Ego Strokes

What is a man's sexual center and what happens when he loses it?

“Narcissism is not fundamentally about self love, but about an escape from love.” Chuck DeGroat

Standing at the vending machine in our school’s cafeteria, my crumpled dollar finally accepted, I punched the code for Funyons and reached down to retrieve my delicious fake onion rings. I stood up and found myself face to face with a high schooler. My 8^th grade frame froze.

“So did you get any?” he asked.

My mind spun into motion trying to make sense of his question. I took it this was not about the snack in my hand.

“I heard you’re going out with Jane and you hung out at her house this weekend.”

And then it clicked. That sort of get some. Oh, I’d heard enough conversations between the guys huddled around lockers in the back hall. But I had never tried to imagine in my own body a sexuality that could stand alone from love and romance. And doing so now, in that split second, it felt like something inside me was being pulled apart.

I asked Jane out last week and ever since we’d been trading folded notes at school, which she wrote in colorful pen, and talking on the phone at night for hours. Last weekend, we walked the mall and hung out at her house to watch a movie. We were young lovers freshly hormonal and still kids at heart just making it all up as we went.

How did an upperclassman even know about my romance life? It felt powerful to be on his radar. But that feeling was short lived because he was on a mission. This was a test, an entrance exam really. The world of men wanted the report. Where did I rank in the initiation culture of the guys at school? Did I have the chops to be one of them? And late night phone conversations and color pen love letters did not count for anything. I better have something to show for all that time spent together.

“Uh . . . I held her hand and we snuggled on her couch?”

He burst into laughter. I bristle at the memory of it. It was a cackle of pure mockery. I failed the test.

I could weep as I picture that young man at the vending machine. It’s painful to recall the embarrassment I felt for my coming of age innocence. He really liked his girlfriend. He was a young lover in young love. And so was she. He wasn’t trying to get anything, just feeling the pleasure of it all. She was beautiful and beautiful to be with. I wish I could go back to help him stay with his innocent lover heart. It took so long to recover him.

This is one of those buried memories that pops up from time to time, a story I now know is part of my sexual formation. In that moment, I learned the absolute clear reality that sexuality could be driven by something totally beyond romance, eroticism, and love. I learned that sexual experience could be a form of getting or taking. I learned that sexuality could be used for power, for bolstering my confidence, my standing in the world of men. I learned that sex could be masculine initiation, sex could be affirmation

Photo by Mitchell Koot on Unsplash

What is your center?

The center of a man’s sexuality was meant to be his lover heart. Sex was meant to exist in the story of romance and love and connection and emotional intimacy and commitment—the lover’s domain. It’s the lover in a man that lets him be overcome by beauty and respond with reverent awe. It’s the lover in a man that holds both his childlike innocence and playfulness alongside his deep capacity for close connection and heart pursuit. The lover makes a man brave enough to let others see him, engage him, and impact him. It was indeed this very lover heart in Adam that inspired his poetic celebration of Eve’s shared humanity and equality.

But if a man disowns the lover within, what becomes his new sexual center? What drives his sexuality? And if sex becomes an act of getting some rather than an act of love, what is that something a man gets?

In a word, it all becomes ego.

His center becomes a self absorbed persona and what he gets is ego strokes. That’s it. Either your sexuality is driven by the lover within as an act of love or its driven by your outsized ego to further puff you up.

Ego sexuality makes sex a mirror of self affirmation, the bolstering and soothing of a man’s insecurity. It uses sex to inflate a sense of self, to fuel self confidence and pride, but not through genuine risk or vulnerability. It avoids all risk. A man like this manipulates with power and control to ensure the necessary outcome of self gratification. He cheats the vulnerable dance of romance. Crippled by self absorption, he is careless to the well being of another. He focuses on getting off, on getting strokes, on getting the ‘hit’ of sexuality. This is not the pleasure of connection. It’s more driven and desperate. It avoids the trappings of love because it’s not there for love. It fulfills a fantasy about himself and numbs on the drug of false empowerment.

In her research on sex addiction, Alexandra Katehakis describes this as the “comfort without contact” strategy. It draws other people not into a mutual bond that could bring comfort through intimacy—emotional, spiritual, physical, sexual—but a one sided moment of self absorbed gratification. “[It] makes other people not sources of relational comfort but objects to assist auto regulation, as expressed in excessive sexualized fantasies, masturbation, and externalizing behaviors.”¹ People become objects for an autoerotic (“self-arousing”) fantasy.

