As I walked to her apartment in the winter dusk, I passed the Congregational church. The darkness helped conceal my clandestine visit. I had arrived directly from my position at a parachurch ministry, one that promoted conservative “family values.” Despite my public pretense of continence, my visits were becoming more frequent – almost weekly. The external expectations of holiness no longer restrained my inner lust. My guilt weighed heavily upon me. I still maintained illusions of renewing my purity. When the temptation to sin had arisen earlier, I coarsely pleaded to be relieved of it.
He found himself confronted by a choice as to his desire for the more accurate knowledge of the one great fascinating mystery that had for so long confronted and fascinated and baffled and yet frightened him a little.
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
But Leigh was such a sweet fuck.
She was his favorite sin. She was not a habit for him anymore, she was an obsession.
Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise
The door opened slightly, and I discreetly entered her apartment. Despite the dim light, the sight of Leigh, her dark brown hair tied up, dressed only in her black lingerie made my cock throb. She offered me a glass of wine. The libation only intensified my arousal. We went up to her bedroom. My lack of sexual experience meant that Leigh had become my de facto sexual tutor. And I was a willing student. As she untied her hair, I unbuttoned my shirt. Her lingerie came off. So did my pants. She pulled a condom out of a small chestnut box. She positioned herself on the bed and spread her legs, offering herself to me.
I had forsaken purity for pussy.
His was a disposition easily and often intensely inflamed by the chemistry of sex and the formula of beauty. He could not easily withstand the appeal, let alone the call, of sex.
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
I had long felt the stirrings of carnal longing. Now I was (literally) penetrating the mysteries of sex, made all the more intense because they had been forbidden for so long. I felt in my body the truth of the words penned by the Arabic poet Ibn Hambis: “When two bodies meet and are consumed with passion, the fruits of pleasure are harvested as soon as they are planted.”
I felt Leigh grasp my ass, as if she wanted to drive me even deeper inside her.
“Go for it! Go for it! Go for it!” she cried out.
There may come a time when you will wish you had never tasted the fruit from the tree of knowledge.
One Easter Sunday as a young adolescent, directly in the pew in front of me, was a family visiting our Lutheran church for the holiday. They included a pair of sisters who resembled the Hilton sisters. Seriously. And they conspicuously dressed like the Hilton sisters, wearing short, tight dresses. In the midst of the hymns and readings, my eyes wandered towards their long, tanned legs and round posteriors. Such a sight was a revelation in our staid church. My erection condemned me as I recited the words of the Confession:
We confess that we are by nature sinful and unclean….We justly deserve your present and eternal punishment.
As I mouthed the words of the Offertory, my thoughts were decidedly impure:
Create in me a clean heart….
After Benediction, I caught sight of one of the sisters coyly smiling at me. I was mortified that she may have caught sight of the bulge in my pants.
For the first time, I experienced what Augustine had lamented in his Confessions:
Within the very walls of your church, I felt incredible lust (3.3.5).
It wouldn’t be the last time.
Despite my efforts at compartmentalization, trying to erect a wall of separation between church and sex, I lust within the walls of the church. “Elena” in particular has my attention at the moment. She comes by and assists in cleaning the church and its associated buildings a couple of times a week. She’s a slender young Polish lass with shoulder-length blonde hair and golden skin. And oh-so fuckable. During her last visit, she wore leggings that left little to the imagination (her cameltoe was clearly visible). In my hypererotic imagination, I’ve yanked her leggings down, bent her over a pew, pounded her senseless, and deposited my load on her pretty face more times than I can count.
My parishioners would be astonished at what a pervert I am.
Early in the HBO series Girls, the guy having sex with the Lena Dunham character tells her, “You’re a dirty little whore, and I’m gonna send you home to your parents covered in cum!” He then chokes her before he climaxes.
“I almost came,” she replies.
In Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves, Sophie Gilbert laments what porn taught Millennial women. At the turn of the millennium, porn had infiltrated pop culture. Jenna Jameson’s, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, made the New York Times best-seller list. Pamela Anderson’s sex tape was among the first videos to go “viral.” The aesthetics of porn influenced fashion, music, and cinema. Young women took notice and were convinced that their sexualization was empowering. Britney Spears in the video “…Baby One More Time” took the porn trope of the sexually precocious schoolgirl mainstream.
The “sex-positive” ethos of the era branded the pornification of the culture as “liberating” and “empowering.” Others discern a more malign influence. Feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan in The Right to Sex writes, “Porn does not inform, or persuade, or debate. Porn trains.” For Gilbert’s generation of Millennial women, it trained them to see themselves “as objects — as things to silence, restrain, fetishize or brutalize.” She approvingly quotes Andrea Dworkin: “[P]ornography incarnates male supremacy.” As early as 2001, Martin Amis noticed the violence prevalent in porn. (“I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right?” one porn entrepreneur mused.) The sexual scripts enacted in porn were imitated in real life, which in turn were refracted back into popular culture. (HBO’s sex-saturated teen drama Euphoria depicts this dark milieu.)
Religious conservatives predictably deplore porn. Christine Emba in a recent Christianity Today podcast complained, “Pornography is not about real relationships. It does not even attempt to show real love and real respect for the other person. We’re consuming other people’s bodies….The relationship between men and women they’re seeing is often violent and ugly: choking, slapping, hitting, vile language, women treated as objects to be abused.” (When that same publication inveighed against “sex and smut on the newsstands” in 1958 — which was easily obtained by the daughter of a Dutch Reformed clergyman a few blocks from the White House — a magazine containing a story about “a voluptuous wench” was considered objectional material.)
“[Porn’s] teaching men to see women as made for my pleasure, my consumption,” Emba said. But a lot of women haven’t gotten the memo that they should be indignant about this state of affairs. A piece in the New York Times last year disapprovingly noted the surging prevalence of sexual asphyxiation among young people. A 15-year old boy when reporting on the sexual proclivities of his female classmates asked, “Why do girls all want to be choked?” A male freshman at a large Midwestern university noted that “girls expected” to be choked during sex and refusing to comply with their desires would make him a “simp.” A female junior enjoyed the power dynamic at play when choked and the sexual euphoria triggered by oxygen deprivation. When one high school senior complained about getting choked by her boyfriend, her friends derided her sexual tastes as “vanilla.”
Some feminists explain this as a form of false consciousness imposed by porn. “The psyches of my students are products of pornography,” Srinivasan writes in an essay entitled “Talking to My Students about Porn.” As “the first generation truly to be raised on internet pornography,” Srinivasan observes that “sex for my students is what porn says it is.” As one female student asked, “But if it weren’t for pornography, how would we ever learn to have sex?” The sex of “the pornworld” is one “in which slick bodies fuck and are fucked for their own pleasure.” These students then enact the sexual scripts in porn, which Srinivasan synopsizes as “hot blondes suck dicks, get fucked hard, get told that they like it, and end up with semen on their face.” Porn reinforces patriarchal systems of power (in which sex is reduced, in feminist Catherine MacKinnon words, to “fucking”: “Man fucks woman; subject verb object”), which is inherently violent. “Porn is not pedagogy,” Srinivasan concludes, “but it often functions as if it were.”
Australian porn star Angela White has been called “the Meryl Streep of porn.” Her most recent opus is Fuck Angela, a homage to the gonzo porn of the early 2000s. (“I can’t wait to show you what a dirty slut I can be,” she teases.) It’s a five-hour epic that begins with the starlet declaring, “I’m ready to get fucked in the arse,” which she is repeatedly (“I love the way you fucking use me!” she cries out in one scene). The movie concludes with a seven-guy blowbang that finishes with White drinking semen out of a dog dish as guys chant “Slut! Slut! Slut!”
