When I was an adolescent struggling with hormones and holiness, a body spray was heavily marketed to my demographic. “SPRAY MORE, GET MORE,” one tagline promised. The campaign wasn’t subtle. The executive behind it described it thusly: “It has this amazing effect that once you spray it on, any woman would fall for you.” The product’s fragrance, according to its website, “acts upon the female libido and stimulates the clothing-removal section of the female brain.” One early commercial presented an attractive blonde so overwhelmed by the scent on a male mannequin, she proceeded to essentially dry hump it. A print ad juxtaposed a can of spray and a pair of panties around a woman’s ankles. Other ads were similarly provocative.

Then there was the commercial with the Mormon missionary who makes the hot, horny women in the neighborhood receptive to his solicitations. It’s unclear whether he proceeds to convert them or fuck them. (The shot of the hottie in a tight tank top holding a garden hose that suddenly spurts suggests the latter.)

The sexless academics in women’s studies departments predictably condemned the campaign as sexist, but those commercials certainly reached their target audience. The premise is ridiculous, of course, but the thought that by spraying some heavily-scented deodorant on my gangly teen body I could make myself attractive to girls (who were both a mystery and an obsession) was compelling. The tension came from the fantasy of transforming the pure, virginal girls at my Christian school into “lust-crazed vixens.” (The “sluts” at the public high school were presumably easier to entice.)

“I want you to like me.”

She sat on my lap; she undoubtedly felt my erection through my pants and the fabric of her black skirt. I untied her lacy top.

“We can have a really good time….”

I reached around her back and unclasped her bra, (size 38G!!!). She took off her bra. She asked me to feel how heavy her tits are. She straddled me as I fondled her breasts and sucked on her nipples (which were very responsive). I grabbed her ass, then slowly moved my hand underneath her skirt. My fingers traced the outline of her panties before probing her bush underneath. I started fingering her.

Having been “entertained” by so many women, I’ve learned that there’s no stereotypical member of this profession. A self-described “nerdy girl,” she looked the part: thick glasses framed her plain Jane face. Her interests in sci-fi, anime, and Renaissance fairs also confirmed her description. She was a bit chubby, which wasn’t unwelcome since it contributed to the size of her big boobs. Our conversation was awkward. But ultimately I wasn’t there to converse.

By now she had unzipped my pants and was playing with my cock, lubricated by my precum. She had earlier admitted to being submissive and eager to please. So she dropped to her knees before pulling down my pants. She made a joke about being a “headmaster.” I asked her to keep her glasses on. Her soft lips took me deep in her mouth. Soon her saliva was dripping onto my balls. She must have sensed that I was approaching orgasm. I wanted her to swallow my load. She sucked on the head of my cock, and I erupted in her mouth and on her lips. Some of my cum dripped off her chin.

She placed a pad on the bed.

“I’m a squirter,” she said.

She lay back on the bed and spread her legs wide open. I found myself mesmerized by the sight of her hairy cunt. She squirmed and giggled as I went down on her. She hopped off the bed and reached for her Hitachi on the nightstand. She pleasured herself with it, squealing with delight, then…started squirting.

After she cleaned up a bit, she told me, “Put me where you want me.”

I had her lay back on the bed. She dabbed some lube between her breasts. I straddled her chest and furiously fucked her tits. She put on a condom, got on top, and started riding me slowly before accelerating her tempo, her ginormous tits swaying and bouncing in my face. I had her stand up and bend over the bed (she had a nicely-shaped ass). I grabbed onto her hips as I fucked her hard and fast. I didn’t take long for me to come again.

We haltingly chatted in bed afterwards. She had previously worked as a barista. The alarm on her phone went off, signaling that our hour was up. We got dressed. After a hug (during which I groped her ass and boobs one last time), I made my way out.

I overheard a conversation in a fast food establishment during the recently concluded Winter Olympics. Two guys expressed their admiration for female figure skaters. Or more precisely, admiration for their butts and crotches exposed in skimpy costumes on the ice. It was expressed crudely, but I certainly shared their admiration.

As an adolescent struggling to remain “pure,” I remember being enraptured by the flexibility of one skater. It wasn’t so much her athleticism but the suggestiveness of her poses (legs spread). And the sight of her exposed crotch. My naivety about the female body heightened my fascination. It amounted to a display of naughty exhibitionism.

