I recall one encounter with Rhonda in which I caught glimpse of us in flagrante delicto in her bedroom mirror. Even with my poor eyesight, I saw myself plowing Rhonda doggy style on her bed. Yet it was as if I was watching another person. My mind could not accommodate an image of me having sex. Having been taught to despise the sinful flesh, visual evidence of my carnal indulgence contradicted my self-concept. I struggled to accept that I am a sexual being.
Rhonda noticed my tendency to intellectualize, which has shaped my understanding of religion. This probably explains why I’ve gravitated to the study of theology. “In the Christian West, theology has too often been a disembodied enterprise,” writes James B. Nelson. “It has been understood preeminently as a rational discipline, a matter of the head.” Academic theology, still in thrall to the Cartesian reduction of the self to the mind, gives short shrift to personal religious experience. I’ve tended to reduce religion to a matter of belief. Belief is understood as a cognitive assent to a proposition. To the extent that belief outwardly expresses itself, it does so in the form of rules that are to be followed. Sex is understood within a matrix of rules, which entails prohibitions against an array of behaviors.
And yet so much in Christian spirituality and Christian life is flesh-denying, flesh-despising, flesh-devaluing. It is head-centred, ponderous, life-extinguishing, devoid of passion. . . . It is disturbing to see how Christian history and Christian spirituality has been so marred by a highly ambivalent tradition which, while officially rejecting gnostic denials of the goodness of the flesh, has nevertheless been affected to a great extent by those gnostic tendencies….
Kenneth Leech
I’ve also inherited the body/spirit dualism that has marked Christianity since the early church. “Much of early Christianity is a sustained polemic against bodily instincts [and] sexual desire,” notes Mark I. Wallace. (“It is well for a man not to touch a woman,” 1 Cor 7:1.) Paul’s opposition of “flesh” and “the Spirit” implicitly disparages sex and the body. Augustine made this critique explicit by attributing carnal desire to the Fall. Elaine Pagels writes, “Ever since Eden…spontaneous sexual desire is, Augustine contends, the clearest evidence of the effect of original sin.” Inheriting the Platonic elevation of the mind over the body, Christian thought emphasized the weakness of the body and the need to exercise control over it, lest the soul be endangered by the lustful flesh. (The obliteration of reason during sexual passion was a big reason why Augustine was so suspicious of it: “So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is an almost extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.”) “Man became like the beasts when he came to practice sexual intercourse,” lamented Clement of Alexandria. Early Christian communities exalted virginity and celibacy, marking the victory of the soul over the body. The church, according to historian and sexologist Vern L. Bullough, “continually emphasised that the sexually active person was a sinner.” One scholar summed up this tradition as “erotophobic.”
“But I am carnal”
Romans 7:14
I became estranged from my own body. Displays of affection have always been uncomfortable for me. (I’m not a hugger.) As I strove for purity, I tried to exercise self-control and master bodily passions. But lust is not so easily tamed. When Summer in her cheerleader uniform triggered an erection, I learned, in Augustine’s words, that “the genital organs have become as it were the private property of lust, which has brought them so completely under its sway.” Although I struggled to exercise reason and spiritual self-discipline, my body rebelled against my efforts to subdue it. “He could not obey himself.” As my disobedience accelerated, I disassociated my “real” self from my corporeal self. That’s why I couldn’t recognize myself in the mirror. It had a feeling of unreality to it. I was performing sexually without being fully present in the act. This discrepancy of selves is so discordant that I have trouble making sense of it.
All of which helps to explain how I’ve come to depersonalize sex. This doesn’t mean that my sexual encounters, even paid sex, has been devoid of elements of affection. The experience of sex for me, however, is centered on the pleasure inherent in the act itself. Sex is reduced to fucking. My early experiences with call girls were instructive. Prostitution exposes with blatant honesty the romantic fictions artificially attached to sex. The zipless fuck without pretensions of intimacy or attachment appeals to me.
Lutheran Guilt 