Taboo

Feeling extra lustful due to this heat? Come visit!

I excused myself from church and made the hour drive to see Betty. She met me at her incall apartment in a thin black robe and invited me to sit on the couch. We engaged in a little small talk about the culture clash of driving in the South as opposed to the Northeast. I spied a book she had been reading lying on a side table. It was about the Clinton-Lewinksy scandal. After a few minutes of pleasant chatter, she stood up and undid her robe, revealing a lacy bra and pair of panties. I followed her to the bed. I complimented her on how pretty she looked.

“You look fine yourself, handsome!” she replied.

She took a condom out. First we shed our clothes, then I shed my inhibitions. I stood in front of her, my erection signaling my arousal. Then I was lying on top of her naked body. Tangled bedsheets and the faint scent of sex witnessed to our exertions.

As we lingered in bed afterwards, covered in sweat, she talked a little about her clandestine occupation. “There’s the whole taboo aspect of it,” she briefly noted. We hadn’t just broken the law — we had transgressed. And on my part, it had intensified our encounter.

“Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family–in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature,” writes Camille Paglia. The prostitute symbolizes uninhibited female sexuality. She is a rebuke to the puritanical religion of my youth, the antithesis of the “good Christian girl” saving herself for marriage. To a repressed Lutheran boy, her tantalizing offer of sweet forbidden sex elicits desire. She embodies the taboo. Georges Bataille wrote, “With prostitution, the prostitute was dedicated to a life of transgression. The sacred or forbidden aspect of sexual activity remained apparent in her, for her whole life was dedicated to violating the taboo.” Taboo, in the original sense of the word, means both prohibition and sacredness. As one sex therapist notes, “Eros thrives when boundaries are crossed.”

I recall Stephanie once lamenting about how the stigma surrounding her profession forced her into subterfuge. Paglia retorts, “The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he’d go and screw the lady next door.”

“Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop.”

Camille Paglia

I’m leading a weekly study on C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Tonight we reviewed Lewis’ thoughts on sexual morality. “Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues,” Lewis writes, upholding traditional Christian sexual ethics. “[T]he old Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’” I explained Lewis’ argument. My conservative parishioners nodded in agreement. They’re oblivious to the fact that just a few hours earlier, I was briskly fucking a call girl. No one is privy to my secret transgression.