Lust Makes You Dumb

"God gives you a penis and a brain, and only enough blood to run one at a time."

— Robin Williams

When it comes to sexual desires, some people have so little self-control that they will ruin their own lives trying to satisfy their urges. They might be easily manipulated into doing reckless or self-destructive actions via promises of sexual favors, sexually harass people who could seriously harm them, have affairs that could end disastrously for them if said affair was discovered, be really short-sighted when chasing after sex, and prioritize satisfying their desires over more important things.

The exact fates of these characters tend to vary; they might lose their reputations, get fired, lose money, or be beaten and/or killed, all because they couldn't keep their libidos under control. If their behavior involves illegal acts (such as voyeurism, sexual assault, rape, etc.), then they will most likely suffer some kind of legal consequences.

A little Truth in Television, as the above paragraphs describes the mindset of a Nymphomaniac. In fact, the consequences of committing those actions often leads to depression and eventually suicide.

Sister Trope to Love Makes You Dumb, the love-based equivalent, and Fear-Induced Idiocy, the fear-based equivalent.

See also Karmic STD and Sexual Karma, which are like this trope, but with morality rather than stupidity, though they can certainly overlap, and I'm a Man; I Can't Help It, which a male character might use as a "justification" for this type of behavior. Compare Distracted by the Sexy and Overcome with Desire. Can overlap with Out with a Bang or A Deadly Affair if a character ends up dying as a result of their stupidity, or Pervert Revenge Mode if they are simply beaten. If the character doing this is a rapist, sexual predator, or some other kind of creep, then this trope overlaps with Stupid Evil. If a character tries to exploit this trope, it's either a case of I Have Boobs, You Must Obey! or Show Some Leg. A Honey Trap can weaponize this with The Schlub Pub Seduction Deduction. Contrast Covert Pervert and Chivalrous Pervert, who are perverts who usually have enough self-control to avoid this behavior, as well as Celibate Hero and Ignore the Fanservice. See Downfall by Sex when it’s the act of having sex that leads to eventual ruin.

Due to Double Standards this is an almost Always Male Trope; an audience is more likely to believe that All Men Are Perverts, whereas women in fiction are more likely to fall into Love Makes You Dumb.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Akame ga Kill!: Some antagonists tend to let their sexual urges drive them even at the worst possible moments. Examples include:
  • Bolic, a spy under Prime Minister Honest, drugs the female followers of the Path of Peace into becoming obedient slaves and sex toys and is also a Smug Snake and Dirty Coward. When Night Raid clashes with Esdeath's forces, he tries to rape an injured Leone in the middle of a battlefield instead of running for cover. Leone grabs him by the legs and gives Akame the opportunity to kill him.
  • Cosmina of Wild Hunt tends to indulge in sexual activities and flirt with men. When she tries to rape Run in the middle of a battlefied, she gets shot by Mine in the chest for her trouble. She does survive this but would end up being experimented on by Dorothea and become a mindless monster.
  • Among Syura's acts of Stupid Evil include rape, and he actually tries to rape Kurome, a skilled assassin under General Esdeath's command. This not only would have earned him her ire, but also threaten Honest's alliance with her. When Wave comes to Kurome's rescue, rather than let Budo's interference settle the issue, he goads Wave into a public duel so he won't be able to hide the consequences. It's only Budo's obsession with "not spilling blood in the imperial castle" that spared his life.
  • The corrupt noble Bach orders his men and dogs to rape Air, Fal, and Luna. When he lets Air go, she would explain to Leone what he's done to Fal and Luna, allowing Night Raid to target and kill him.
• Black Lagoon: In Roberta's Blood Trail after the FARC commander manages to defeat her, rather than restraining and/or shooting her immediately, he decides to try having sex with her, allowing Roberta to shoot him with a hidden gun in her belt buckle before beating his head to a pulp.
• Master Roshi from Dragon Ball is such a horndog that he'll sometimes harass women who are more than capable of seriously harming or killing him, such as Launch, whose Split Personality is a violent, gun-toting criminal, and Android 18, who is strong enough to fight people who can blow up planets. This habit of his is so bad that in Super, part of his training for the Tournament of Power involves learning to control himself enough to prevent any female opponents from seducing him into letting his guard down. During the tournament, one of his female opponents, Caway, does try to seduce him and it looks like it works at first... but it turns out he only acted that way to get her to let her guard down.
• Goblins in Goblin Slayer are an race of hedonistic Serial Rapists whose lust for women is so great that they sometimes try to rape women in the middle of the battlefield while the battle is still ongoing; predictably, goblins who engage in this type of behavior tend to die fast.
• Interspecies Reviewers: The four Intrepid Reporters decide to visit a brothel of lilim, which are child-sized she-devils with insatiable libidos. Crim takes a hard pass on this one, but Stunk, Zel, and Brooz can't pass up the rock-bottom fee and no time limit. Despite the caution they're given, these three horndogs believe a magical status buff will carry them through a roomful of sex-crazed mini-demons. The buff lasts only 10 minutes, after which Stunk describes the experience as "torture." Drained of all semen, happiness, and stamina, the three patrons get dumped naked down a garbage chute into the cold rain outside. The lilim brothel receives a satisfaction score of 1 (1+0+0+NR) out of a possible 40 maximum.
• Naruto: Jiraiya almost died because of this trope; when he was a teenager, he got the bright idea to peep on Tsunade, a talented Ninja with Super-Strength. When Tsunade caught him, she decided to retaliate by breaking six of his ribs, both of his arms, and rupturing several of his organs. He wisely decided to not peep on her again.
• Photon: The Idiot Adventures: The Villain Papacharino Nanandan is a minor nobleman in the Emperor's court, and he harbors plans to attain godlike powers with which to seize the throne. His libido, however, tends to sabotage this effort. He has 13 wives and is wooing the Emperor's daughter Lashara Moon. He has a fine chance to capture Keyne Aqua aboard her starship but pauses to leer at her while she undresses. He blows his cash on booze and floozies while staying at an inn, for which he has to work off his debt. Lastly, he tries to cajole his adversary, Photon, into punching a peephole in the rock wall that separates the men's hot spring from the women's. Instead, Photon applies a Megaton Punch to smash Papacharino completely through the rocks, which he somehow survives.

