*Not* me in high school

Anecdotally one of the comical side effects of the Joseph in Egypt story that hormone-driven deacons and teachers are raised with is the subtext that you have to have your commitment to the law of chastity dialed in (“remember who you are and what you stand for”) because you need to be prepared for when attractive, powerful, wealthy women will tear at your clothes and demand that you have sex with them. And then of course on some subconscious level we were probably a little disappointed when we awkwardly came of age and wondered where all of these women who were supposed to be throwing themselves at us were. (In the same way that, contrary to what we learned in D.A.R.E., people don’t actually offer you expensive drugs for free–unless your insurance covers it, they left that part out of the “Just Say No”).

Of course, Potipher’s wife is our own particular manifestation of a broader cross-cultural trope of the sexually aggressive seductress that tempts valiant men–but which also on some level is probably also an object of their prurient interest. This is Odysseus turning away from the sirens–but still wanting to hear them. This pops up enough across time and space as a sort of Jungian archetype that I suspect it’s a natural manifestation of male desire. On my own mission I remember hearing a classic “friend of a friend” folkloric account of a stateside mission where part of the initiation hurdle for the local sorority was to get a missionary name badge through, shall we say, unsavory means. Of course, an account that centers one as the object of college female desire is the exact kind of thing 20-year old celibate heterosexual men would think up, and it’s not hard to see what fueled that particular rumor. 

But again it’s not just us. Perhaps the most classic case of this (which I have no reason to think is not true) is Aquinas’ siblings hiring a prostitute to seductively dissuade him from his intentions to enter the priesthood. “According to the official records for his canonization, Thomas drove her away wielding a burning log.” Purportedly St. Benedict, not to be outdone, threw himself naked into a thorn bush to escape temptation. Eastern traditions have their variations too. Buddha had his own “Three Temptations”-type moment when a demon tried to sexually tempt him in order to prevent him from achieving enlightenment. More fantastically there are mermaids, the succubus, Lilith, and the Slavic rusalka. 

Of course, with this kind of thing you have to hurry and point out that, sure, you can find some actual cases, it’s not all projection from latent male desire. For example, in a landmark gay-rights case in Germany pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld testified on behalf of a gay army officer married to a woman. His wife’s testimony “was marked by moments of low comedy when it emerged that she had taken to attacking Moltke with a frying pan in vain attempts to make him have sex with her,” and Hirschfeld ironically found himself defending both the gay husband and the abusive repressed wife, arguing that both of them were acting in accordance with their natural impulses, since at the time strong female sexuality was considered aberrant (indeed, many powerful women such as Cleopatra and Catherine the Great were assumed to be abnormally oversexed). But still, gender differences in sociosexuality being as the are, for the most part Potipher’s wife is not a thing (or at least not nearly as much as the gendered converse), much to the chagrin of young men across the Mountain West.