Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

When I look back upon my life
It's always with a sense of shame
I've always been the one to blame

For everything I long to do
No matter when or where or who
Has one thing in common, too
It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a sin

A character with this state of mind believes that Sex Is Evil, but can't escape his own sexuality. Operating under ethical guidelines completely opposite to those of an Ethical Slut, the character who sees the world through the glasses of Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny is likely to care little, if at all, for the people he has sex with, as he considers them "dirty" and might resent them or worse for "leading him into temptation."

The character isn't necessarily a rapist, it's enough for him (or her) to be a Jerkass about his sexuality under the presumption that Sex Is Evil, "unmarried non-virgins are whores," or similar. He is likely to eventually take it out on his partner(s), on himself, or both.

If he does commit sexual harassment or worse, he might be Obliviously Evil about it. He is likely to show his consideration by choosing victims who are already Defiled Forever so that some extra abuse really won't make any difference... to him, that is.

In a setting where Sex Is Evil, this character will exemplify the evils of sexuality. If he makes a Heel Face Turn and become Good, he is likely to forgive his victims for tempting him. In a setting where sex is not evil, the character is likely to be contrasted with a Chivalrous Pervert, Good Bad Girl, or fully operational Ethical Slut.

A character with this mindset is likely to think that at least some men are incapable of controlling their sexual urges, so women should expect them to do sexual harassment or worse and be Crazy Prepared in various ways. Including trying to second-guess what these men might find attractive - and then try her best to not look attractive, lest these men might get their urges. Of course, since each individual man has his individual preferences (and also since the whole "oh no, I got aroused" thing is just an excuse anyway), even wearing a Burqua would not be a safe in this regard. And yet, some particularly unsympathetic or tragic character may take this attitude one step further, demanding the Doublethink that we should all consider men to be some kind of monsters while still consider them to be the superior gender - morally and otherwise. This is done by blaming women for (by their appearance or mere existence) "tempting" men, making any sex-crimes against them their own fault. Naturally, many works portray this attitude as barbaric misogyny. With or without any such aspects of ideology or social structure, a character of either gender may use another character's attractiveness or way of dressing as a Lame Excuse to misbehave and then claim Never My Fault.

While this trope is traditionally male, these days it's far from Always Male. However, it's often played out in the way that a male character with this trope is destructive and abusive, while a woman with the same underlying mindset is self-destructive.

See also Troubled Sympathetic Bigot, Then Let Me Be Evil, and Internalized Categorism. Contrast both Celibate Hero and Ethical Slut: The two ways of being a polar opposite of this trope. Contrast Romanticized Abuse for when abusive sexual gratification is played for Fetish Fuel rather then angst.

No real life examples, please; calling real-life people "evil" is an extremely bad idea. Examples of how real cases have been portrayed in media is okay.

Examples of Sex Is Evil and I Am Horny include:

Anime and Manga

  • Neon Genesis Evangelion: Asuka has a few shades of this... She tells Misato that she has never seen "such an inappropriate relationship" by someone who is supposed to be her guardian (regarding Misato's relationship with Kaji. However, she makes several passes at the man herself, including trying to seduce him the night before they arrive in Japan. She also makes several less than subtle attempts to get Shinji, who is so socially awkward he just doesn't get it.
  • Jirou from Kamisama Kiss is pretty much the walking embodiment of Straight Edge Evil, the Evil part doesn't last, but he soon starts becoming attracted to the heroine Nanami. Unfortunately for Jirou, Tomoe (a Kitsune and Shapeshifting Seducer) notices this...
  • Many, many female Hentai characters. Especially after Rape Is Love kicks in.

Comic Books

  • In New Mutants Wolfsbane's guardian Reverend Craig was a preacher of the hellfire and brimstone variety, and he basically beat it into her that she was going to hell because her mother was a prostitute. It was later revealed that he used to have sex with prostitutes, one of them being Rahne's mother. She realized this later on and went to confront him revealing she knew his secret.

Fan Works

  • The general gist of this fanfic on a Pokémon kink meme involves Cyrus feeling this way about Cynthia.
    • Considering that Cyrus's canonical motivation is "Emotions Are Evil And I Am Passionate", it's not surprising that fanfic involving sexuality sometimes takes him in this direction.
  • In Naruto Veangance Revelaitons, the women of the council disapprove of non-reproductive sex and homosexuality, but like making out. This is presumably because the author likes lesbian sex. Similarly, a brainwashed Sakura asks Ronan "RONAN! I AM SO HORNY N NEED HLEP BUT I AM N XTINA ND SEX IS EVIL 2 US SO WAT SHULD U DO?"

