Mandi met me last night at the door of her hotel room in a tight black mini dress and black suede boots that went past her knees. Minutes later she teased me, “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!” She seductively stripped out of her clothes, making me throb. Some fun on the bed followed, then she positioned herself by bending over the desk.
We unapologetically committed our sins behind closed drapes and shut doors. Gratifying the flesh inside a 14th floor hotel room. Away from prying eyes.
My position in the church forces me to be discreet about my sexual life. As a single minister, I publicly committed to sexual abstinence before marriage.
Which means I have to use the utmost discretion.
“Si non caste, tamen caute.”
Adalbert of Hamburg, medieval archbishop to his clerics
In one recent online article, the author extols the virtue of purity as not just an intrinsic good but as “prudent” in the digital age. “Almost anything we do on a computer or cell phone, no matter how embarrassing or sensitive, leaves an exploitable record that is difficult to expunge.” The very real danger of exposure recommends chastity.
That’s an ideal solution. But as the good archbishop said, “If you can’t be chaste….”
Outside of my brief (and admittedly very indiscreet) relationship with the Deaconess, I’ve avoided becoming entangled with a woman from my parish. (Although Heidi, with her tight jeans that reveal the contours of her smackable ass, is testing my self-discipline.) One of the advantages of hiring reputable “professionals” is that both parties have an incentive to discreetly arrange the transaction and protect their privacy. “High-basic-quality-escorts will show up on time, match their advertised description, provide the agreed-upon services at the advertised price, be discreet, and generally act in a manner respectful of their client’s privacy and safety,” writes one scholar. Both agencies and independent escorts will screen and verify their clients, treating the received personal information as confidential. “Tina” at a local agency, for instance, knows that I work at a church, but because her business traffics in the keeping of secrets, it is in her interest to not disclose such information.
This is not to discount the very real risks I take. Still, given the alternative, I strive to minimize them. A classmate once proffered these words of wisdom: “You can be smart or you can be celibate.”
The Kama Sutra refers to fellatio as auparishtaka – “superior coitus.”
I waited for her to unbuckle my belt, undo the button at the top of my jeans, and lower the zipper. Rhonda bent down and unzipped me. As she slipped me into her mouth, I was stiff but not yet rock-hard. With her lips tight against my shaft, I felt myself expand. She circled her tongue around the head, then took me deep inside her mouth. As she sucked and licked, she looked up into my eyes, reaffirming my masculinity. Down on her knees, submissive before me, Rhonda had given herself over to cock worship. Now was not the time to be a gentleman. I moved my hand to the back of her head. It was dark, dirty, and liberating.
“Fellatio” comes from the Latin fellare, meaning “to suck.” It was coined in 1894 by Haverlock Ellis. (A “fellatrix” is a woman who sucks.) “La pipe” is French slang for fellatio. English has its own terminology.
Because of its non-procreative potential, Christian moral theology condemned oral sex. Tertullian equated it with cannibalism. The medieval canonical penalty for fellatio was 15 years penance. It neglected a possible biblical sanction for orally pleasuring a man. In the Song of Songs, the woman says of her beloved:
With great delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste (2:3).
I recall hearing whispered rumors that some of my female classmates at my conservative evangelical college engaged in the oral arts while technically maintaining their virginity. (Apparently President Clinton’s definition of sex was definitive.) Virtually all of my sexual encounters with professionals and the majority of my encounters with non-professionals have included having oral sex performed on me.
“Suck on, suck on, I glow, I glow!”
Percy Bysshe Shelley
“[O]ne of the sources of its power and significance is the desire to place the penis in a forbidden location,” John H. Gagnon and William Simon write. Fellatio still has an aura of the taboo about it. “[T]he act of fellatio is symbolically constructed in terms of men’s dominance and women’s submission….The images of…dominating, controlling, degrading are all immediately available.” I can’t escape the impression that performing fellatio is in some way degrading. I’ve had trouble conceiving of it as something that “good girls” do. It has an ancient provenance. The ancient Romans thought the subservience involved in providing oral sex made it demeaning. In his book The Roman Gaze: Vision, Power, and the Body, David Fredrick writes, “Both ancient literature and graffiti tell us that fellatio was the province of prostitutes; it was a sexual act no Roman male of the elite class would request of his wife.” Certainly the way it is roughly portrayed in pornography makes it look degrading. Philosopher Alan Soble states, “Putting your face in someone’s crotch, no matter the posture, no matter the language used to name the event, is degrading and humiliating.” Given the intimacy of the act, and the inherent vulnerability of the recipient, some see it as a tender expression of romantic affection. I can’t help but think that, when a girl presses her mouth onto my cock, she’s a dirty little whore.