The power dynamics at play may be more complex than they appear on the surface. Porn star Sasha Grey wanted girls to know “it’s OK to be a slut.” Karley Sciortino observed that while Grey’s extreme “whorishness” seems to align with the Madonna/whore dichotomy, she’s actually subverting it:
As the male porn actors take turns fucking her, she bosses them around and demands they fuck her…. Throughout the whole scene she appears to be the person that’s most hungry for sex, as well as the one who’s most enjoying the situation—it literally seems as if she hired the gang of dudes to bang her. As a result, she straight-up hijacks the male gaze, subverting the image of a whore into one of female pleasure and sexual power.
Porn, according to Srinivasan, “shows women hungry for the assertion of male sexual power,” a reflection of patriarchal oppression. But what if porn is instead, as Camille Paglia asserts, a reflection of primal male and female sexual desires: “My position has always been that pornography shows us the truth about sexuality, which connects us to the animal realm of primitive urges….Hence I view pornography as both art and anthropology–an alluring cultural projection that also reveals the hidden compulsions and conflicts of sexual relations in every era.” As the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon showed, contra feminists like Srinivasan, many women are indeed hungry for the assertion of male sexual power. In his essay “Patriarchal Sex,” Robert Jensen succinctly states, “Sex is fucking.” Perhaps the truth is that “the male need to fuck” which he attributes to the structures of patriarchy is reducible to the biological imperative which porn unerringly captures.
For me, the rawness of porn punctured the illusion of sex as an ineluctable expression of romantic love and resonated with my own sexual experience. As M. Scott Peck observed, “In itself, making love is not an act of love.”
As Dylan Elliott recounts in Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages, there is historical precedent for sex in holy places. During the Carolingian period, sexual activity in a church was categorized in The Second Diocesan Statute of Theodulf of Orleans as a form of “Irrational Fornication,” akin to incest. An eleventh century penitential gravely stated:
Concerning those who would have fornicated or committed adultery within the church. At present, there is nothing more dangerous than to sin lethally, and nothing more damnable than, on account of the heat of the flesh, that one consents to fondle some whore even within the walls of the holy church…. If anyone performed fornication in the church, that person should have penance all the days of his life on bread and water….
The Pontificale Romano-Germanicum of the mid-tenth century contains a prayer for a rite to cleanse a church from sexual desecration, lest it invite God’s wrath. (A Dominican preacher ascribed lightning strikes that hit churches to the sexual sins committed within them.) Hildegard of Bingen lamented those who “defile that dedication originated by Jacob by polluting holy places with…the impure seed of adultery or fornication.” That such prayers and penances were assigned means the offenses were not hypothetical. Sex between a confessor and a penitent was not uncommon. Two knights having affairs with the queen of Navarre and her sister-in-law confessed to consummating their adultery in holy precincts. (As a practical matter, in a society that afforded amorous couples little privacy, churches provided a spaces for amorous activities.)
Even in our secular age, the erotic allure of sex in sacred precincts remains. More than one Baptist girl has been covertly fingered in a pew during the sermon. A number of Catholics had to later confess that they had sex in a confessional. Graham Greene is reported to have had sex with his mistress behind altars in Italy. A few years ago, a priest in Louisiana was busted for having sex on his church’s altar with two dominatrices.
My first sexual encounter with the Deaconess was on a sofa in the parish office, but our sexcapades soon took us elsewhere. (As parish ministers, it was easy to access different places for sex.) We fucked in a closet storing old hymnals. We fucked in the vestry. We fucked in the choir loft. We fucked in a pew in the back row. We fucked in the nave in front of the baptismal font.
Having sex in a church poses it’s own particular challenges. Wooden pews and stone floors make copulating difficult (I bent the Deaconess over the back of the pew and railed her from behind), but I’ve found that adrenaline compensates for any physical discomfort. The risk of being caught, while part of the thrill, also demands that the rendezvous occur when one is reasonably sure that the church is empty. (Plus a church’s unique acoustics amplifies the grunts and moans emitted during sex.) Yet that “heat of the flesh” compelled us to commit so damnable a sin.
And hearing the Deaconess gasp “Oh, God” made it worthwhile.
