Sex and the Seminary

After college and a year of volunteer service in New York City, I enrolled at a mainline Protestant divinity school with the intention of pursuing a divinity degree and ordination in my Lutheran denomination. I knew it would be very different than my experience at my small evangelical college. I intentionally chose the school in order to broaden my theological horizon. My conservative background did little to prepare me for what I encountered. The sexual ethics discussed at seminary were (to me) unabashedly liberal. Classmates mocked “Sunday school” prohibitions against pre-marital sex as unenlightened and judgmental. A student-led discussion group devoted itself to the topics of kink and sexual fantasy. A popular seminar examined queer theology. Traditional Christian teachings were dismissed as outdated or, even worse, bigoted. Arguments in favor of monogamy were dismissed as “heteronormative.” One ethicist I read defended the morality of casual sex, approvingly quoting psychologist Albert Ellis that “personal growth” is “abetted and enhanced by sexual adventuring.”

It was outside the classroom, however, where I discovered the sexual ethos of the school. At a party I attended during my first semester, condoms were available on the kitchen counter. I overheard a faculty member say that since seminarians will spend the rest of their lives in service to others, they should have some fun now. I discovered that hooking up was common among my peers. There was a good chance that you’d wake up next to a classmate over the weekend. (Unless you banged her in a cramped bathroom beforehand.) A classmate from my denomination, referring to our church’s statement that sexual intimacy was reserved for marriage, dismissed it as a pious fantasy from a less enlightened time. As long as you’re not caught fornicating, it shouldn’t impact your candidacy. “You can be smart or you can be celibate,” she quipped.

One classmate put it this way: as “holy” men and women preparing for ministry, some sexual indulgence is permissible because all the good we do outweighs it. That is, committing ourselves to service in the church excuses us from having to follow the rules, at least until ordination. I’ve probably internalized this attitude. There is little consideration of how spirituality informs our sex lives, no connection between the bedroom and the pulpit. I haven’t been able to build a bridge between my religious study and my sexual self.

Sex and the City

sexy_girl_at_the_window_looking_at_new_york_by_alexpotapov-d9gtpop

“New York City is all about sex. People getting it, people trying to get it, people who can’t get it. No wonder the city never sleeps. It’s too busy trying to get laid.”
“Carrie Bradshaw,” Sex and the City

Between college and divinity school, I served for a year as a volunteer in a parish in Manhattan. When I arrived at the church I served at, I resolved to rededicate myself to purity. I innocently believed that one who serves in the church should conduct oneself accordingly. In fact one of the conditions of volunteer service was that we would refrain from sexual immorality. Yet nothing could prepare me for New York. For a repressed Midwestern Lutheran, it was an intoxicating environment. The city oozes sex. Leggy models strutting in the fashion district, sexy secretaries on Wall St., corporate women in fuck-me pumps in Midtown — it was too much to resist. After three months of struggling to remain abstinent, I succumbed to my lust and started seeing call girls again.

“Jacqueline” was a fortysomething brunette who rode me to the sounds of Enigma. There was the French girl with the Spanish accent. The fashion student with long, pointy nipples. The full-figured girl who confessed to seducing her accounting professor and tied my hands with a pillowcase. The aspiring actress who didn’t pass the audition. And a few more.

One evening in my church office shortly before Valentine’s Day, I noticed a brief ad online:

Emma Sinclair – Beautiful. British. Upscale. Midtown. Private.

I hesitated. I had pledged to subdue my bestial instincts to loftier spiritual ideals. “But I am carnal.” I called the number listed in her ad. Unexpectedly, a woman with a refined English accent answered. I expressed my interest in arranging an engagement. She seemed a little hesitant after I provided some details about myself, but she agreed to make an arrangement for a last-minute appointment. I hurriedly prepared myself and made my way uptown in the winter night.

As instructed, I called her when I arrived at Bloomingdale’s. She gave me the address of her residence a few blocks away. I arrived a few minutes later and was buzzed into the building. An intoxicating blend of anxiety and arousal propelled me up the stairwell to her apartment. I heard the door unlock.

“Philip?”

A tall blonde in a black robe discreetly ushered me in her small apartment and invited me to sit down. The soft romantic lighting did nothing to diminish her pretty face. She asked if I had a girlfriend. My nervousness was apparent. “I won’t bite, unless you want me to,” she assured me. Her friendliness was comforting. She appreciated my politeness and good manners and the roses I brought her. I appreciated her round breasts that protruded from her robe. She engaged me in conversation to assuage my nerves. She had moved to the U.S. a few years earlier, teaching at a private school in Manhattan before taking the plunge into escorting. I complimented her on her athletic body. She credited it to the work she did with a personal trainer. Her sexiness was irresistible. Then she stood up and removed her robe, revealing a pair of black stockings and a bare mons pubis. Taking her cue, I undressed and revealed a raging hard-on.

