As I unfastened her long blue skirt, I was reminded of the woman in a Graham Greene novel who, with “fear and pride,” confessed, “We’re going to do a mortal sin.” I gently brushed my hand against her crotch and felt damp fabric – she was creaming her panties in anticipation of her sin. She removed the rest of her clothing but continued to wear her engagement ring and the cross on her necklace, symbols of the two sacred pledges she was now about to violate.
In “Guilty Pleasures: When Sex is Good Because It’s Bad,” feminist Jewish rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert explores the irony of how rules intended “to limit and control sexual desire unwittingly enhances the power of sexual desire.” She writes from the perspective of Judaism, but its implications apply to other creeds. “Regulating sexual behavior is a significant dimension of most religious systems,” distinguishing between licit and illicit desires. Traditionally in Judaism, sex was valued almost exclusively for its procreative potential. “For the purposes of procreation, sexual desire is understood as useful, but it is still called yetzer hara, an evil inclination, and must be controlled and limited.” Narrowly circumscribing sexual activity has the result of “making sex seem bad, dangerous, and shameful.” It also acknowledges that sex is daemonic. “Forbidding people to act out on sexual desires affirms that sexual desire is dangerous.”
Sexual desire is not so easily tamed. “The erotic is connected to wildness, chaos, and disorder–just what the rabbinic tradition wishes to tame and make orderly.” Sexual regulation invites its own subversion. “The efforts to control desire make it more desirable.” A medieval mystical Jewish account of the story of Adam and Eve suggests that sexual desire came from eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The forbidden is erotic. “Illicit sex is appealing because it is an opportunity to do what is forbidden, to test the rules.” Desire is heightened, not diminished. “Sex with the wrong person at the wrong place or time enhances erotic pleasure.” In a system that regulates sex, people whose desires do not conform to the regulations must hide their erotic selves. Yet “the pleasure of illicit sex is enhanced through secrecy.” As it’s been said, the best sex is the sex you can’t tell anybody about.
There are “unintended liberating consequences” to all this. Not only can transgression heighten erotic experience, “it has the potential to challenge the privileged status of licit relationships.” Alpert notes that in both contemporary Orthodox and liberal Jewish sexual ethics, sex is attached to commitment and intimacy. Sexual pleasure per se is devalued as a good. Transgressive sex outside of committed monogamous relationships subverts this paradigm and challenges the assumption that sex is merely instrumental to other values.
At that moment, we were nothing more than two sinners fucking. The engagement ring. The cross. Solemn promises abjured for a few moments of furtive pleasure. Her mouth on my neck, her nails in my back, her legs clamped around my waist. As her pleasure intensified, she took the Lord’s name in vain. Her little blasphemies are almost liturgical in their cadences. In their desperation, I detect a plea for divine mercy for her sin. And as I thrust into her over and over again, I continued our erotic liturgy, one “which makes flesh a deity” (Shakespeare). Our sex was unprotected, but conception was not our intention. Nor was it a sign of romantic commitment. The truth was starker: we fucked because we could.
“Could I enjoy what was forbidden for no other reason except that it was forbidden?”
Augustine, Confessions
Lutheran Guilt 