Lust and pride: the vices dividing the sexes

India Knight: The Sunday Times

February 22, 2009

Men and women sin in very different ways, according to Monsignor Wojciech Giertych, personal theologian to Pope Benedict XVI and the papal household. There is “no sexual equality when it comes to sin”, Giertych wrote last week in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper.

His views were formed by his own experience of the confessional and were supported by an analysis of confessional data carried out by 95-year-old Roberto Busa, an impressively tech-savvy Jesuit priest who has also carried out a computerised study of the works of St Thomas Aquinas.

The seven deadly sins are: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride (as opposed to chastity, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility). Last year, however, the Vatican suggested these might be supplemented with some new sins particularly relevant to the modern age – namely genetic modification, human experimentation, polluting the environment, social injustice, causing poverty, financial gluttony and the taking or selling of drugs (I’m not really seeing how smoking a doobie offends the Lord in a way comparable to deliberately causing poverty, but anyway . . . ).

According to Busa and Giertych’s Vatican-endorsed findings, if you’re a man, then your number one sin is lust, followed by gluttony – and then sloth, since by that point you’re probably too sated, in both senses, to move.

If you’re a woman, the prime sin is pride, followed by envy and then anger, which, I must say, doesn’t paint a very attractive picture. No wonder men sit around eating a lot and watching porn.

Dorothy L Sayers once cleverly observed that the sins ought to be subdivided into the disreputable-but-warm-hearted (lust, anger, gluttony) and the respectable-but-cold-hearted (envy, sloth, avarice, pride) – cold-hearted because they are sins of the spirit rather than the flesh and respectable because they can masquerade as virtues.

I expect the list ranking our sins would have looked very different 30 or 40 years ago. Would lust have topped the men’s list when advertising still tended to feature fully-clothed “housewives” trying to put together simple and nutritious meals and access to porn involved an embarrassing, furtive trip to the newsagent? In 2009 it’s hardly surprising that lust should occupy the number one slot in the male mind: sex seems to saturate every aspect of their lives.

If a man had been asked 40 years ago in the confessional to list every single time the old sap had risen during the course of a day, he might have mentioned two or three instances. Today, to catalogue every twinge properly, he’d probably be in there for hours. Still, at least men do tend to confess to lust, which means they presumably feel bad about getting the horn at random things, such as advertisements for chocolate.

I am interested in the fact that avarice comes second to bottom in the list of sins that women confess to and bottom in the list of men’s. Like lust, avarice is practically a universal: everyone walks around wanting stuff they don’t have and not properly appreciating what they do have. Unlike lust, this isn’t generally felt to be a bad or particularly reprehensible thing, unless it applies to bankers and bonuses.

The cracked.com website last week published a widely circulated article entitled “Five things you think will make you happy (but won’t)”, the five things being, in reverse order: fame (the website links teenagers’ hunger for fame to being starved of attention by absent or “emotionally distant” parents); wealth (“Nigerians are happier with their lives than the people of any other country. The average Nigerian makes $300 a year”); beauty (too much “counterfeit flattery” just because you’re hot, same self-esteem problems as the plain); genius (which makes you lonely and possibly mentally ill); and power (which turns you “into an asshole” and possibly a sociopath).

The thoughts of this funny and irreverent website on the subject of human delusion echo the Vatican’s confessional findings almost to the letter, which you must admit is rather interesting. As Giertych said: “Diverse cultural contexts generate diverse habits – but human nature remains the same.”

In a gripping essay published a couple of weeks ago (available online), Mary Eberstadt, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, ponders on the significance of the fact that, for the first time in history, westerners have access to practically all the food and sex they want.

She describes the “chasm in attitude” that separates us from our ancestors when it comes to these two fundamentals, which “have historically been subject in all civilisations to rules both formal and informal” in order to avoid things such as sexual aggression, disease, “what used to be called home-wrecking” and so on.

Those rules are gone. You don’t have to fear getting pregnant; you don’t have to expose yourself to disease; there is little stigma attached to multiple partners; and mechanised farming, pesticides and genetically modified foods have ensured that almost everyone in the West can eat until they’re stuffed. To paraphrase and simplify wildly: Eberstadt concludes that food is the new sex – the place where taboos, obsessions, rules, quirks and fetishes now go to roost.

Anyone who has eyes in their head, or who’s had awkward dinner guests with wheat “issues”, can see that this is true. And the male side of the Vatican’s sin list rather suggests that men are, as per Eberstadt, completely beached by their own appetites.

In fact, the list provides a useful insight into the fundamental differences between the sexes today: men eat and shag and then worry about it; women preen and resent, with a little envy and crossness chucked in, and don’t especially like themselves for it either. The “vice divide” identified by the Vatican echoes the societal changes of the past few decades in an unexpectedly modern way – and what initially seems like an entertaining little titbit provides a perfect snapshot of male and female unease.

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True or not true?