Comic Books

• Starfire (2015): In issue #5, Kory is getting ready for a job interview and wears a shirt with a Navel-Deep Neckline. As Stella covers her up, she explains to the alien that on Earth her boobs "make men act stupid". Kory asks how she can make men act smarter.
• In the third Tyler Cross story, Shirley is abducted by three hitmen cleaning up people who know too much. Two of them disobey the third's orders to kill her, planning to finish the rest of their hitlist, rape her and then kill her, leaving her in a pit at a construction site in the meantime. The goons are killed by Tyler in an unrelated confrontation, giving Shirley the time she needs to escape. Once Tyler finds Shirley, he's able to put together what she knows to kill the rest of the gang.

Fan Works

• Intelligence Factor: The Gothitelle chapter has an attractive man cause a woman to lower her guard.
• Synépeies - A Collection Of NTR Consequences: The fanfic in general deconstructs the netorare genre by painting both the cheating woman and antagonist as moronic hedonists who end up ruining their own lives as a result of thinking with their libidos.
  • The cheating women in general are shown to be foolish for dumping their kind-hearted husbands/boyfriends for scumbags whose only positive quality is a bigger manhood. The stories typically end with the women realizing what they lost after the relationship with the antagonist goes south and the guy they cheated on ends up in a happy relationship with a more faithful woman. In addition, their social lives are also ruined, ending up disowned by their parents, children, and friends for what they did.
  • The antagonist's punishments tend to be physical as well as social.
    • Fallen Leaves has Marada, a Creepy Gym Coach who raped his students, ending up eventually getting arrested when he laid his hands on a woman with powerful and well-connected parents.
    • Withered Hydrangea has Masaru, a playboy, being tortured via several Groin Attacks for sleeping with the girlfriends of some delinquents. In addition, it is also implied that he caught an STD as a result of him not using protection.

Films — Animated

• Beauty and the Beast: Gaston is dead set on marrying Belle by any means necessary, including trying to win her over by force, and acting like a total creep who stalks her and tries to kiss her against her will. Gaston is completely oblivious to the fact that these behaviors will only make Belle want him less. Is it any wonder that she chooses Beast over him? When Gaston finds out about Beast, his first impulse is to try to slay him, since he believes that he is trying to "steal" Belle from him, despite there being absolutely zero evidence to back that up. Originally, the townspeople were going to realize how Gaston's stupidity made them risk their lives for nothing, and they beat him to death. Another original fate for him was getting eaten by wolves after his fight with The Beast.^note The crew didn't want that idea to go to waste, so they had it happen to Scar instead.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Frollo is, notably, a very dark example. When a chance encounter with Esmeralda sparks feelings of lust he believed he was above, he resolves to either have her captured and forced to submit to his desires, or accuse her of witchcraft and have her burned at the stake. As the weeks go by and she constantly eludes him, his obsession grows more and more violent, culminating in an assault on the Notre Dame Church itself when Quasimodo rescues Esmeralda from being burned alive and proclaims Sanctuary from the church's bell towers. Predictably, this invites an already angry mob of Parisians gathered there into a full-scale revolt, while Quasimodo attempts to protect the Church and Esmeralda by pouring molten steel through the mouths of the stone gargoyles that adorn the Church and onto the grounds below. Frollo escapes both, but instead of taking any one of the several opportunities after then to flee for his life, he chases Quasimodo and Esmeralda across the bell towers, until he finds himself standing on top of one of the already weakened gargoyles, which almost immediately collapses from underneath him and sends him plummeting to his death.