“You are quite horny!” she said teasingly.

She put on Andrea Bocelli to set the mood. We moved to the bed. Her breasts proved irresistible. She signaled her approval as I sucked on her nipples.

“Juicy,” she sighed.

She lay me on my back. “I’m going to give you the best blowjob you’ve ever had,” she promised. She delivered on her promise as her mouth pleasured my bare cock. Sensing that I was about to come, she disengaged and reached for her bottle of Astroglide on her nightstand (upon which was also stationed a bottle of holy water). She retrieved a condom, covered me, then guided my turgid manhood inside her. I felt her grab my ass as I thrust.

“You’re cock is so hard,” she moaned.

I could feel her pussy clench my cock. My body convulsed in orgasm.

“Shall we try doggie style next time?” she tantalizingly offered afterwards.

I dressed and put my glasses back on. “Now you’re a good boy again,” she teased me. She kissed me on the cheek as I departed her apartment.

And, yes, I returned to fuck her doggie style.

“You’re so young!”

“You’re so young!” she exclaimed in her high pitched voice. She had greeted me at the door in a white babydoll and matching white stockings. Inside her cozy apartment, we shared a bottle of wine before we retired to her bedroom. I nervously undressed and reclined on the bed. She noticed my nervousness and promptly asked, “Are you religious?”

I told her I was.

She got on the bed and straddled me. “I was raised Catholic,” she said as she put the condom on me.

“Are you married?” she asked. I replied that I wasn’t.

“I’m not married,” she said to alleviate my guilt.

She lowered her body on top of mine.

“Ooooooh…” she moaned.

“Leigh” was the first escort I developed an ongoing relationship with. “Angel in the Attic,” according to her ad. She was a cute brunette in her 40’s who was an art student. She had a very attractive daughter in college. (I saw her photograph.) Inspired by the movie Dangerous Beauty, she had become a “courtesan.” I must have seen her a dozen times. Now that I think about it, she was my de facto sex education instructor, initiating me into the mysteries of sex. She was sweet, if a bit flaky. And it was apparent that she loved sex.

“You’re too conservative!” she complained. Previous encounters had been mostly limited to the missionary position. She stood at the edge of the bed and beckoned me to stand behind her. The she grabbed my cock and slipped it inside her. At this point instinct took over.

“This feels good,” she sighed.

“You’re opening up to me!” she exclaimed. After a few encounters, my reserve was slowly melting away. We had developed a relationship, albeit one of a peculiar sort.

She lay down on the bed and literally opened herself up to me. As I rocked on top of her, I heard her cry out.

“Go for it! Go for it! Go for it!”

Erotic Saints

“The original whore was a priestess, the conduit to the divine, the one through whose body one entered the sacred arena and was restored.”
Deena Metzger

In ancient religion, prostitution was sacralized. We find evidence of sacred prostitution in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Code of Hammurabi. Herodotus wrote, “Women of the land…sit in the temple of love and have intercourse with some stranger…. After their intercourse, she has made herself holy in the sight of the goddess.” The ritual practice of sacred sexual intercourse within the temples of Innana and Ishtar in Mesopotamia was understood to unleash divine fertile energy upon the land. The temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, according to the Greek historian Strabo, had over 1,000 prostitutes. Hesiod, a poet in the 8th century B.C.E., observed that the prostitutes’ sensual gifts “mellowed the behavior of men” by bringing sexual joy. Sexual intercourse with a temple prostitute was ritualized, the union of male and female in a fertility rite or the hieros gamos (ἱερὸς γάμος), the divine marriage between the god and the goddess. According to Julius Evola, “Ritual sex was the instrument for man’s participation in the sacram.” Sexual union was communion with the divine. Nancy Qualls-Corbert writes, “Desire and sexual response experienced as a regenerative power, were recognized as a gift or a blessing from the divine. Both a man’s and woman’s sexual nature together with their religious attitude were inseparable.” The sacred prostitute herself, according to Qualls-Corbet, was an image of the eternal feminine, “a woman, who, through ritual or psychological development, has come to know the spiritual side of her sexuality, her true Eroticism.” She consciously used sex as a means of enlightenment. The sacred prostitute was a sexual priestess who empowered men desirous of the “wondrous vulva” to connect with spiritual realities through pleasure. The French philosopher Georges Bataille noted, “The prostitutes in contact with sacred things, in surroundings themselves sacred, had a sacredness comparable with that of priests.” Prostitutes retain to some degree this consecration; they are votaries of sex. They are priestesses of the sacred sexual mysteries. “Erotic saint,” one writer suggests, is a term that should be applied to any “woman decent enough to service a man sexually.”

