Why Porn, Lust, and Gender Confusion FEAR the Rosary

The Blessed Trinity's Preferred Weapon of Choice in Spiritual Warefare

In this essay, I'm going to be talking about the ultimate solution for any man dealing with lust, pornography, autogynephilia, crossdressing, weed, gender confusion, sexual addiction—these endless cycles of getting horny, watching porn, masturbating, feeling depressed, and repeating that cycle endlessly. If you feel addicted to pornography, struggle with desires for crossdressing, or battle insecurities about your masculinity, there's hope in Our Lady of the Rosary. And obviously, this same advice will equally apply to any vice or addiction women are dealing with. The best tools of spiritual warfare are the same regardless of your sex. But due to my own life experience and testimony, I have a special soft spot for other men who struggle with sins of lust and drug addiction.

Why You Need the Rosary

There's a solution that comes straight from God, and it's called the Rosary. If your sexual sins and addictions are making you feel guilty, ashamed, depressed, causing sexual dysfunction, harming your relationships, or preventing you from being self-sacrificially loving towards your spouse, the Rosary is for you. Even if you're a young man confused about your gender, hating your body, and entertaining fantasies about being submissive or feminine, or thinking that your life would be so much better if you just gave in to your desire to crossdress and transition, the Rosary offers genuine liberation from these disordered desires.

I recently discovered a YouTube channel called Gabi After Hours, hosted by Gabriel Castillo. If you’re a man struggling with sexual addiction, I promise you need to watch his content. It’s life-changing. I’m confident that his ministry is the work of a modern-day saint.

My Journey with the Rosary

When I first converted to Catholicism and initially wrote about overcoming my autogynephilia, another Catholic writer on Substack,

Emmanuel Smith

, offered me words of encouragement and advice on how to fight the spiritual battle that is lust. He runs a Substack called Desert Catholic, advocating a disciplined, ascetic lifestyle reminiscent of the Desert Fathers. In our modern ocean of temptation, daily discipline and self-denial are essential. Without consistently denying yourself pleasure, you'll inevitably become soft, weak, and succumb to temptation, including pornography, drugs, video games, excessive social media, gambling, gluttony, sloth, laziness, and every other vice imaginable.

Emanuel recommended praying the Rosary daily. Initially, I tried it, and it helped, but I didn’t fully grasp its importance, so I eventually neglected it and relapsed. Now that I’m back in a state of grace and praying the complete Rosary every day, I can see its transformative power and believe strongly that if I had maintained the habit of consistently praying the Rosary every day, I never would have relapsed.

Understanding the Rosary

Many misunderstand what the Rosary is. Typically, Rosary beads have five sets of ten beads (decades), each used to pray ten Hail Marys, for a total of 50 Hail Marys. The Rosary includes additional prayers like the Apostles’ Creed, the Our Father, the Glory Be, and the Fatima prayer: “Oh Jesus, forgive us our sins, save us from the fires of hell, lead all souls to heaven, especially those most in need of thy mercy.”

Fundamentally, the Rosary boils down to three ingredients which make it the single most effective prayer anybody can ever pray:

• The Angelic Salutation (“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee”), which comes straight from Scripture and announces the moment in Salvation history when the Word Became Flesh.

• The Our Father, which is the most perfect prayer possible because it was given to us from our Blessed Lord and Spiritual Master, Jesus Christ Himself.

• Deep mental prayer or internal meditation on the life of Jesus and Mary, the Holy Mother of God. Since the beginning, all saints have acknowledged that the best way to get to Christ is through His mother, Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin. Our Blessed Virgin Mother is the surest pathway to a profound Christological wisdom.

Many people mistakenly think that going around once and saying, for example, just the Joyous Mysteries and saying 50 Hail Marys counts as “saying the Rosary.”

However, praying once around isn't technically the whole Rosary. According to St. Louis De Montfort’s The Secret of the Rosary, the Rosary originates from a Marian apparition to St. Dominic. Mary instructed Dominic to “pray her psalter,” referring to praying 150 Hail Marys, mirroring the desert fathers' practice of reciting all 150 Psalms daily. St Louis De Montfort recommends saying only one Rosary for children. If we want to follow the advice of Our Lady to “pray her psalter,” we need to pray ALL the Rosaries every single day.

Historical Roots and Spiritual Significance

Desert fathers memorized the entire Psalter, displaying immense intellectual capability. But average medieval peasants, unable to read or access scripture, substituted 150 Hail Marys to practice a similar spiritual discipline. This Marian Psalter became essential to Catholic spirituality.