Film

  • The bad guy in Preaching to the Perverted spends the movie fighting against harmless sadomasochists. At the end, it turns out that he is a sadist as well, but has avoided taking part in the "perverted" lifestyle by living out his sadistic lusts in a "more acceptable" way... taking it out on children.
  • The protagonist of the movie The Good Girl is so repressed that it leads her into a destructive adulterous relationship.
  • One of the main themes, if not the main theme of The Wicker Man is the conflict between the stuck-up, virginal, devoutly religious Sgt. Howie and the sexually liberal, promiscuous pagan islanders. The filmmakers have stated that Howie's decision of whether or not to have sex dictates what happens to him in the end.
  • In the movie Crimes Of Passion, "Reverend" Peter Shayne mixes moralism and horniness into a combination that grows more and more destructive. Stalking a prostitute he has the hots for as a misguided crusade to "save her soul." His sexual harassment of her eventually forces her to kill him in a final confrontation. Afterwards she and the protagonist (who tried to save her from the psycho, but she saved herself instead) become a couple and presumably live happily ever after.
  • In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Judge Turpin fills this role, fooling himself that he can protect young Johanna from the evil of other men's sexuality by forcing her to marry him and satisfy his own selfish lust.
    • Various theater versions of this musical have various takes on this. Some make him a more clear-cut example by highlighting his self-loathing, while others make him a more one-dimensional Complete Monster.
    • His solo, "Mea Culpa," exemplifies this much the way "Hellfire" does for Hunchback's Frollo.
  • In Disturbing Behavior, this is the most frequent cause of the mind-control chips glitching out—fundamental instinct on the part of former teen Delinquents straining against puritanical Brainwashing resulting in temporary Ax Crazy. Either that, or it's a form of pon farr.
  • In Secretary, this view on his own sexuality seem to be the core of Edward's internal conflict.
  • Greg Pilkington in Priest. The conflict is pretty natural since he's a gay Catholic priest, but the way he treats his sex partner is still pretty appalling, and father Matthew calls him out on it.

Literature

  • The villains in the first book of The Millennium Trilogy. The original title translates to "Men Who Hate Women," and that sums it up quite nicely. The villains are distinguished morally upstanding gentlemen who happen to be serial rapists and sexual serial killers. They are contrasted by a protagonist duo of Action Girl Hacker and Knight Errant Journalist who are both Ethical Sluts.
  • In Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the villian Frollo has more then a hint of this with his mix of love and loathing for Esmeralda.
  • Angelo in Measure for Measure. After condemning Claudio to die for having premarital sex, he offers to spare him if Claudio's virginal sister will have sex with him. She immediately calls him out on his hypocrisy. Even worse, it turns out he had no intention of sparing Claudio either way.
  • Carrie's abusive Bible-thumbing mother from Carrie was convinced that sex was evil, even within the confines of marriage. However, her husband managed to pressure her into having sex (or outright raped her, it's a bit ambiguous), the result of which was her telekinetic offspring. She never got over the fact that she actually enjoyed the act.
  • Keira in the Dark Heresy books is a religious fanatic who believes that sex is evil and killing people is good. She is also a teenage girl. Needless to say, she is very confused.
  • Alex D'Urberville in Tess of the D'Urbervilles morphs into this trope. After he seduces Tess (read: rapes her while she sleeps) and she leaves, he has a spiritual "reawakening" that causes him to become a man of God. When he meets Tess again, he blames her for his fall and makes her swear on a roadside cross to never tempt him again. Which is of course his way of trying to cover up the fact that he still wants her, bad. In the end he drops the religion.
  • Played with in The Belgariad with Relg, a religious fanatic and zealot. He believes that sex is evil, and hates himself and by extension the women he desires, because of it. The rest of the characters think he's off his rocker, including the woman he eventually marries, who confronts him about it, arguing that the 'sin' is in his mind, not hers. It's the first step towards him getting over it, which he does.
    • Important in his case (to avoid other Unfortunate Implications that would be the inverse of this trope, such as A Man Is Not a Virgin) is that the woman in question is from a race thought extinct so she is motivated to reproduce, and Relg's god UL has told him the next religious leader of his people will come 'through him.' Relg assumes this means he'll discover the new leader, when in fact what UL meant was that the next leader would be Relg's son. So if he did NOT reproduce, he'd actually be defying his god. Though in fairness UL was a little vague.
  • The villain of Whispers, and one villain in Watchers, both by Dean Koontz.
    • Actually, the vast majority of Koontz' villains (more so in his early work, but still present today) have major issues with sexuality.
  • In I Shall Wear Midnight, this trope is what drives The Cunning Man.
  • In Atlas Shrugged, Hank Rearden displays this about having sex with protagonist Dagny Taggart and cheating on his wife, Lillian.
  • In a Nightside short story, this trope is used as a spiritual weapon that backfires. A fanatical trio of Christian fundamentalists—one man, one woman, and one ghost—uses the cumulative power of the abstinent living members' sexual frustration to power magical attacks against pagans and their deities on the Street of the Gods. As it happens, the Street is a place where any revered figure can take on spiritual power, and when the holy trio make the mistake of coming too near the Church of Marilyn Monroe, the first two are overwhelmed by the Horny side of this trope, and start tearing each other's clothes off, oblivious to danger or their ghostly associate's protests.
  • In The Redemption of Althalus, the protagonists have to rescue Leitha from being burned as a witch. It turns out that the local priest is constantly getting aroused by seeing pretty girls, but since he's a holy man and assumed to be above that sort of thing, he assumes they're using witchcraft to "corrupt" him, so he has them charged and executed instead of dealing with his own weak moral fiber. While Leitha (who did actually have supernatural powers—that let her figure out the whole tragic mess, to boot) survives, it's revealed that he's murdered a very large number of girls beforehand.
    • Heroic character Bheid has a bit of this going on, he's eventually forced to get over it, and ends up married to the above mentioned Leitha.
  • In The Poisonwood Bible, Orleanna indicates that her husband Nathan is a prime example of this trope. She mentions that he would rarely sleep with her, and when he did, he would end up begging God for forgiveness and blaming her for having led him into temptation. Somehow, they managed to have four children, a fact that Orleanna wryly lampshades.
  • In one of the Aubrey-Maturin books, a sailor comes to Stephen asking if there's such a thing as the opposite of an aphrodisiac, and if so, can he have some—because his wife is a very religious woman and is disgusted by the idea of sex being pleasurable, so even when she's willing to sleep with him, he freaks her out with his enthusiasm, and then he feels even worse. He's concluded that his only chance of ever having the thing he wants so badly is not to want it.
  • In In the Time of The Butterflies, Patria describes her hands "wandering" at night and her desire to lick the fingers of every man that walks into her father's store, despite the fact that she wants to be a nun.
  • Being what he considers an upstanding Christian man, John struggles with sexuality in A Dirge for Prester John.