“Sex was brought openly and with reverence to the very altar of the goddess. In her temple, men and women came to find life and all that it had to offer in sensual pleasure and delight.”
Nancy Qualls-Corbett, The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine

Bataille also wrote, “Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude.” Women, insofar as they make themselves objects of desire, are conditioned to provoke a male response. The prostitute merely adds a commercial aspect to the feminine disposition and embraces the objectification which other women more subtlety accept. “Prostitution made them into objects of masculine desire; objects which at any rate heralded the moment when in the close embrace nothing remained but only a convulsive continuity.” The prostitute is the protagonist in this drama. Feminist critic Camille Paglia writes, “The prostitute is not, as feminists claim, the victim of men, but rather their conqueror, an outlaw, who controls the sexual channels between nature and culture.”

“With prostitution, the prostitute was dedicated to a life of transgression,” Bataille continued. “The sacred or forbidden aspect of sexual activity remained apparent in her, for her whole life was dedicated to violating the taboo.” If the heart of eroticism is in transgression, as Bataille contends, prostitutes are priestesses of transgression. That is their vocation and allure.

“It’s not normal not to have sex!”

In the aftermath of losing my virginity, to judge by external appearances, nothing had changed. I was still the same quiet, studious young man. I was still active in my Lutheran fellowship. My interactions with women were still chaste and respectful.

In a fundamental sense, though, everything had changed. It was as if that first moment of penetration had effected an ontological transformation. No longer a virgin, I had violated values I thought were essential to my character. My pledge to remain pure had been broken in the most dramatic way. If purity had defined my religious experience, my sin made me question the authenticity of my faith. Having succumbed to temptation, my will to resist future temptations was severely compromised. Once I had sinned, it was easier to sin again. There was no return to purity.

A couple of months after my first encounter with an escort, I called the service again and hired another one. This one was a short, busty blonde who arrived at my hotel room in a miniskirt and chunky heels and carefully examined the $50 dollar bills that made up my “donation.” She was quiet, so there wasn’t much conversation between us. She suggested that we “get comfortable” and undressed, revealing some butterfly tattoos and big, luscious of tits. We moved our naked bodies to the bed, where I caressed her body until she cried out:

“You’re dripping!”

My precum had dribbled onto her body. Embarrassed, I apologized effusively. She wrapped a condom around my member. I got on top of her and, after she guided me inside her, vigorously thrust until I came.

As she dressed, she told me, “You’re a very nice man.”

Six weeks later I hired another call girl from the agency. This time I selected an older lady, a fortysomething brunette. She asked me why I had hired an escort, so I proceeded to tell her that I was curious about sex, which, upon entering the ministry, would be reserved for a future wife.

“It’s not normal not to have sex!” she admonished me as she pulled a condom out of her bra.

I felt myself blushing. She was gentle with me. Having confessed that I was only a few weeks removed from losing my virginity, she confessed to being a little nervous. “So that’s why you wanted an older woman!” she exclaimed, saying it reminded her of a scene out of a romance novel. She kissed me softly as she slowly pulled off my clothes. She put my right hand on her waist, and my left hand on her breast. From there my lust took over. I passionately kissed her back, letting a moan escape from my lips as I pressed my erection against her. She got on top, rocking her hips and grinding into me, screwing me slowly in the hotel room’s dim light.

Upon departing, she kissed me on the cheek and wished me well.

Paying for Sex

“Stephanie” leaned up against the wall, clad only in french maid lingerie she had recently purchased at Victoria’s Secret. I had just discretely placed an envelope on the table containing my “donation.” She is a self-described “professional companion” with a playful smile and a soft touch. A tantra chair sat in the living room. Madonna’s “Justify My Love” played in the background.

“Religion says sex is so bad,” she protested with a mischievous smile as she unbuckled my belt.

“But perhaps it is true,” I said, quoting Martin Buber. (I think that may have been the first time Buber was quoted during foreplay.)

Stephanie was one of my favorite escorts. Smart and sweet and naughty, she worked in real estate in addition to entertaining as a call girl. Experimenting with her sexuality, she worked as an exotic dancer before she tried escorting. When we first met, having learned of my background, she asked, “Isn’t this very Mary Magdalene?” (I explained to her that the tradition of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute has no textual basis in the New Testament.) She was raised Catholic but called herself an agnostic. She couldn’t reconcile the Church’s sexual ethics with her sexual appetite. “I love sex,” she said forthrightly, adding that there is no better form of therapy than getting sweaty in the sheets. She admitted to me that she couldn’t be monogamous, and she was promiscuous even before she became an escort. In a addition to her partner, she had “secondary” boyfriends. She also confessed to being turned on by having sex with strangers. An avid reader of erotica, she found 50 Shades of Grey rather tame. Anne Rice’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy is much more risque, she said. She confessed that she was scared of death and afraid that, if there is a God, she’d be condemned to perdition for her lust. (I tried to assure her of God’s mercy.)