Our Lady gave St. Dominic the Rosary as the preferred weapon in spiritual warfare. Originally 15 decades (150 Hail Marys), Pope St. John Paul II later introduced a fourth set of mysteries called the Luminous Mysteries, which are crucial to the needs of the modern Church where baptized Catholics have fallen away (Jesus’ baptism), collapse of family (Wedding at Cana), there’s a severe crisis in catechesis (Proclaiming the Kingdom), failure to understand Christ’s divinity (Transfiguration), and total lack of reverence and piety for the Real Presence of the Eucharist.

Meditating on the Mysteries

Before praying each decade, announce and meditate on a specific mystery from Christ’s life:

• Joyful Mysteries: Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity, Presentation, Finding in the Temple.

• Luminous Mysteries: Baptism, Wedding at Cana, Proclamation of the Kingdom, Transfiguration, Institution of the Eucharist.

• Sorrowful Mysteries: Agony in the Garden, Scourging at the Pillar, Crowning with Thorns, Carrying the Cross, Crucifixion.

• Glorious Mysteries: Resurrection, Ascension, Descent of the Holy Spirit, Assumption, Coronation of Mary.

The rosary is fundamentally Christ-centered, meditating deeply on Christ’s life through Mary, His mother.

“We must not only say the Rosary with our lips in honor of Our Lord and Our Lady, but also meditate upon the sacred mysteries while we are saying it.”~ St Louis De Montfort, The Secret of the Rosary

According to all the great saints, including the Doctor of Prayer, St Teresa of Avila, “Mental prayer,” “Christian meditation,” or what’s just “using the imagination of your inner mind’s eye,” is critical to deepening your spiritual life.

Mary: Queen Mother, New Ark, and New Eve

The Catholic devotion to Mary isn't extra-biblical, but rather deeply rooted in Scripture and Jewish tradition. Old Testament prefigurations highlight Mary’s role:

• Queen Mother: In the Davidic kingdom, the king’s mother was the queen, holding real authority.

• New Ark of the Covenant: Revelation 12 portrays Mary symbolically as the Ark appearing in heaven, indicating her purity and holiness necessary for God’s incarnation.

• New Eve: Genesis 3:15’s Protoevangelium depicts eternal enmity between Satan and "the woman," fulfilled through Mary bringing Jesus, who conquers death.

This holiness underscores why Mary's womb needed purity so that it could be an undefiled place for God to become “with us,” Immanuel.

Practical Spirituality and Transformation

Since starting this devotion of praying the full Rosary daily, my life has transformed profoundly and I have had so many little signal graces from Our Lady reassuring me I am on the right path. When you say the full Rosary, small providential events occur, lust and addictions vanish, and abundant graces emerge. This isn’t a coincidence; it's divine providence! Nobody “likes” saying the Rosary. It’s tedious. You get distracted. You want to cut it short early. But that’s why it works! It’s self-sacrificial. It’s a dying of self, modeling Our Lady of Sorrows, the perfect disciple, who gave herself completely over to God’s Will. So many Marian apparitions have directly instructed the faithful to pray the Rosary. So by doing so, we are actively following God’s Will through self-sacrifice in carrying out the Blessed Trinity’s preferred strategy for spiritual warfare against Satan, the Enemy, who Our Lady is predestined to crush at the end of time.

For example, I randomly got inspired by Gabi to consecrate myself to Mary. I didn’t know this, but you are supposed to start the process of consecration 33 days before a Marian feast. The day I just happened to be inspired to do this, total “coincidence,” turned out to correspond with one of the few officially recommended starting dates (June 13th), which will end up with consecration on the Feast of Our Lady of Mt Carmel. This was clearly a signal of grace from the Blessed Mother, telling me, “Well done, my beloved son.”

Asceticism through the Rosary helps us participate in Christ’s passion. Discipline, self-denial, and meditation mold us into Christ’s likeness. Praying the full Rosary daily brings real spiritual warfare victory and personal transformation.

Try It for Yourself

Even if you’re skeptical, consider it an experiment. American philosopher William James, despite his agnostic tendencies, understood "faking it until you make it"—the "will to believe"—as a legitimate approach to developing religious belief. You experiment with diets, workouts, and habits for self-improvement; why not give this proven spiritual method a chance?

Across the centuries, every saint, every mystic, every significant Pope, has consistently recommended devotion to Marian devotion through the Rosary. It's scripturally grounded, historically proven, and personally transformative. Fr. Ripperger says Our Lady is the conqueror of all heresy, and if you devote yourself to the Blessed Virgin, she will give you special graces to stay out of error.

Give it a sincere effort. Try the entire set of mysteries just once, and observe how your life changes. If skeptical, ask yourself why you're curious enough to read this far.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death.

We fly to thy patronage, O holy Mother of God;
despise not our petitions in our necessities,
but deliver us always from all dangers,
O glorious and blessed Virgin.

May the Divine assistance remain always with us!

Mary, Mother of grace, Mother of mercy, shield us from the enemy, and receive us at the hour of our death.

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Amen!