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*Not* me in high school<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n 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 (\u201cremember who you are and what you stand for\u201d) 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\u2019t actually offer you expensive drugs for free\u2013unless your insurance covers it, they left that part out of the \u201cJust Say No\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n Of course, Potipher\u2019s wife is our own particular manifestation of a broader cross-cultural trope of the sexually aggressive seductress that tempts valiant men\u2013but which also on some level is probably also an object of their prurient interest. This is Odysseus turning away from the sirens\u2013but still wanting to hear them. This pops up enough across time and space as a sort of Jungian archetype that I suspect it\u2019s a natural manifestation of male desire. On my own mission I remember hearing a classic \u201cfriend of a friend\u201d 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\u2019s not hard to see what fueled that particular rumor.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But again it\u2019s not just us. Perhaps the most classic case of this (which I have no reason to think is not true) is Aquinas\u2019 siblings hiring a prostitute to seductively dissuade him from his intentions to enter the priesthood. \u201c<\/span>According to the official records for his canonization, Thomas drove her away wielding a burning log<\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/span> 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 \u201cThree Temptations\u201d-type moment when <\/span>a demon tried to sexually tempt him in order to prevent him from achieving enlightenment<\/span><\/a>. More fantastically there are mermaids, the succubus, Lilith, and the Slavic rusalka.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n