I want to talk about the idea that “men are wired to lust.”
Bullshit.
Men have been taught, over generations and centuries, that they are “wired to lust”. That they are “visual creatures,” “hormonal beings,” that they “can’t help it,” that they are “built for the pursuit.” You hear it on social media, in schools, in social circles, from pulpits, in seminars, in motivational spaces. It’s everywhere.
A cultural myth became doctrine and has been reinforced so consistently that most people stopped questioning it. And once you stop questioning something, you start living inside it.
This Isn’t About Women
Before this gets twisted, this is not about women.
If you go out half-naked, no, you are not asking for anything, except maybe a stylist and someone to teach you some self-respect. That’s it.
Clothing is not consent. Now, if you go to a bar and deliberately lead men on, tease them, make promises you do not intend to keep, then you are flirting with the line and you need to rethink some of your life choices.
But dressing badly isn’t an invitation, it just means you have no taste. That’s all.
And this is a story and debate for another time.
The Lie Men Were Raised On
Men have been told for literal ages that they have no real control over their sexual impulses.
Men were taught that lust is automatic, unavoidable, inevitable. (Psst…it’s not just men. Women struggle with it too; we just hide it super well.) They are taught that resistance is either futile or unnatural, and that they are biologically obligated to follow through on what they feel.
And then of course they are punished, mocked, and shamed when they fail to control those same impulses.
That is not guidance. That is a trap.
Telling someone they are incapable of regulating behaviour, and then morally condemning them for not regulating it, is illogical. It’s a contradiction.
It’s not going to produce better men, despite claiming that on the packaging. It produces confused and frustrated men. Angry men. Tired men. Depressed men.
Learned Helplessness
What exactly is learned helplessness?
The term was introduced by Martin Seligman in the late 1960s. It describes a condition where a person is repeatedly exposed to situations in which they believe they have no control over the outcome, and over time they stop trying to change it, even when change becomes possible. The American Psychological Association defines learned helplessness as a state in which individuals come to believe they are powerless to influence events, leading to passive behaviour, reduced motivation, and a sense of resignation.
Sound familiar?
Apply that to desire. Imagine being told your entire life that you have no influence over your own body, that no matter what you do or how hard you try, nothing will affect the outcome, and you are doomed to lust after women.
Anyone who has struggled with weight loss will understand this immediately. If you are overweight, and you were taught your entire life that there’s nothing you can do about it, you’re highly unlikely to be hitting the gym anyway.
You’re far more likely to be on the couch eating chips, hating yourself, hating skinny people, and telling yourself everything is pointless.
Not because you are a moral failure, but because you were taught helplessness and you are trapped in it.
The Backseat Problem
If you were taught this your entire life, and the previous multitude of generations were taught the same thing, at some point nobody even questions it anymore. Most aren’t even aware of it anymore. That is how deep the conditioning goes.
Imagine you’re sitting in the backseat of a car heading for a cliff, and you were told you can’t touch the steering wheel, that pulling up the handbrake will not work, and jumping out is also not going to work. What do you do?
And when you do try to steer or brake or change direction, that is also wrong!
You do your best not to look at a woman with lust but with respect, and at some point you are in a relationship and you want to express desire, and suddenly that is also wrong? So what exactly are you supposed to do? At some point even loving your wife starts to feel like a problem.
That level of contradiction doesn’t create discipline.
It creates paralysis, or rebellion, or both.
Control Through Fear
What is the easiest way to control a population?
Fear.
Religious systems figured this out a long time ago. If you sin, you go to hell. A few words, delivered in a stern commanding tone from a little throne in the front of a pointy building, and you have behavioural compliance on a global scale.
Not religious? Not a problem.
The mechanism works the same, we just give it a different jacket.
Convince men they are helpless against their urges. Surround them with temptation 24/7. Tell them they can’t resist it, that they are biologically obligated to follow. Then mock them, punish them, and degrade them when they inevitably fail.
It is not complicated to see why so many men end up angry, ashamed, and depressed.
Same System, Different Targets
Before anyone comes after this with “what would you know,” understand that women are conditioned too, just differently.
Women are taught that being sexual makes them shameful, that their bodies are dangerous, that their value is tied to how well they suppress, perform, or package themselves, from before pre-school.
The conditioning is different, but the mechanism is the same. Fear, shame, and control.
So yes, I understand very well how this works.
The Physics of Attention
There is a real concept in physics often simplified into the idea that observation affects reality. The most cited example is the double-slit experiment, where particles behave differently when measured than when they are not. Later work, including experiments proposed by John Archibald Wheeler, explored how measurement appears to determine the state a system settles into.
What this actually shows is not that your thoughts magically create reality, but that observation collapses multiple possibilities into a single outcome. Before measurement, a system exists in a range of probabilities. After measurement, one state is realised.
Bring that back to behaviour. Your brain works on reinforcement. What you repeatedly pay attention to, you strengthen. What you ignore is weakened. In neuroscience, this is often summarised as “neurons that fire together wire together”.
If your attention has been trained for years to scan for sexual stimulus, novelty, and quick dopamine hits, that becomes your default pattern. It feels automatic, like it is just who you are.
But it is not who you are. It is what you have practiced.
Conditioning Isn’t Destiny
Lusting feels automatic because it’s been rehearsed. Years of reinforcement will do that.
That does not make it permanent. It makes it trained.
Anything that has been trained can be retrained. You don’t just “take control” and hope for the best, no. You use small, repeatable actions to reshape how your attention works. It could be something as simple as redirecting your gaze when a pattern triggers you, replacing old automatic thoughts with new, intentional ones, or deliberately practicing focus on connection instead of novelty. Over time, the brain rewires itself. This is called neuroplasticity and it’s how you gradually train yourself into a new default.
You can climb out of the backseat and into the front. You can take the steering wheel, pull the handbrake, spin up some gravel, and change direction.
You do have control. Years and years of garbage made you forget. You do have control.
Take it.
What You’re Actually Wired For
You are not wired for lust.
You are wired for connection. Connection was distorted and flattened into lust, then amplified and monetised.
When people stop being people and start being stimuli, you get consumption instead of connection. Consumption keeps people from connection. Disconnection keeps people safely under control.
If you can keep someone chasing impulses while believing they have no control over them, you don’t need to control them directly, they’ll happily and obliviously do it for you.
There is an old maxim that says “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. The ones in charge have control. They are benefiting from the monetisation of fear. And they will do anything to keep that control – that includes perverting once-good rules and institutions so that they can gain more control from it.
Take It Back
We are not going to bring down massive, centuries-old systems overnight. That’s not realistic.
But you can stop beating yourself up. You can stop making poor decisions because you believe you have no choice. You can take back your agency, your self-control, your self-respect, and your ability to choose.
If you try to take control of institutions while you’re not in control of yourself, you end up with the same problem in a different form. New boss, same as the old boss.
Start With Number 1
You are not a failure for looking. You are not broken for struggling. You are not doomed because you clicked on something you feel you shouldn’t have. You are operating inside a clever system that trained you well.
You are capable of training yourself out of it.
The system may have failed you, but that doesn’t mean you are a failure, or that you have failed yourself. Build something better, for yourself first, and then for the people who come after you, where young men aren’t raised on the idea that everything they do is futile.
Where they are shown that their effort matters, their humanity is valued, that their voices count, and that they have a choice in their destinies.
So start with yourself.
Make decisions with integrity, grace, and honour. Choose connection over quick fixes. Choose discipline over impulse. Because you aren’t wired for lust.
You’re wired for love.
-Nova
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