Films — Live-Action

• Fantastic Four (2005): It's mentioned in Johnny Storm's introductory scene that he was thrown out of NASA for sneaking "two Victoria's Secret wannabes" into a flight simulator. It is for this reason that Ben Grimm, who was Johnny's commanding officer, doesn't want him on the mission to space.
• An Exploited Trope in the opening act of Porky's, where a handful of horny teen boys visit the raunchy establishment specifically to get laid. They get "inspected" by the madam, and are told to strip naked, then wait in a darkened room for hot, lustful babes to service them. The fools do this, only to fall through a Trap Door floor and end up dunked in the muddy bayou.

Literature

• In His Dark Materials, Marisa Coulter meets Metatron, who, as an angel, spent millennia without physical contact and was a womanizer and a polygamist on Earth, and then seduced him to draw him into a trap laid by Lord Asriel.

Music

• Dierks Bentley's "What Was I Thinkin'?" is about letting hormones override common sense. He picks up a girl with an overprotective father he's pretty sure has done time in jail, culminating in a mad dash from the police, a Bar Brawl, and buckshot in his back bumper courtesy of her Papa Wolf—and he's just about to come to his senses when she grins at him again, and he's done for.
  'Cause I was thinkin' 'bout a little white tank top
  Sittin' right there in the middle by me
  I was thinkin' 'bout a long kiss
  Man, just gotta get goin' where the night might lead
  I know what I was feelin'
  But what was I thinkin'?
• In Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light", a teenage boy is overcome with lust for a girl. When the girl says she'll only have sex with him if he promises to "love [her] 'till the end of time", his hormones make him give a Rash Promise, "swearing to my God and on my mother's grave." This ends with him miserably trapped in a loveless marriage, unable to break the oath he swore.
• Ninja Sex Party: This is a Running Gag in the songs, where Danny's eagerness to have sex causes him to make absolute terrible choices:
  • In "The Decision" and "The Decision Part 2: Ten Years Later'', Danny is trying to get the woman to sleep with him instead of Ninja Brian. He claims in both cases that Brian has an STD, which causes Brian to attack him.
  • In "Next To You", Danny is so attracted to his female friend that he cannot stop himself from masturbating every time he sees her — including during a zombie apocalypse, where he fails to help fight the zombies off and gets eaten as a result.
  • In "Road Trip", Danny decides to jump out of a rocket ship with no gear in order to have sex with alien babes. He dies in space immediately.
  • In "Courtship of the Mermaid", he decides to fling himself in the air to deliver pizza to the beautiful mermaid and win her heart. Predictably, he gets horribly injured from this, and the mermaid never notices him.

