The Price of Flesh in a Culture Without Soul

There was once a time when to behold another human being was to glimpse the divine.

Now, we swipe.

Swipe for lips. Swipe for abs. Swipe for a jawline or a hip-to-waist ratio that might briefly give us the illusion of meaning. In the modern sexual marketplace, no one is merely looking for love—they are looking for leverage. Everyone is both merchant and merchandise. And the great tragedy is not only what we have lost but what we have become.

The body is no longer the temple. It is the product.

This was not an accident. It is the consequence of a culture that no longer believes in essence—only image. A world that no longer believes in man or woman, but only in appetite. What was once a sacred exchange between souls has become a negotiation between egos. Our passions, severed from our purpose, now flail about like loose wires—desperate for contact, indifferent to meaning, and utterly indifferent to the cost.

And there is a cost. There is always a cost.

Our culture now celebrates promiscuity as empowerment, exhibitionism as identity, and vanity as virtue. The rise of artificial beauty—sculpted faces, filtered flesh, cosmetic symmetry—serves not to glorify human dignity but to disguise its absence. What was once adorned is now auctioned. What was once reserved is now rendered. What was once loved is now consumed.

And in that consumption, we find a culture drunk on lust but starved of love.

This is not just about homosexuality or heterosexuality. It is about the homogenization of all desire into market logic—where attraction is measured not by the soul, but by the scroll. We are being conditioned to desire people not as persons, but as parcels of pleasure. Whether it is a man fetishizing youth or a woman commodifying her curves, the result is the same: the human being is no longer the end, but the means. And that is the textbook definition of degradation.

Love is not transactional. It is sacrificial.

When a man loves a woman, he is not bartering for services—he is binding his life to hers. When a woman loves a man, she is not offering herself as a reward for status—she is offering herself in trust, in faith, in hope. That kind of union is not easily found in a world of OnlyFans, “situationships,” and algorithm-driven dating apps designed to gamify the very concept of commitment.

No, that kind of love requires virtue. It requires vision. It requires the rejection of what this culture most desperately wants you to believe—that your worth is tied to your desirability, and that your desirability is the sum total of your measurements, your money, or your metrics.

Let me say this plainly: if the world loves you only when you are young, it does not love you. If it wants you only when you are filtered, it does not want you.

We are witnessing, in real time, the collapse of the soul beneath the weight of unchecked vanity and institutionalized lust. Children—yes, children—are being groomed into this marketplace before they even understand what it means to be human. Teenage girls mutilate their faces in pursuit of synthetic perfection. Boys are taught that conquest is manhood and that dominance is affection. The mirror has become a judge. The feed has become a pulpit. And no one is preaching the truth.

That truth is this: beauty without truth is pornography, and desire without love is desecration.

We must not merely return to the idea of chastity as some quaint religious doctrine. We must recover chastity as the reorientation of desire—the elevation of passion toward something greater than pleasure. Chastity is not repression. It is redirection. It is what transforms lust into love, power into protection, and want into worship.

The goal is not to shame the sinner but to awaken the soul.

Yes, there is room for shame, for shame rightly ordered is the conscience stirred. But shame without direction is cruelty. What we need is the restoration of a moral imagination—one that does not flatten all identities into hashtags or reduce all desire into dopamine hits. We need to re-learn how to behold one another as beings imbued with destiny, not just data points in a digital catalog.

A man is not a paycheck with abs. A woman is not an algorithm-approved hourglass. We are not brands. We are not products. We are not fetishes waiting to be fulfilled. We are human beings made in the image of God.

And when we forget that, when we surrender that, we do not merely lose meaning—we lose ourselves.

A culture cannot survive if it teaches its young to sell their bodies before they understand their souls. A civilization cannot endure if it mocks the sacred while celebrating the profane. If everything is permitted, then nothing is protected. And if nothing is protected, then everything is up for sale.

Even you.