“Every one of her blowjobs would have been enough to justify the life of a man.”
Especially when she was in her cheerleader’s uniform. I had made a covenant with my eyes, and I tried to take those thoughts captive, but….
At night in bed, visions of Summer came unbidden. I had pledged to remain pure, but as I envisioned my body on top of Summer’s nubile body, my hand went to a forbidden place.
When my erotic fantasy reached its apogee, and my body had discharged all its erotic tension, I was paralyzed by guilt. I vowed never to do it again.
Then I saw Summer once more in her cheerleader’s uniform.
Masturbation is sinful. That was the lesson I unambiguously learned in the purity culture. It stained one’s holiness, “without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14). It was a form of adultery against one’s future spouse, for “the husband does not rule over his body, but the wife does” (1 Cor 7:4). Marriage was the balm for lust. As one commentator put it, St. Paul didn’t say, “It is better to masturbate than to burn” (cf. 1 Cor 7:9). Driven by lust and fantasy, masturbation enslaves one’s body to sexual passion, placing one under the dominion of sin (cf. Rom 6:14). I even recall one speaker who said that it was a form of homosexual activity because it did not involve someone of the opposite sex. One purity author said of masturbation that “its selfishness is utterly foreign to the Kingdom of God.”
This perspective has a long lineage. Ethicist Margaret Farley writes, “Through centuries of Western thought masturbation was judged to be not only an immoral sexual practice, but one that should be particularly repugnant to human individuals and the human community.” Kant declared that sexual relations with oneself was “an abuse of one’s sexuality” and relegated oneself “below the level of animals.” William James thought it led to insanity. Certainly the Christian tradition contributed mightily to this consensus. Aquinas termed the deed “unchaste softness.” (It also came to be known as the “solitary sin,” “onanism,” and “self-abuse.”) The Angelic Doctor wrote that masturbation is a grave unnatural vice that involves sin against right order and the use of one’s body. Raymond J. Lawrence in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom wrote that “resisting the temptation to masturbate” was elevated into “the sexual cause celebre for Protestants.” Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers were invented as wholesome remedies against unwanted sexual desire.
Having pledged to remain chaste until marriage, I strove to “be pure in heart and body,” which included refraining from sexual self-stimulation. As the aforementioned tale indicates, I didn’t always succeed. I learned through bitter experience the same lesson as Luther: “Nature never lets up….we are all driven to the secret sin. To say it crudely but honestly, if it doesn’t go into a woman, it goes into your shirt.” I didn’t have access to porn, but my fertile imagination more than compensated. (As a teenager, I recall surreptitiously purchasing a copy of Maxim and jerking off to photos of Elisha Cuthbert. I wasn’t alone in my solo explorations. During one encounter, Stephanie confessed to me that she had experimented with cucumbers and a curling iron.)
For one young lady reared in the purity culture, her church’s proscription against masturbation and her inability to refrain from self-pleasure created a crisis of faith:
Throughout my teenage years I battled with it constantly. I don’t even know how many hours I spent on my knees at the altar begging God to help me “stop doing It” (I could only ever refer to masturbation as It) until I finally gave up and refused to go forward to the altar anymore.
It was the first thing I ever really felt betrayed by God about. He promised that there wouldn’t be any temptation we couldn’t face, didn’t he?…I don’t even know how old I was when I decided that I was done dealing with all the agony and pain– I was convinced that if I could dedicate that much time and energy into “quitting,” into countless promises and bargains and vows, that no matter how much I tried it just wasn’t going to go away.