On a Saturday in this early autumn, I attended with some colleagues a football game featuring two local colleges. The seats were quite good – close to the field on the 40-yard line. The game was entertaining, but my eyes were frequently drawn to the cheerleading squads on the sidelines.
The erotic appeal of nubile creatures in short skirts and tight tops, impressively displaying their physical flexibility and athletic stamina, goes without saying.
Even within the confines of my conservative Christian high school, I was enraptured by Summer in her cheerleading uniform: her blonde hair tied up in a ponytail; the contours of her ample breasts protruding from her vest; the top of her long tanned legs disappearing in a short pleated skirt, which barely concealed the spankies that hugged her rear. Summer became an object of masturbatory fantasy.
One sociologist noted that “the cheerleader is a disturbing erotic icon….She incarnates, in a word, the basic male-voyeuristic fantasy.” In her short skirt and tight vest, her sexually provocative gyrations (the pelvic thrusts and spread eagle jumps didn’t escape my notice on Saturday) invite the male gaze. Even the cheers mimic the cries a female would emit during sex:
Do it! Do it! Do it! Do it!
Yet she is packaged as an icon of wholesome all-American femininity, a patina of purity that only heightens her erotic potential. The cheerleader has become “the ultimate male fantasy: the woman who is both a virgin and a vamp.” (That facade of innocence is easily dismantled. A few years ago, it came to light that several cheerleaders at a university in the South were moonlighting as strippers and escorts.)
According to The Harvard Crimson, 13% of Harvard students claim to have had sex in Widener Library by the time they’ve graduated.
They’re not alone.
A decade ago, Angela White recorded herself having sex in the library of an Australian university. The school professed to be “shocked and appalled by this brazen act,” which culminated in the porn starlet exulting in her tits being covered with cum. (White framed her act as promoting literacy: “I’m a firm believer in the power of education, so if the scandal encouraged a few people to pick up a book then I’ll take that small victory.”)
“Molly” was a librarian at my Christian college. She was the nerdy librarian personified: thick glasses, long brown unkempt hair, frumpy dress. Her prim demeanor suggested that she had yet to be properly fucked. I often fantasized about pressing her body against a shelf of books, lifting up her skirt, and having my way with her in the stacks.
On that particular Friday evening, we may have been the only students in the library. Playing footsie under the table progressed to making out. I pulled up her blouse and fondled her breasts. We made our way down to the subterranean level occupied only by shelves of bound theological journals. In a corner, I undid my pants as Rhonda got on her knees. I peered out of the corner of my eye as she gave me a blowjob, the only witnesses being decades-old copies of Novum Testamentum. Then she got on her hands and knees, pulled up her skirt, and pulled down her panties. I got behind her, slipped myself inside her, and started pumping. The strain of trying to muffle the sound of my grunts intensified the pleasure; it didn’t take long for me to come inside her.
And then we walked past the circulation desk as we exited the library as if nothing happened.
A female parishioner recently introduced me to a friend of hers, “Jess.” Jess is a graphic design artist who works for a parachurch ministry. She invited me to her office to test a new website design. Later I invited her to lunch. Jess is sweet and somewhat adorkable, and I enjoyed getting to know her. She attends a conservative Presbyterian church, reads Max Lucado, and doesn’t watch R-rated movies. I find both her shyness and the way the bangs of her brown hair frame her face winsome. The following Sunday she attended my church and sat in on my adult Sunday school class. (She even gave me some resources to help me with my preparation for my class on Galatians.) We started seeing each other regularly after that.
Last Sunday our late afternoon coffee date was hindered by the shop’s closing early, so we walked a few blocks to the ice cream parlor. Over milkshakes, she invited me to travel with her to Virginia to visit her family. Our interactions have been entirely chaste, of course.
Jess is pretty, feminine, sweet. I’m attracted to this type of woman. My previous girlfriends have fit this type. They exhibit a certain purity. (When I attended her young adults group at her church, Jessica made a point of decrying explicit sex in contemporary films.) I find Jess physically attractive, yet I struggle to translate that into sexual arousal….