A decade ago, The Globe and Mail came under intense criticism for printing on its front page a photo of a Canadian figure skater that prominently featured her crotch as she lifted her leg. Sour feminists complained that such photos sexually objectify female athletes and are a form of “upskirting” (defined as “the practice of making unauthorized photographs under a female’s skirt, capturing an image of her crotch area and underwear.“) My response is that any display of a nubile woman, her attractive body toned through athletic exertion and enhanced by a sexy costume, in which she teases an audience with tantalizing glimpses of her barely concealed private parts, is bound to attract male attention.

Katarina Witt won two Olympic gold medals for the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s, but her fame didn’t derive from her technical mastery of her routines. Dubbed “the most beautiful face of socialism,” she flirted with the audience while skating in revealing costumes. Time magazine called her “Sex on Skates.” (After the Iron Curtin fell, it was discovered in the archives of the Stasi that an agent had listened in on Witt having sex with an American at an East German hotel. The agent noted with bureaucratic precision: “Sexual intercourse took place from 20.00 until 20.07.”) No longer bound by the constraints of socialism, she went on to capitalize on her sex appeal and appeared in Playboy sans costume.

(Witt wasn’t the only ice skater whose sexual exploits were recorded. Tonya Harding’s sex tape was one of the best selling pornographic videos of the 1990s. I recently discovered it online and watched it – for research, of course. Her skill at riding cowgirl was impressive.)

A cold late morning in winter. I had ventured onto a side street in the old city and made my way to the apartment building. That morning I had felt, in Auden’s words, “an intolerable neural itch.”

And an itch needs to be scratched.

“Sara” is an athletic petite All-American blonde. Experience this mature seductress for a mutually rewarding experience.

I was buzzed into the building. She met me at the door to the loft with a sweet smile, and I was let in. She was wearing a lacy black top, a short black skirt, black thigh-high stockings, and heels. Very slutty. Sara’s in her forties now, but her body’s toned and tight. She led me to her bedroom. I placed the “donation” on the nightstand. She offered me a glass of water and said she had taken the train into the city. We exchanged a few generic pleasantries, but Sara isn’t much of a conversationalist. But I wasn’t there to talk. Besides, her mouth would soon be occupied with other activities.

We sat on a couch. I slid my hand beneath her skirt. My fingers reached into her thong panties; I brushed my hand against her trimmed patch of pubic hair. She responded by rubbing her hand over my crotch and fondling my erect cock through my pants. She climbed onto my lap, slowly grinding on me through my pants. I thrust my tongue deep into her mouth. We continued to make out for a while. Then I pulled her right breast out of her top and started to suck on her nipple. Her nipple got hard. She started moaning very faintly.

She stood up and led me to the bed. We methodically removed our clothing. Before I removed my glasses, I took time to admire her pert ass. I sat on the edge of the bed. She dropped to her knees, lowered her head, and started sucking my cock. The little noises she emitted as she sucked me off were very erotic. I placed my hand behind her head and guided her ministrations. Her oral technique is superb. After several minutes of bliss, I warned her that I was about to come.

With my cock still in her mouth, she replied, “Mmm hmm.”

My balls tightened, and as I gripped her head, I cried out my pleasure and came in her mouth.

She got up and went to the bathroom sink to spit it out. But we weren’t done. After she cleaned me up with a warm wet washcloth, I quickly became aroused again.

“Let’s fuck,” she said sweetly as she straddled my hips.

I asked, “Should we get out the condom?”

“That would be wise,” she said.

She slipped the condom on. I lay on my back. She mounted me. My hands clasped her waist, my fingers pressed deep into her flesh, as she rode me like a wild woman. I enjoyed watching her breasts bounce as her hair became disheveled. She then rolled over and positioned her legs over my shoulders. I drove myself deep into her, not mistaking our coupling for anything other than what it was. It was, in D.H. Lawrence’s words, “cold-hearted fucking.” No emotion besides lust. It was brutally mechanical and impersonal. There was nothing loving or redemptive about it. The will to pleasure.

“Yeah, give it to me again!” she cried out.

My body tensed as I approached climax. Then I let out an almost desperate groan.

After a brief rest, I started to get dressed. We didn’t speak as we prepared for my departure. We shared a tentative hug, then I exited the loft into the winter cold in preparation for a pastoral appointment.

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.

Louise Hawes, A Flight of Angels

There was no return to innocence.

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.

Set the believers an example in purity.

1 Timothy 4:12

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.”