Thoughts on Sex Drive
Dear [Mentat],
Yes, the reading has been most enjoyable, informative, and enlightening. I really do want to be knowledgeable about this stuff, and so lately I’ve been spending six to eight hours a day reading. I have a little ways to go in order to catch up to your knowledge. But these dialogues give me good reasons to read – so that I might understand your arguments and how to counter them. 
Well, even if the actual numbers of abusive priests is small, the damage they can cause is quite a bit bigger, since each one has access to perhaps hundreds or even thousands of children in a parish.
Yes, as long as the nymphos are gratified most of the time when they feel the urge, I contend that they do get more pleasure from sex than those who barely desire it. This must be so if, as I believe, pleasure is indeed the result of gratifying desire. The more desire you have to gratify, the more potential pleasure you can reap. The less you have, then the less you’ll reap. Thus, as in your water scenario above, the person who gets thirsty every two days and then enjoys the quenching each time indeed gets more pleasure (or at least, more incidents of pleasure) in a two-week period than the person who thirsts only once during that same two-week period.
Now on a per-thirst-quenching incident basis, I agree with you. He may enjoy water as much as someone who must drink it more often. But he won’t enjoy it as often. Per a given amount of time (say a month or a year), he’ll enjoy it fewer times. So I’d say that the person who must quench his thirst a hundred times a month, gets more enjoyment than the one who only does so ten times.
In light of the above, I’d also contend that reduced sex drive would indeed constitute reduced over all pleasure that could be gained from having sex. The less you want it, the less you’re going to seek it. Again, you may enjoy it immensely when you do seek it. But since a reduced drive would mean that you’d be compelled to seek it less often, you wouldn’t enjoy getting it as much, because you wouldn’t get it as much. This all boils down to the following question: Who enjoys sex more? The nymphomaniac who has 20 orgasms per month, or the frigid person who has just one orgasm per month? I believe that you know now, how I’d answer it.
I might also add that the person who wants it very little may feel that way because he or she does not get much pleasure from it. If he did get lots of enjoyment, it seems to me that he’d want it more. I knew a girl in the late 1990s who openly boasted that she was asexual. She never went with either man or woman, and didn’t want to, finding the whole sexual ritual disgusting. Granted, she’s at the far end of the continuum of frigidity. But she does illustrate that someone who desires sex very little would also get very little pleasure from it, and in fact, actively seeks to avoid such pleasures. Again, with less desire, there is less pleasure in gratifying it. And it’s also true that when little pleasure is felt when gratifying a particular desire, the desire itself lessens. After all, how long would you continue wanting ice cream if all you could find were sour curds?
However, many passions fuel rape, besides sex. In fact, often, sexual desire has nothing to do with a man’s desire to dominate a woman. Some guys like hurting women or disfiguring them so that no one wants them. We can’t blame sexual craving for much of the concealed violence against women that you mention. Much of this “wholesale rape and murder” grows out of a culture-wide bias against women, which still exists to some degree today even in this country. It’s rare that a man’s sheer love lust for a woman drives him to harm her. If it does, then it’s consistently easy to show that he has other mental problems besides simply thwarted sexual gratification. Blaming sexual craving for violent crimes against women, is like blaming guns for the high rates of murder. It makes [little] sense to do so.
Understood. But again, I must say that you may be attributing too much evil to the sex drive, whether we’re talking about you, me, or even someone who has been jailed for rape.
[...] Keep in mind that you had lots of excess alcohol and pot byproducts in your system in those days. Plus you probably weren’t eating well, not to mention the fact that you were severely depressed. You said often how irregular your sleeping patterns were. Well, given all that, your mind probably wasn’t functioning in a healthy manner.
Such a mix of conditions can produce confused responses to stimuli, false causalities, and exaggerated addictions. You might not have acted [so] problematically if you hadn’t been drinking, been eating a well-balanced diet, getting enough sleep on a regular basis, and not smoking pot. Who’s to say whether sexual craving [in and of itself] caused you to behave too irresponsibly? I bet it probably was not.