Mythology & Religion

• Classical Mythology:
  • Ixion, the king of the Lapiths, already established himself as an untrustworthy Jerkass when he invited his father-in-law to a feast, only to shove him into a burning pit instead of paying him a dowry. But when Zeus took pity on him when no other Greek kings would, and allowed him shelter in Olympus, how did Ixion repay him? By openly lusting after Zeus' wife Hera. Upon first being made suspicious of Ixion's conduct, Zeus decided to test him by either making a decoy of Hera made from clouds, or using Nephele, a cloud nymph who just happened to be Hera's Identical Stranger. Whichever account you go by, Ixion flat-out raped what he thought was Hera, and despite his less-than-perfect record as a husband, Zeus was furious that this man would dare rape the Queen of the Gods, while in the home of the Gods, no less. Ixion was punished for his lust in the Underworld by being tied to a burning wheel and sent spinning around through Tartarus forever, while the seed of his rape gave rise to the centaurs, who were themselves prone to doing stupid things when thinking with their penises, including starting a war with the Lapiths, their forefather's own people. Nice going there, Ixion!
  • Satyrs were originally hairy men with the tails and ears of donkeys and comically oversized penises that were permanently erect, leaving them with insatiable lust and a desire to rape everyone they encountered. However, due to their constant lust, they were very foolish and easy to trick into doing things like trying to have sex with a tree or a thorn bush.
  • In Roman tradition, Sextus Tarquinius, the sixth son of the tyrant King Tarquinius Superbus, became dangerously obsessed with the noblewoman Lucretia, to the point of visiting her at Collatia years later, and then he forced her to have sex with him at swordpoint, telling her that if she didn't, he'd kill her and one of her slaves, line their bodies up together, and then claim he caught her cheating on her husband with said slave and killed them both to preserve her husband's honour. This was the worst thing Sextus could have done: He had raped someone who had not only paid him the respects of Sacred Hospitality but was the daughter of the powerful magistrate Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus and the wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. Feeling Defiled Forever, Lucretia came before her father and her husband, telling them what Sextus had done, and appealing to them to take revenge for her, before stabbing herself to death right where she stood. Sextus' callous rape was the last straw for all the Romans who had suffered under him and his father, and Collatinus, alongside his friend Lucius Junius Brutus, decided to lead an uprising against Tarquinius Superbus. Sextus, being a Dirty Coward, fled to Gabii to try to take refuge before the revolution happened, but the leaders of that region killed him anyway for his past crimes. Sextus got the entire monarchy of Rome overthrown, his father exiled, and himself assassinated, all because he couldn't keep it in his pants for a married woman.
• Native American Mythology: According to Lakota Legend, two men went hunting in a time of famine and encountered a beautiful woman in white buffalo skin. One man saw her and was overcome by lust. Despite the other man warning him she was probably sacred, and interference would have consequences, the first man approached and was reduced to a pile of bones.

Video Games

• The Last Sovereign: The Chosen as a whole have a problem with putting their libidos over their roles as saviors. For instance, Tal is killed by Simon after the former decides to take advantage of one of their allies.
• The Legend of Zelda: While the recurring villain Vaati was portrayed as a cunning schemer in his chronological first appearance in The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap, his years of isolation and transformation into a demon left him obsessed with abducting young women to serve as his brides, even though every kidnapping spree of his resulted in Link chasing after and defeating him.
• In Leisure Suit Larry 6, one of the game's death scenes is a result of the player doing this; if you have Larry grope Cavaricci Vuarnet, a muscular aerobics instructor, she will decide to give Larry a quick peek...and then kill him. Larry thinks it was Worth It.

Web Animation

• Etra chan saw it!:
  • Hiiragi is a plain-looking, soft-spoken man who's unpopular with women. He ended up settling for Yuri, a plain-looking overweight girl, under the belief that he couldn't do better. Before their wedding, Yuri decides to lose weight and use beauty products in order to look good for Hiiragi. Once Hiiragi sees how beautiful Yuri has become, he starts thinking he's a ladies' man and starts cheating on Yuri with other women, which naturally leads to a divorce. Where this trope comes in is that it was revealed that Hiiragi's boss was the one who set them up, so him cheating on her results in him quitting due to his boss's anger at him.
  • Azami was a former Dude Magnet who rejected guys left and right because of her high standards, which included coming from a good family and having a six-figure salary; one day, she got engaged to Kuroki, who met her standards, only to lose her rich fiancee by cheating with a male host club worker.
  • Akane is dating Akamatsu, her boss, who's also a married man. Akane is so sure that she won't get caught that she outright brags to her friends and even shows pictures of her and Akamatsu together. Her friends try to warn her to break up with Akamatsu, but she brushes them off. Once she gets caught and sued, she blames them for not trying hard enough to warn her; Yuri calls her out for her stupidity and refusal to listen to their warnings. To make matters worse, Akane ends up fired for screwing with Akamatsu (who got demoted and divorced) on company time.
  • Akamatsu has always been a playboy ever since he was a teenager. One day, he sleeps with the girlfriend of Tachibana's older brother and gets a beating. Even as an adult, he's hardly better; despite being genuinely in love with Yuzuriha, his lack of self-control means he cheats on her with Akane. While he got away with it for a while thanks to Akane's Seamless Spontaneous Lie about being Akamatsu's sister, once Yuzuriha comes over to his parents' house and realizes that Karin is clearly not the girl who said she was Akamatsu's sister, she dumps and slaps him, leaving Akamatsu to lament his chance at love.
• Manga-Waido: Fukawa is a lazy assistant manager who forces his subordinates to do his work while he watches porn on the company's computers, which results in the company's network catching a virus. Making this extra stupid is the fact that there were cameras in his workplace. Unsurprisingly, he ends up getting fired for this.
• Revenge Films:
  • Don is a police officer who cheats on his wife with a fellow police officer, which is stupid for three reasons
    • First, the place Don and his affair partner decide to have sex in? The police station's locker room. Unsurprisingly, he gets caught by his wife as well as the other officers.
    • Second, Don only married his wife, who's the district chief's daughter, in order to quickly climb the ranks, and never actually loved her. Even if he was more discreet and never he loved her, cheating on your boss's daughter is not exactly a good idea if you want to climb the ranks. Plus, even if he didn't get fired, his boss probably wouldn't be in a hurry to give him a promotion.
    • Third, him being fired for cheating on the police chief's daughter pretty much destroys his social life; his parents disown him, his ex-coworkers hate him for cheating on such a nice girl, and he's incapable of going outside without people mocking him.
  • The groom decides to have an affair with his ex girlfriend on the day of his wedding inside of the wedding venue; unsurprisingly, he and his ex get caught. To add to the humiliation they end up being taken to the hospital due to getting stuck together, sued by his ex-fiance, can't find a stable job due to his reputation, and disowned by his parents.
  • Karen and Thomas are coworkers who decide to have their affair in the office supply closet. Naturally, they get caught, sued by their spouses, gets disowned their parents, and severely punished by their boss. Even if they weren't married what they did could have still ended badly; as the boss pointed out, an office is no place to be having sex.
  • "My wife was paralyzed while cheating on me and riding her boyfriend…": This example crosses with Too Dumb to Live. Instead of booking a motel or going to her lover's house, OP's cheating wife decides to have her affair in the cramped living room of her husband's apartment, which leads to them accidentally breaking a nearby cabinet's leg in their lovemaking, causing it to fall on and wound them with glass shards. As a result, the cheating wife is rendered mute and paralyzed in one arm, while her boyfriend dies of exsanguination.
• Sekai no Fushigi: Ushida tries to pick up Izumi after seeing that she no longer has a scar on her face. This is stupid for three reasons:
  • One, Ushida constantly made fun of her for her scar, saying all kinds of disrespectful and hurtful things about it. Not to mention that he pretty much admits to her face that he only likes her now that she doesn't have a scar on her face.
  • Two, Ushida says this in front of Ataru, Izumi's boyfriend, who liked her even with the scar; not helping matters is that Ushida called Ataru a loser for being willing to date a girl with a scar.
  • Three, he said this in front of Enomoto, his girlfriend, who slaps and dumps him for hitting on another girl.