This is not a man’s real self, his true empowered ego, but his false self, a highly curated image. Or better said, its a fragment of his personality that he over utilizes to get care and love. There is a drastic difference between having a personality and having a self. And an ego driven man does seek a true sense of self or true healthy ego.

Biblical Egos

The Persian King Xerxes the Great once threw himself a six month party to “…display the riches of his royal glory and the splendor of his majestic greatness” (Esther 1:4). Someone might have an ego issue here. One night while drunk with his royal buddies, he sent for the queen to come dance for them. He wanted to brag on her beauty, like some show piece in his kingdom.

Queen Vashti, in a breathtaking display of courage, refuses him. She refuses to be his property. And she refuses to be an extension of his bloated ego. And he absolutely cannot handle her “No.” He goes into a rage—a smoking gun sign that his ego is injured. His insecurity mushrooms into a huge crippling conspiracy theory: he fears that all women will be empowered to say “No” to their husbands (as if that would be bad?). It’s all projection and fear. And of course, he way over reacts with a show of “power” to keep his pride intact. He divorces Queen Vashti, discards her really, and refuses to ever see her in person again.

This is so far from the lover within a man. This is so far from Adam who could celebrate Eve’s equality and respect her as a companion, not a piece of property for his bidding. Xerxes has completely lost his center to his ego.

King Solomon fits this image too. Despite being blessed with wisdom, he amassed a thousand women for his sexual leisure, among them 700 wives of royal blood. He had a sexual pattern, as all sexual brokenness does. He sought beautiful women who helped him secure more fame and notoriety in the world. And this sexual conquest and lust for power turned his heart from God, the source of his truest identity.

The Man, The Myth, The Legend

A person driven by an inflated ego has a name—Narcissist. It’s a psychological condition characterized by grandiosity, a constant need for affirmation and attention, and an inability to empathize. As Chuck Degroat points out, this is not the struggle of too much self love but a person crippled with unrelenting self absorption.² They cannot see outside themselves. Though it’s far beyond a sexual disorder, the first time the term was ever used clinically was by sexologist Havelock Ellis in 1898. In treating a patient who got sexually aroused by his own reflection, Ellis described a “Narcissus-like tendency…for the sexual emotion to be absorbed and often entirely lost in self admiration.”

The Greek myth of Narcissus, the most famous version written by Ovid, tells the story of a young man, handsome in appearance. As such, several young nymphs pursue him and fall in love with him. But Narcissus pushes away and rejects any interested lovers, which seems to go against our definition of an attention driven egoist. Why would he push these admirers away? Doesn’t he crave attention and affirmation? I believe it’s because these women actually invited him into true romance, which crosses over simple admiration into vulnerable love and intimacy.

As retaliation, one of the gods curses Narcissus to suffer the same feeling of rejection he’s inflicted. The next time he’s out hunting, he stops by a pond and sees there his own reflection in the water. He becomes smitten and reaches out to hug his own reflection. But his arms trouble the water and make the mirage disappear. He’s left rejected until the waters coalesce and return him to his own gaze. And so the cycle continues leaving him perpetually craving and perpetually empty of fulfillment or love. Despite all that self absorption, he never finds himself. Its a tragic and agonizing living hell.

He dies there at the waters edge.

What Narcissists Hide

When the writer Ovid scribed his version of the myth, he buried within his lines a massive insight into the roots of narcissism. Twice he says that Narcissus “…might seem a man or a boy.”³ At its absolute heart, narcissism is a form of arrested development. As Chuck Degroat put it, behind every narcissist is a wounded little boy—a very heavily protected and hidden little boy. Everything a narcissist does—all the bravado and bloviation and manipulation and retaliation—all of it exists to do one thing: keep you from seeing the wounded little boy inside.

Pay no attention to the boy behind the curtain.

Ego driven sex is always about relieving or hiding the shame of that little boy inside. So it attempts to over accentuate or “inflate” other aspects of the personality to counter the shame. It focuses on looks or performance or getting off and not connection or anything truly vulnerable. That’s the self absorption. This makes all sexual activity feel very puerile: what Johan Huizinga called “a blend of barbarity and adolescence.” This kind of sex is extremely childish in its experience and yet also savage in practice. It grabs and takes like a child and yet, in the body of a full grown man, inflicts the terror of a savage.

“Did you get some?” Can you hear how both childish and savage that is? It’s a hungry toddler and a thief all at once. It’s stealing sex.

I remember John Eldredge once described how at adolescence, a hunger opens in a young man’s heart for his father’s presence, for an initiation passage into the world of men. And very quickly on the heals of this hunger, his sexuality begins to awaken. If his father does not read and respond to his hunger for initiation, sexuality presents itself as a false form of initiation, a false way of feeling like a man. It seems to offer what the “…young man or a boy…” inside us all needs.