She may as well be wearing a chastity belt.
Even the prospect of “corrupting” her (taking her virginity and initiating her into the realm of carnal delights) doesn’t arouse me. (And it’s safe to say that I have a corruption kink.) Jess’s chastity repels my lust.
Meanwhile I’ve continued to furtively visit escorts and indulge in hookups.
Nineteenth century art, literary critic Bram Dijkstra contends, depicted women as either Madonna or Whore. Freud in “On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love” said that a man can only get sexual gratification from a degraded woman (a mistress or a whore). Freud argued, “The whole sphere of love in such persons remains divided in the two directions personified in art as sacred and profane (or animal) love.” There are two archetypal ways that I view women: either as the saintly Madonna or the lascivious whore. Jess obviously falls into the first archetype. She does not produce, to again quote Freud, “any sensual excitation but in affection which has no erotic effect.” I can’t imagine virginal Jess succumbing to bestial lust. I’m romantically drawn to the “girl next door.”
But it’s the slut who excites me. So I seek out that Proverbs 7 woman, “dressed as a harlot,” when that primal sexual instinct erupts within me.
The sexually liberated woman both arouses and unsettles me. Positioned against the chaste vestal, she challenges the conventional notions of femininity with which I was raised. One of the messages I received in the purity culture was that women are divinely ordained, through their inherent virtue, to quell the tempestuousness of male sexuality. In The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti writes, “Making women the sexual gatekeepers and telling men they just can’t help themselves not only drives home the point that women’s sexuality is unnatural, but also sets up a disturbing dynamic in which women are expected to be responsible for men’s sexual behavior.” The tempting “daughter of Eve” — alluring, sexually potent — corrupts my attempts at sexual virtue.
“Eve. The original bad girl of the Bible, Eve is cast as weak and susceptible to Satan, ravenous for forbidden knowledge….” That’s what Kristen Sollee writes inWitches, Sluts, Feminists: Conjuring the Sex Positive. Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden set the template for femininity. “Prevailing archetypes of womanhood in the Bible become virgin, obedient wife or deviant whore.” Luther wrote, “The word and works of God are quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” When I was seduced by Jezebel into committing fornication (cf. Rev 2:20), temptation proved irresistible.
Much contemporary popular culture (as exemplified by the erotic adventurousness of the protagonists on Sex and the City) posits that uninhibited sexual expression is empowering to the modern woman. Samantha is the lustiest of the quartet, seeking to “have sex like a man.” The antithesis of my romantic ideal of the “good girl,” she won’t let anything stand between her and her next orgasm. “Girl power” has become synonymous with sexual assertiveness. I recall the unreserved sluttiness of the sorority girls at the nearby public university when I was in college. They were nothing like the modestly attired girls from my Christian college. They unnerved me. And aroused me.
I’ve never considered myself much of a seducer, which explains my attraction to transactional sex. But I’ve recently found myself becoming more…assertive.
Consider a recent night with “Julie.”
Julie is active in her Presbyterian church’s young adults group. She teaches math at a middle school. I was introduced to her when I dated Ingrid; I noticed her auburn hair, cherubic face, and plump rump. Our interactions had been pleasant but brief – there was no hint of a romantic interest from her.
I had also managed to hear some gossip about her scandalous behavior at a New Year’s Eve party.
A few months later, I found myself at a party she and her roommates hosted at their house. Presbyterian abstemiousness did not mark the occasion – there was plenty of alcohol, and it was obvious that Julie had liberally imbibed.
I sensed that Julie could be a slut that night.
I sat next to her on a couch, somewhat secluded from the other partygoers. We chatted about our respective experiences at small Christian colleges. (The code of conduct at her school in the Wesleyan tradition expressly prohibited any sexual activity outside of marriage; she flirtatiously hinted that she hadn’t been entirely faithful in observing it.) As we talked, our legs touched on the couch. I caressed her arm. She started kissing me. (I could smell the alcohol on her breath.) I responded aggressively, grabbing one of her breasts through her sweater with one hand while, with the other hand, rubbing her crotch through her pants.