“You’re not going to feel guilty over this, are you?” she teased.

“It may be a perverted taste, but I love prostitution, and for itself, too, quite apart from its carnal aspects. My heart begins to pound every time I see one of those women in low-cut dresses walking under the lamplight in the rain, just as monks in their corded robes have always excited some deep, ascetic corner of my soul.”

– Gustave Flaubert

The majority of my sexual encounters have been with prostitutes. I’ve admittedly come to see sex as a commodity. Convenience explains much of it. One call to an escort service or an independent provider can arrange a sexual liaison in minutes. Many of the call girls I’ve seen were extremely attractive. “Professionals” tend to be, to put it delicately, skilled. I’ve met a remarkable number of charming, intelligent women who work as escorts. There’s a certain honesty in prostitution. Like any commercial transaction, the prostitute will provide a service in exchange for payment. No games, no manipulation, no hurt feelings, no false professions of love. Moreover, the very act of paying a woman for sex is erotic. Discretely handing over an envelope with three crisp $100 bills in expectation of sexual gratification brings a frisson of excitement. (It can work both ways. One lady confessed to me, “It’s really hot being paid for sex.”) But there’s more.

Now Stephanie was on her knees, pleasuring my cock with her soft mouth. I gently caressed her hair as she serviced me. After putting a condom on me with her mouth (quite a skill, I must say), she bent over the bed. She hadn’t been wearing any panties under her lingerie. I accepted her invitation and positioned myself behind her. I entered her, clutched her feminine hips and started to pump. Stephanie’s girlish moans heightened my arousal. I grabbed a fistful of her long blonde hair and quickened my pace. Slapping my pelvis against her ass, I thrust madly, losing myself in the euphoria.

The First Time

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.
Voltaire, Notebooks

During my senior year of college, the thought first entered my mind of visiting a call girl. At first I brushed it aside, thinking that I could never go through with it. But the urge to do so kept reappearing. One Saturday night I was by myself in my apartment, depressed and lonely. And really horny. I decided to go through with it. I checked into a hotel room and called an escort service.

The lady on the phone recommended a strawberry blonde “with porcelain skin” in her 20’s. While I waited for her to arrive, simultaneously excited and petrified, I opened the nightstand drawer and reached for the Gideon’s Bible. Seriously. I was skimming through the Bible as I prepared to lose my virginity to a prostitute. After what felt like an eternity, I heard a knock on the door. I opened it and saw an attractive young woman. She had a very pretty smile. As I greeted her, I remember thinking in my mind, I’m going to have sex with her in a few minutes. After some pleasantries, we sat down next to each other on a couch. She was dressed nicely and professionally, as if she was on her way to a job in a bank. She must have sensed I was terrified, so she started a conversation that put me a little more at ease. (Needless to say, she did most of the talking.) She told me about her life. I still, years later, remember and appreciate her friendliness and kindness.

After about 10 or 15 minutes, she leaned in close to me and asked what I wanted to do. I stammered and mumbled some evasive reply. She said, ‘You can ask me anything.’ I leaned over to whisper in her ear and blurted out, “I want to have sex with you.” I leaned in to kiss her, but she slid back and gently told me, “I don’t kiss.” She sensed my dismay and, smiling, reassured me, “I’m a very sexual person. We’ll have fun.”

Soon I was fumblingly attempting to undress her. At some point I confessed, “I’ve never really done this before.” After we undressed and got on the bed, she started caressing me and nibbling on my ear. “You’re a cute thing,” she said. As I was lying on my back, she placed her body on top of mine and…

I ejaculated on her leg.

I was mortified. She told me, “It’s okay,” and went to the bathroom to clean herself. Once she returned to the bed, we talked for a while. It didn’t take me long to get aroused again, and I started to explore her body. I spent time rubbing and kissing her breasts. She laid me on my back, moved her head over my crotch and started to give me a blowjob. I watched with fascination as her mouth slid up-and-down the shaft of my penis. After going down on me for a few minutes, she asked, “What do you want to do now?”

“Let’s fuck.”

She put a condom on me, lay on her back, and guided me inside her. I don’t remember much about the physical act itself, only the thought in my head, I’m finally inside a woman.

I climaxed and she cleaned me up with a washcloth. We then both sat on the edge of the bed. Instead of being relieved at losing my virginity, I started to feel very depressed. She noticed me looking forlorn and tried to cheer me up. “Don’t look so sad.” She smiled at me, gave me a kiss on my cheek and said, “You’re a really nice guy.” She dressed and I accompanied her toward the door. As she exited, she smiled again and wished me good night.

I spent the next couple of days in bed, paralyzed by guilt. Despite the positive qualities of the escort I hired, the encounter left me feeling empty and sad. I had violated my moral beliefs. For a few days, I felt ashamed to face my female friends and classmates.

But it wasn’t enough to stop me from doing it again.