Given my extensive catalogue of sexual transgressions, masturbation seems fairly tame. Farley concludes, “Masturbation is more likely to be considered morally neutral, which could mean that it is either good or bad, depending on the circumstances and the individual….it usually does not raise any moral questions at all.”
Prostitution: the oldest profession in the world. The one profession which will never be sent into oblivion. Why? Because at our core we are animal, and who we are at our core can never be denied. Hidden, yes, but never can we truly separate ourselves from our insatiable lust for flesh.
I carved out some time this afternoon and made a detour to a hotel in the suburbs. Her thick accent made it difficult to understand her, but I arrived with some time to spare. I waited in my car for the appointed time. Then I went inside, discreetly made my way through the lobby, took the elevator up to the 5th floor, and found her room. I knocked on the door. The door opened. A voice invited me in.
“Kathy” is a slender middle-aged blonde from Europe. She’s visiting from out of town. Her miniskirt highlighted her shapely legs. She’s pleasant but a bit cool.
We quickly got down to business. I placed the envelope containing my “donation” on a side table. We shed our clothes and moved to the bed. She crawled between my legs and started pleasuring me orally. She’s quite talented, and I struggled not to come too early. She then took a condom out and covered me. Without saying a word, she climbed on top me, straddled me, and lowered herself onto my throbbing cock. I guided her hips with my hands and bucked up into her. She rode me steadily at first. Sweat trickled across my forehead. Moving faster, she rode me harder until my body spasmed. I moaned in pleasure.
She took off the condom and went to the bathroom. After a few minutes, she returned with a wet washcloth to clean me up. Then she sensuously ran her nails down my chest and stomach. She caressed my balls and ran her fingers across my inner thighs. I was already aroused again. She fetched another condom. Then she fell forward on her hands and knees. I seized the opportunity and mounted her from behind. My hands grabbed her ass, and I thrust in and out of her. I continued to pound her from behind, pressing myself deeper and deeper inside her, my balls banging hard against her, until with a groan I finally spurted into the condom.
I was spent after our vigorous fuck session, my animal passions released. Kathy gave me a bottle of water and complimented me on my shirt. “You’re nice,” she said. Then it was time to leave.
By the time evening came, I was already feeling again the pull of that “insatiable lust.”
“Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives,” says Camille Paglia. But it’s more than just an escape. Porn can be profoundly liberating. Transgressing the traditional cultural taboos or religious mores surrounding sex, porn displays human sexuality in its raw and uncensored state. It subverts conventionally sanitized depictions of sexuality (“romance”). Porn is not bound by the constraints of marriage or bourgeois morality. Indeed, one scholar writes that “a sexual suspension of the ethical is a pre-requisite for seeing it pornographically.” Violating the taboos bound up with conventional morality is itself a source of pleasure. “To know that the sexual has triumphed over the moral could add to the sense of sexual liberation.” The “illicit triumph of sexuality” over morality is most vivid in “the fantasy of sexual desire overcoming some of the biggest taboos.”
One porn production company invites viewers to “give in to temptation,” boasting of scenarios where “mothers sleep with their daughters’ boyfriends, step-brothers shamelessly seduce step-sisters, and fathers eye their teen daughter’s best friend.” The premise is that “when passion takes over,” the moral compass is disoriented, and “what’s wrong seems right in the moment.”
“But behind closed doors, these Mormon girls are anything but innocent.”
“I always found things that are taboo attractive,” said the actress who depicts “Sister Rose” aka the Mormon MILF (“a total f*cking slut”) on MormonGirlz.com. As a dominatrix outside of adult films, she delved into religious role play. Eroticizing the religious can be a way of subverting sexual repression and its concomitant guilt. The sexual ethics of the Latter-day Saints are famously restrictive.
Yet there is also an inherent eroticism in Mormonism. One Mormon pornographer (really!) says, “Mormonism has always been seen as a place for secret sexuality. Ever since Joe Smith was secretly marrying [multiple] wives, people have thought of the Church as a sexually libertine one that was a danger to the mainstream way of life.”
MormonGirlz.com depicts sumptuous young women attired in temple garments as they navigate the rituals of a polygamous sex-crazed cult. Erotic explorations between missionaries in the bishop’s office and the insemination of these Mormon girls by the cult’s leaders in the precincts of the temple are standard fare.