And to make something absolutely clear, ego driven sex does not help us grow up. It simply keeps us immature. It keeps us infantile and barbaric in our sexuality. We don’t mature into the lover. It’s hiding our broken parts in power and self protection. Not risking them in vulnerability.

And without risk, without vulnerability, we do not grow.

The Rest of Us

There are full blown malignant narcissists on the regular in our news cycle. Another politician or pastor or leader gets exposed for some wild sexual escapade or sexual abuse. It’s devastating to see the unmasked brokenness and emptiness behind our favorite gifted and charismatic leaders. It’s disruptive to watch any appearance of real strength or substance or solid sense of self vaporize before our eyes as the inflated ego pops. And the more intense the sexual escapade or denial or cover up, the more the chasm yawns between the man and his wounded little boy. Pay no attention to the little boy behind the political theater or church show.

You might say, well, thank god I’m not a narcissist. And yes, most men are not so totally absorbed within themselves. But narcissism exists on a spectrum, as Chuck Degroat points out. Narcissism can be behavior we resort to from time to time in certain situations or triggers to hide our shame or wounds. It does not cripple us entirely, but we fall into the spell of self absorption here and there. We dabble. We flirt. And that brings harm to us and our loved one’s too.

As men, we all live in a pornified culture that baptizes male sexual pleasure as a source of ego stroking. Pornography is so extremely skewed towards male dominance and pleasure. It invites men to empower themselves by pushing their bodies through the sexual arousal cycle to get release rather than seek pain relief through the hard work of emotional engagement. And even if you don’t look at porn, men can be drawn to feel entitled to sex in our relationships. That may not be narcissistic but its certainly self absorbed.

We all have the boy within. And wherever we have shame or wounds we hide, we can be tempted towards self absorbed narcissistic behavior. Including sexualized ego stroking. Chuck Degroat points out, “the name Narcissus comes from the Greek word Narc, which means numbness—a kind of stupor.” Wherever we numb ourselves to our own pain or the pain of others, we are set up to be absorbed into ourselves and numb to life.

Healing

In a Rolling Stones article a number of years ago, shock jock radio host Howard Stern said some staggeringly honest words about his own ego stroking sexual behavior.

“After my divorce, I realized, ‘Oh, wow, I can go have sex.’ And I was running around, picking up women. Then all of a sudden, it dawned on me that I really didn't need that much sex. I just wanted somebody with me every minute. I was using women as a surrogate mother. When I tapped into that, it suddenly became very childish behavior. And really, was it so great f***ing every night? They're using me for my fame, I'm using them for their beauty, and the whole f***ing thing seemed empty.”⁴

Howard did what we must all do: be curious about the boy within. The answer here is not to condemn ourselves and redouble the shame. If you recognize a pull towards treating sex as an ego stroke, if sex feels more desperate or driven than playful and connecting, you must address the shame and wounding you are trying to soothe. We need to help that boy grow up in us.

You actually need a healthy ego, what we call the true self. In the words of Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, “Only a strong Ego, with legitimate and viable boundaries, is capable of reaching out to another with love and concern, without feeling overly threatened and without losing a sense of itself.”⁵ And quite ironically, what feeds a man’s real self and grows him up is vulnerable love. We only gain when we risk on love. That’s it. That’s all that grows us up. Brave vulnerability in the face of love.

Sex is not the source of our initiation or power or comfort or love. It can be a beautiful place the lover in us plays as an expression of all those things. But it cannot be our source. We need to recognize what the Lover in us knows: that vulnerability is our greatest power.

You can never really kill off the lover in you. He’s closer than you think. May we all become the true self lover within.

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1. Katehakis, Alexandra. Sex Addiction as Affect Dysregulation: A Neurobiologically Informed Holistic Treatment (United States: W. W. Norton, 2016), xv.

2. DeGroat, Chuck. When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community From Emotional and Spiritual Abuse (United Kingdom: InterVarsity Press, 2020), 28

3. http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:latinLit:phi0959.phi006.perseus-eng1:3.337-3.434

4. Strauss, Neil. “The Happiest Man Alive: The Long Struggle and Neurotic Triumph of Howard Stern.” Rolling Stone, March 31, 2011, 40-47,76.

5. Moore, Robert L.., Gillette, Douglas. The Lover Within : Accessing the Lover in the Male Psyche (New York: W. Morrow, 1993), 176