.

The alternative is not hedonistic chaos. Dionysus without Apollo is just as destructive. The point is not to let the animal run wild without limit; the point is to stop pretending the animal does not exist. It is to bring head number two into the light, to educate it, to give it language and boundaries that are flexible rather than iron. It is to teach young people that desire is normal and can be discussed, that fantasy is not the same as action, that kink can be explored safely and consensually. It is to create a world where someone like the deacon’s son might have said, “I have these dark thoughts and I need help” instead of letting them fester until they kill someone.

And here I want to gesture toward something obvious but rarely said in these debates: we have all this sexual energy because we are alive. It needs somewhere to go. If you lock it in a cage, it turns into a monster. If you feed it through romance, through art, through erotica, through consensual kink communities where people negotiate boundaries and treat fantasy as play—it becomes something you can live with. Sometimes even something beautiful.

But until we make peace with the things that we cannot change, we’ll keep repressing and denying ourselves until the thing we were fighting wins because the human spirit cannot be crushed by willpower.

The Augustine prayer is the perfect expression of the split psyche. I want you to hear it again, in the mouth of the deacon’s son as he commits his atrocity. In the mouth of Bryon Noem as he sends another payment. In the mouth of every conservative politician who rails against trans people while searching for trans porn. “Lord, grant me chastity, but not yet.” The prayer asks for forgiveness in advance, which means it never requires change. It is a loophole that lets you hate yourself and stay the same forever. That is Christianity’s great gift to the West: an elaborate mechanism for self-loathing that guarantees the behavior it condemns will continue, because shame is an aphrodisiac and repression is a pressure cooker.

What if we just stopped praying that prayer? What if we accepted that head number two is part of us, not a demon to be exorcised but a creature to be understood and, yes, loved? The shadow does not forget. But it can be integrated. Jung thought that the goal of psychological development was individuation: the process of bringing conscious and unconscious into dialogue, so that the shadow becomes something you know rather than something that possesses you. That process requires courage, because it means admitting you are not the person you pretend to be. It means admitting, if you are a conservative strongman, that you want to be a sissy bimbo sometimes. For most people, that admission is too terrifying to make. So they go to war against the external world instead, trying to kill the shadow out there because they cannot face it in here.

I am not optimistic. But I am writing this essay because I think the only way out is to keep talking about it. To tell the stories. To name the pattern. To show, with examples as lurid and stupid as Bryon Noem’s $7,000 bimbo addiction, that the cage always breaks. The deacon’s son is the worst-case scenario. Most repressed people do not become murderers. But they become miserable, or they become bullies, or they become voters for policies that punish other people for the desires they cannot admit in themselves. The personal is political, and the sexual is the most personal thing there is. Augustine’s prayer is still being prayed, every day, in a million different ways, and we are all living in the blast radius.

Maybe the hell I would send Augustine to is just an eternity of listening to the consequences of his prayer, played on a loop. The deleted browser histories. The sons and daughters taught to hate their bodies. The barbed wire. And over it all, his own voice, begging for a chastity that never came, because the thing he was begging to be saved from was the very thing that made him human.

For the people who are perpetually traumatized by their own desires, the way Mr. Noem seems to be, I’d suggest replacing Augustine’s prayer with a different, better prayer: the serenity prayer:

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

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