A similar dynamic animates something else I’ve recently been getting off to: nun porn.
It’s not a theme new to the Internet age. Sally Munt remarks that “a whole subgenre of sexually titillating manuscripts” exploring the sexual desires of nuns has been produced for centuries. “Nun pornography is…one aspect of the vast, diffuse eroticisation of Catholicism enjoyed throughout Western culture.” Venus in the Cloister (1682) depicts a novice learning about sexual pleasure through frequent liaisons with monks. In La Religieuse, Diderot depicted a young nun ravaged by her lesbian abbess. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was the work of a 19th century Canadian which presented convent life as unrelieved debauchery. Italian filmmakers in the 1970s produced a series of “nunsploitation” films such as The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine.
“The nun is the woman above sex,” wrote a British psychiatrist. The habit and veil attempt to conceal her sexual identity. Yet veiled desires, nun-themed pornography suggests, cannot long be supressed. In the Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe writes of one alluring nun, “Hers was the contour of a Madonna, with the sensibility of a Magdalene.” There is a dialectic between the chaste and the erotic. Her attempt at desexualization is never completely successful. The nun’s habit is the testimony of her purity, a purity which is nevertheless precarious.
That purity is despoiled in porn. Profane lust overwhelms the sacred. Virtue is no match for vice.
My regular “go-to girls” are no longer available. Betty is on hiatus. Sara retired. But Tammy the secretary is back looking to reunite with old clients. I gave her a call. We made an early evening appointment.
Tammy’s boss, she told me during an earlier appointment, permits her to keep a flexible schedule. (The boss is obviously unaware that she leaves the office to moonlight as an escort.)
I navigated through the brutal rush hour traffic and arrived at her downtown hotel. Tammy was delayed, so I waited in the lobby. Finally she texted me to come up to her room. Once inside, she greeted me in casual attire – a pair of jeans and a tight sweater which showed off her ample bosom. She had lost some weight since the last time I saw her. She’s a friendly MILF and asked about my day. I told her about some of the stress I’m under. “Well, I’ll just have to take care of that!” she responded. She leaned in to kiss me, her body grinding against mine. She remarked that we were both overdressed. I helped lift her sweater off of her. She got up and pulled down her jeans. She reached around her back and unhooked her bra. My finger playfully tugged at the side of her thong panties. Soon those were off, too. I hurriedly undressed in response to the sight of her round ass and plump tits. She caught sight of my erection. She positioned me on my back on the bed, then pulled a condom from the drawer. She slowly kissed her across down my chest, then went down and started licking my balls. She gently stroked me, using my own precum as lubricant, then put on the condom. She lowered herself onto my cock and guided my cock inside her. My hands grabbed that ass. She rode me slowly at first, her big breasts in my face. My mouth sucked on her perky nipples. Her moans heightened my arousal. I enjoyed the feeling of her warm, fleshy body atop mine. Then she started riding me harder, her breasts bouncing. I responded, thrusting faster and faster, harder and harder. She leaned down and kissed me hard, her tongue deep into my mouth. My body tensed, and I let out a deep groan.
We disengaged, and Tammy got a warm, wet washcloth from the bathroom. She suggested a couple of local restaurants where I could get something to eat. We dressed, gave each other a quick kiss, and I left the hotel into the chilly evening.
“The Christian church plays the central formative role in limiting and thwarting our sexual phantasie.”
Carter Heyward
German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle wrote of Phantasie, the use of imagination to transcend the limits of present reality. Sexual phantasie can be conceived as sexual imagination, the dynamic expansion of our sexual horizon. And at the heart of sexual phantasie is fantasy, the imaginative escape from real-life sexual restraints.
My sexual imagination was forged in the crucible of a religious culture which imposed an “obsessive, proscriptive attitude” toward sexuality. From purity culture, I learned that one’s essential worth consists in maintaining “purity,” that is, in abstaining from being sexual. When I wasn’t suppressing my sexual urges, I was convicting myself of the sinfulness of unrepressed sexual obsessions. “Impure thoughts” were condemned as adultery against a future spouse. My erotophobia stifled any sexual exploration.