Webcomics

• Better Days: Two feline horndogs fare badly in this series by furry artist Jay Naylor:
  • Principal Longfellow hears Sheila Black dress down the haywire liberal teacher Bedbutter and sees her lithe, feminine form glide out of the school building. The man tries dating Sheila and plants a seed of doubt about her deceased husband. When Sheila consults some old Army friends, she learns that Longfellow was never stationed anywhere near her husband; rather, he was a supply sergeant in Japan during the Vietnam War and was discharged for fraternizing with female staffers. When Longfellow shows up to explain himself, Sheila rejects his lies, which prompts him to attempt to rape Sheila in her own home. Longfellow gets a baseball bat to the kisser for his trouble. The Army buddies visit him in the hospital to guarantee that Longfellow never repeats his crime.
  • "The Ted," a young, handsome, but arrogant student catches the eye of Lucy Black, and he arranges a date with her. While upstairs in the Black house, he catches sight of Sheila Black bathing and is smitten with lust. Arriving ostensibly for a second date with Lucy, Ted reveals he's really there to woo Sheila, who delivers a scathing dress-down before expelling him from the property.
• The Order of the Stick: A downplayed example happens with Roy after Miko is introduced. Roy is highly attracted to her, which leads to him ignoring just how awful a person she really is and the way she abuses the rest of the Order of the Stick. It isn't until some convoluted circumstances result in him being temporarily transformed into a woman that he actually pays attention to her personality instead of her looks and decides that he wants nothing to do with her.

Web Videos

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged: Master Roshi, unlike the source material, has gotten in serious legal trouble for his actions; he's on a sex offender registry and has been banned from more than 500 Victoria's Secret stores. The fact that he has to use a fake name in his everyday life (his actual name is never revealed) shows just how little self-control he has.

Western Animation

• Family Guy: Glenn Quagmire's libido has frequently gotten him in trouble.
  • Due to his lax behavior in using protection, he has several STDs.
  • In "Blind Ambition", he spies on Lois in the bathroom, by hiding on the ceiling, which results in him getting arrested and almost kicked out of the neighborhood.
  • In "The Cleveland-Loretta Quagmire" he almost gets killed by Cleveland for sleeping with Loretta, Cleveland's then-wife.
• Johnny Bravo: Johnny regularly objectifies women and hits on them in brazen fashion. This regularly causes him Amusing Injuries from said women.

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