You tear down my reason It's your sex I can smell
I suggested that we head to the basement.
She ended up following me down to the basement. After some more sloppy kissing as I pressed her body against a washing machine, I quickly pulled her clothes off – it didn’t take long to strip her down to her underwear. As I turned off the lights, she stripped off her bra and panties. Having heard the rumors of her prodigious oral abilities, I wanted to feel her mouth on my cock. We moved onto an old couch. I placed the palm of my hand on the back of her head and guided her head to my crotch. She took my cock and proceeded to give me a blowjob. But I didn’t want to come in her mouth. I got on top of her on the couch.
She spread her legs apart.
Neither one of us brought a condom. But the prospect of fucking her without protection only fueled my lust. After a few awkward moments of positioning ourselves on the couch, I slowly pushed myself inside her. (Despite our haste, I needn’t have worried that she wasn’t wet enough. I imagine the alcohol and her arousal temporarily anesthetized whatever sexual guilt came from her Wesleyan Holiness background.) I made no pretense of lovemaking as I fucked her.
You let me violate you You let me desecrate you You let me penetrate you You let me complicate you
I struggled to stifle my groans lest our acquaintances catch us in flagrante delicto. As I fucked her faster and harder, thrusting my cock into her pussy, I felt my sweat drip onto her body. At this moment, she was no sister in Christ.
I wanna fuck you like an animal I wanna feel you from the inside I wanna fuck you like an animal You get me closer to God
The intensity of our fucking was too much. My body convulsed. An orgasmic burst deep in her pussy. That primal sound of release.
We disengaged. Without saying a word, she picked up her bra and panties (which had been discarded on top of the washing machine) and got dressed. She then stumbled up the stairs and rejoined the party.
Having (temporarily) sated my carnal urge, I put my clothes back on and quietly exited the house.
There’s an elite all-girls prep school in my neighborhood.
And, yes, the uniform of this illustrious institution includes a plaid skirt.
One recent morning at the coffee shop, I espied one of the students in her uniform – short plaid skirt, crisp white blouse, tight blue blazer emblazoned with the school seal. Her long blonde hair cascaded down the back of her blazer. A pair of tanned legs protruded from her skirt.
She surely was aware of her own ripeness.
If I felt such ripe excitement it was surely because my body was already ripe for it….I would toss and turn in my bed, calling for a man’s body to be pressed against my own, for a man’s hand to stroke my flesh.
It’s May, it’s May, the lusty month of May! That lovely month when everyone goes blissfully astray.
Camelot
The month of May derives its name from Maia, a nymph in Greco-Roman religion. According to the Homeric Hymns: “Maia bare, the rich-tressed nymph, when she was joined in love with Zeus….And the purpose of great Zeus was fulfilled.”
Springtime is an aphrodisiac.
Now is the month of maying, When merry lads are a playing, Each with his bonny lass Upon the greeny grass.
English Ballad by Thomas Morely (1595)
Ancient May Day festivals are said to have been orgiastic. Young men and women copulated in nature to ritually fertilize the fields (and to biologically fertilize the young women). The maypole is an obvious phallic symbol, a representation of the divine phallus plunged into Mother Earth to fertilize her womb. (It’s sexual symbolism led dour English Puritans to ban it during the Interregnum.)
Beltane was an ancient Gaelic festival which falls between the spring equinox and summer solstice which celebrated fertility. Wiccans and other neopagans mark it as an observance of the sexual union of god and goddess which fecundates nature. One self-proclaimed witch enthuses, “Celebrations include the obvious pleasures of sexual coupling!” Some engage in the “Great Rite in Truth”: the uniting of man and woman in ritual sex.
Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight, Or he would call it a sin; But - we have been out in the woods all night, A-conjuring Summer in!
Lutheran Guilt 