But there was Genevieve.
Genevieve was a fellow freshman at my private Christian high school. Petite and pretty with long brown hair, I couldn’t help but notice her. And I couldn’t help but notice her massive chest. I had only the most rudimentary notions of sex (I thought oral sex was talking about sex), but I fantasized about Genevieve. I wondered what wonders lay under her skirt. As I marveled at the fullness of her breasts, admonitions to take thoughts captive sounded hollow. Guilt inevitably accompanied my erotic imaginings. Whenever Genevieve shyly smiled at me, though, I lusted in my heart.
Despite my best efforts to control it, my erotic imagination intensified. I undressed Miss Singer, my comely young English teacher, in my mind. I furtively sneaked off and masturbated to images of Anna Kournikova. I developed a fetish for the lacy lingerie that (barely) covered my favorite Victoria’s Secret models. My religiosity tempered my fantasies and clothed them in shame, but they couldn’t be quelled entirely.
Oh, Anna….
Tina’s kids are watching VeggieTales in the nursery. She’s in my office for more adult pursuits. I press her against the wall, hike up her skirt, and pull down her panties. She wraps her legs around me. I hear some other parishioners in the hallway outside. No matter. I roughly fuck her against the wall — hot, wet, sticky, creamy. She strains to muffle her moans of pleasure. I’m intent on sending her back to her kids with my sperm swimming inside her….
My erotic imagination has certainly expanded since then. My exposure to porn surely has contributed. More so, becoming sexually active has allowed me to penetrate (no pun intended) the mystery of erotic experience. My hypersexual imagination now filters much of my life through an erotic prism. As I write this sentence at Starbucks, I’m spying two young college girls in line, their tight leggings hugging their legs. Visions of the blonde going down on her friend dance in my head.
My sexual imagination has a momentum of its own.
I drew closer to Sister Agnes. “I don’t think you’ll be needing your habit any longer.” I reached for her veil and slowly took it off her head. She removed the pins from her hair and allowed her beautiful brown tresses to frame her face. Then she slowly removed her habit, which she allowed to fall to the church floor. She stood before me in her simple underwear: a plain white bra and white cotton panties. She unclasped the back of her bra and allowed it to fall down.Her round, pointy-tipped breasts were quite lovely. She reached down and slipped off her panties, revealing an unshaven patch of dark brown pubic hair. She took my hand, and I led her to the altar. I told her to lie on it. She hesitated, then climbed on top of the altar and spread her knees wide. I climbed on top of her and guided my cock to her opening. She shivered as it started to slide it in. I felt the tip of my cock against her hymen. I paused for a second, marveling at the thought at what I was about to do….
Freud believed sexual fantasies were a window into the psyche. Sex researcher Justin J. Lehmiller made an interesting discovery:
People who were religiously affiliated and who, presumably, had the most sexual constraints placed upon them, tended to fantasize more about breaking free of them. Specifically, they were more likely to fantasize about a range of novel and taboo sex acts. They seemed to be demonstrating what psychologists call reactance, the idea that when our perceived freedoms are threatened or when we’re pressured to adopt a certain view or attitude, we respond in a way that’s opposite of what the authority or requestor wants. In other words, rather than getting in line, we rebel.
My hands run through Khloe’s blonde hair as she aggressively sucks my cock. Kara plants a deep kiss on my lips before joining her sister on her knees before me. As Khloe continues to work on my shaft, Kara takes one of my balls into her mouth. Then Kara positions herself on the edge of the bed and spreads her legs. Khloe looks on as I penetrate her sister. I establish a steady rhythm before Khloe comes in to make out with me.Minutes pass before Khloe pouts that she wants to get in on the fun. I lie on my back. Khloe gets on top and furiously rides me.Now its time to make out again with Kara. Or is it Kara who’s riding me as I passionately kiss Khloe? It makes no difference….
Shadow Self
I’ve long struggled with my shadow self, that dark part of my psyche which contradicts my public commitments. I’ve been incapable of accepting my erotic imagination. My personality is fractured. In the struggle to repress my desires, I’ve lost control of them. My fantasies expose the perversity at the heart of my sexual rebellion.
