Illicit Triumph of Sexuality

“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.”

“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.