Live-Action TV

  • In one episode of Sex and the City, one of the main characters dates a guy who gives her a hard time for "making him dirty" by allowing him to have sex with her.
  • In the miniseries version of Les Misérables (NOT the novel by Victor Hugo and not the musical either - only the miniseries version), the protagonist Jean Valjean has been given a dose of this. In all versions of the story, he loves his adopted daughter, but in the miniseries this has been given creepy undertones of him having pedophilic urges that he needs to fight with himself to keep in check.
  • This is the reason behind Karofsky's bullying of Kurt in Glee, although in his case it's more of a case of Homosexuality is Evil and I Am Gay.

Music

Tabletop Games

  • One book for Mage: The Awakening features a town where a mage with strong ideas on wholesomeness and youth morality created a working that would keep teenagers away from sex, especially "aberrant" forms of sex such as homosexuality or kink. The good news is, it's worked, as most of the youth have sublimated their sexual desires into other hobbies. The bad news is, beides being as homophobic as all get out,if they ever give in to their sexual desires outside of the context of heterosexual marriage, it's a sin against the Karma Meter—with premarital sex being as bad as manslaughter, and homosexual or kinky sex being as bad as torture. Which means the Mage has effectively created a ticking time bomb for mass-producing sociopathic sexual sadists and serial killers.
  • The Werewolf: The Apocalypse book Posessed features an old man who spent many years standing with bible in hand at the collage gates, berating female students for their skimpy clothing. Turns out that his true motivation was that he enjoyed staring at beautiful young women and comment their bodies and clothing. The whole moral superiority thing was merely an excuse that he used to trick everyone (surely including himself) that his behavior was acceptable.
    • To make it worse, indulging his hatred of beautiful young women and his self-inflicted sexual frustration opened him up to what can be called demonic possession. Having turned into a Formori minion of the Wyrm, he ends up attacking a young beautiful female coed werewolf, making himself the first kill in her new career as a slayer of wyrm-tainted monsters.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • The satire newspaper The Onion commented on the scandal of the Catholic Church covering up for pedophile priests (by moving them around instead of firing and reporting them, thus covering their tracks and giving them access to new victims) with a fake announcement from the Pope, who announced that God will forgive the children for their crime of leading his priests into temptation.

Western Animation

Real Life

  • A lot of newspapers accused themselves, each other and a certain politician of internalizing this trope in their portrayal of a horrific event from 2011 where eighteen men gang-raped a eleven-year-old girl. The politician was portrayed as thinking it was the kid's own fault she got raped — and thus really her parents' fault, since they are responsible for her — while the papers, in reporting on how the girl seemed to dress way above her age, cast unfortunate overtones of, "Did you see how she was dressed? She was asking for it!"