Dr. Sheffield’s undergraduate students would never imagine this. Their cool, calm professor, who has mastered Ugaritic and is an expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls, was utterly servile before me: bent over her desk, skirt pulled up, her panties stuffed in her mouth. Her heart-shaped bottom was as red as a rose, but I wasn’t done yet. SMACK! She flinched and whimpered as she endured yet another spanking. SMACK! She had discovered the pleasure that can only come from humiliation and pain….
Sexual fantasies are the ultimate expression of erotic freedom. In my “straight” life, I hide and suppress my deepest, darkest desires. Even as I have become more sexually adventurous, my inner erotic life is marked by a yearning for deeper exploration. In my sexual phantasmagoria, all is possible. I can athletically bang Amy Adams. Or the young barista behind the counter. A threesome with Mrs. Sexton and her nubile daughter is vividly enacted. Molly the prudish librarian is stripped of her virginity in the stacks, and no pretty pastor’s wife is safe from debauchment. Liberated from social, religious and moral strictures (as well as the constraints of time, space, and plausibility), my erotic imagination occupies a liminal space between right and wrong, good and evil, the sacred and the profane. It’s a space of raw uninhibited honesty.
Journeying to the deepest and darkest corners of my psyche, I’m confronted by a deep reservoir of shame. “Some desires aren’t desirable,” I recall being told. My rigid conservative upbringing narrowly defined “normal” sexual behavior. The things I dream of doing, the unspeakable thoughts that sear my mind and make my pulse race — they are condemnable. Yet my polymorphic perversities are not so easily tamed. I filter sex through a dark lens.
This week a colleague called me “quiet and poised.” Little does she know of the lust that burns inside me.
It was this lust that directed me to Sarah’s hotel room. Having received her e-mail detailing her visit, I promptly set up an appointment. Having seen each other before several times, we’ve developed a nice rapport. Friendly conversation soon leads to us disrobing and our bodies twisting on the bed. Tonight my hands latched onto Sarah’s thick hips as she rode me. As I watched her big titties flop up and down, I heard her breathy, girlish squeals. The sounds that come from sex are primal. As my preternatural shyness dissolved, I caught myself emitting some low moans. Then we moved on to doggy style. The air was punctuated by her squeals and my rhythmic grunts. Then she shrieked. I started to lose myself in the throes of passion. My grunts grew deeper and louder. I couldn’t restrain my animalistic urges. As I came, a cry I couldn’t suppress escaped my throat.
I live in an area populated by a number of smaller colleges. One of the benefits is espying college girls on a warm spring day.
This afternoon at a coffee shop, I had an eyeful of young, nubile college girls. In short skirts. Shorts. Tank tops. Long billowy legs. Cleavage. My hypersexual imagination went places.
The girls at my conservative Christian college dressed much more modestly and were (theoretically, anyway) committed to purity. These girls seem to advertise their sexual availability.
I’m not that much older than them, but part of their allure is that they have an aura of the forbidden about them. I haven’t been with a college girl. I’m hoping to do some teaching at the college level shortly, and more than once have I fantasized about having a cute little undergrad on her knees before me. Or bent over a desk.
I recently discovered a new escort listing site. Taking a break from my final paper on Lacan and the “triumph of religion,” I browsed the site and happened upon a comely young blonde visiting from the Midwest. Despite being pressed for time, I couldn’t resist. I contacted “Hayley,” got screened, and arranged an early evening appointment.
Petite but busty, Hayley met me in her hotel room attired in lacy red lingerie. She’s a quiet girl, younger than I anticipated, and our efforts at conversation were halting. She subtly removed her lingerie. I followed suit and removed my clothes. We climbed on the bed. She let me caress her silky soft porcelain skin. My hands found their way to her breasts. My mouth then found its way to her nipples. More caresses and kisses, then she whispered in my ear, “Are you ready to be inside me?” The condom went on. She lay back and spread her legs. I climbed onto her and pressed the head of my cock between her pussy lips, easing slowly into her. She spread her legs wider. My body rocked on top of her, my mouth kissing the smooth flesh on her neck. I began to pump furiously for what seemed an eternity, then I finally reached bliss.
Lutheran Guilt 