Classwork has gone online. Much of my work in ministry is on hold. The Starbucks with the lovely barista (tall and slender with dark rimmed glasses and long brown hair done in a ponytail, her heart-shaped ass an enticing sight before dawn) is closed. The governor has ordered us to stay home except for “life-sustaining” activities. Additionally, a health department has issued guidelines for “Sex and Coronavirus Disease 2019”:
- If you do have sex with others, have as few partners as possible.
- If you usually meet your partners online…consider taking a break from in-person dates. Video dates, sexting or chat rooms may be options for you.
- You are your safest sex partner. Masturbation will not spread COVID-19.
Most of the ladies have gone on hiatus. Yet even a pandemic cannot quell the fires of lust.
Therapist Esther Perel says, “The erotic is an antidote to death.” In The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, historian David Herlily writes that “revulsion toward death and the dead” expressed itself in sexual abandonment, most notably in orgies in cemeteries. The cemetery at Avignon Champfleur became so notorious that prostitutes solicited their services there, and a papal official threatened “fornicators and adulterers” with excommunication for their “unseemly acts.” The bacchanals were a “celebration of…victory, however temporary, over death.” Fucking was an act of existential defiance. (Boccaccio noted that this lowering of inhibitions was “a cause of looser morals in those women who survived.”)
Social distancing? I crave the embrace of a woman. That exquisite moment of penetration, the rhythmic pulsations accompanying bodies in heat, the trembling surrender of orgasmic release — social distances are obliterated during sex.
Porn and phone sex are erotic outlets during this season of imposed celibacy.
Lutheran Guilt 