“Philip” is a single young man completing a PhD at divinity school and serving in lay ministry at a Lutheran parish. The product of a traditional religious upbringing, he struggles to reconcile his sexual behavior with his calling.
I had a brief meeting with Anne in my office this afternoon. Next month, we’ll have an initial meeting of young adults in the parish who are interested in participating in a structured group. She volunteered to make an announcement after service next Sunday and write up something for the newsletter. She envisions something informal at first — a Bible study followed by a social get-together. I admired her enthusiasm and initiative.
I also admired the shapeliness of her figure. The way her black hair contrasts with her porcelain skin. Her piercing blue eyes. I could see the outline of her bra through her shirt. Her deliciously round derriere enraptured me as I escorted her to my office.
My imagination took over after she departed. What kind of girl is Anne? Is she the girl who was the president of her high school’s True Love Waits® club who is valiantly intent on “saving herself”? Or is there a temptress beneath her sweet exterior?
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?”
As much as possible, I try to compartmentalize my “church” life from my sex life. Excluding my brief (and intense) fling with The Deaconess, I haven’t become sexually involved with any woman from my parish. Some of it is probably a mechanism to reduce the dissonance in my life. I try to compensate for my sexual guilt through my work in ministry. In the #MeToo era, relations between church leaders and congregants are especially dangerous. Sexual misconduct is grounds for dismissal from ministry.
“Anne” is tempting my restraint.
Anne’s relatively new to our church. She’s a single twentysomething Christian school teacher who remarkably resembles Shannen Doherty on Charmed. In the classes I’ve taught, she’s revealed herself to be whip-smart. (Tonight she made a long but penetrating digression on The Pilgrim’s Progress.)
Tonight she came up to me after class. She said was interested in forming a young adults group in our parish and asked if I could be of assistance. With church and school, I’m pressed for time as it is, but I agreed to help because
A young adults group would be an excellent ministry and advance our mission.
It would give me the opportunity to spend time with Anne.
Was Anne signaling any attraction to me? I doubt it. Still….
What followed was what Catholic moral theology used to call delectatio morosa.
Anne’s welcoming smile turning into a naughty smirk….panties falling to the floor….pushing open her thighs….her nails pressed into my hips, pressing me deeper into her….a shriek of pleasure.
I recently watched the movie First Reformed about the crisis of faith of a Reformed pastor. It got weird toward the end, but the film culminates in the suicidal pastor embracing a young pregnant widow he had been counseling (played by Amanda Seyfried). Implicit in the embrace is the sexual consummation which will follow. One heterodox interpretation could be that even when faith is obscured by doubt, shards of salvation can be glimpsed during sex.
One female pastor confessed that her sexuality was “like pieces of a puzzle that I haven’t put together yet.” I haven’t put that puzzle together, either.
I’m meeting “Colleen” for coffee tomorrow evening. Mrs. Swan from the adult Sunday school class I teach set us up. “She’s such a nice girl!” Mrs. Swan enthused. As a single young man in ministry, this isn’t the first time a parishioner has arranged a date for me.
Colleen and I have communicated with each other via e-mail and text. She really does seem like a nice girl. She graduated from a local Christian college and is a child counselor. She’s active in her church. She adores coffee and the works of Tim Keller. She’s, um, not unattractive. Her online blog evidences a genuine spirituality. One of her recurrent themes is a desire to be a “Proverbs 31 woman.”
Most of the young women I’ve dated fall into this mold. I’m genuinely attracted to that type.
But I can’t seem to resist a “Proverbs 7 woman”: And behold, a woman comes to meet him, dressed as a harlot…. “I have sprinkled my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon. Come, let us drink our fill of love until morning; Let us delight ourselves with caresses.”(10, 17-18).
In my experience, dating and sex have generally been separated. Growing up, I somehow was conditioned to distinguish between “good girls” and “bad girls.” Good girls were the ones you accompanied to Bible study, innocently held hands with, and chastely kissed on the cheek at the end of the night. Of course, good girls don’t think about sex. They’re pure and untainted. Bad girls were literally soiled. “Damaged goods.” There’s an OKCupid question that asks: “Could you respect someone you slept with on the first date?” At a certain level, I honestly have to answer, “No.”
But I’d still gladly sleep with her.
In The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti critiques the cultural shibboleth that a young woman’s moral worth is dependent upon whether or not she is sexually active. “Women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs.” “Dirty girls” demonstrate a lack of character by their inability to abstain from sex. “Unable to live up to the ideal of purity…many young women are choosing the hypersexualized alternative that’s offered to them everywhere else as the safer–and more attractive–option.” If you can’t be a virgin, you might as well be a slut.
I couldn’t imagine committing myself to a young woman who wasn’t saving herself for marriage. But good girls seriously devoted to preserving their chastity aren’t fuckable. Since good girls were off limits, I subconsciously channeled my erotic energies toward women who advertised their sexual availability, divorcing sexual expression from romantic affection. Sex was dirty, so dirty girls were the ones you went to for sex.
Prostitute use is exciting not simply because it involves sexual contact with a…‘whore’, but also because this contact represents an act of vengeance against ‘good’ women’s demands for monogamy and sexual restraint.
– Julia O’Connell-Davidson
Mine is a classic case of the Madonna-whore complex. Love and sex are not equivalent. Ideally I’d find a nice girl who loves sex. Yet I can’t seem to even conceptualize that. I date Proverbs 31 women. I fuck the woman from Proverbs 7.
“I have made a covenant with my eyes; how then could I gaze at a virgin?” (Job 31:1)
As part of my pledge of purity, I made a “covenant with my eyes.” That is, I promised not to look lustfully at a woman. Thinking naughty thoughts about Rachel in English class? Take those thoughts captive. Staring at the blonde in a miniskirt? Avert my eyes. Smitten with the buxom Dallas Cowboys cheerleader on TV? Change the channel.
I failed, of course. I tried. I tried to suppress those thoughts, to find freedom from lust. I’d have small victories. Then a peek of cleavage, and I’d succumb to concupiscence. A feeling of shame engulfed me as my cock hardened.
But I still couldn’t stop looking.
The female form enraptures me. It invites my gaze.
And my lust.
This is the female form,
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot.
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor,
all falls aside but myself and it….
– Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric”
I’m not the only one.
And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon (2 Sam 11:2).
“Woman’s billowy body reflects the surging sea of chthonian nature,” Camille Paglia writes in Sexual Personae. Feminists object to objectification and religious moralists condemn lust, but the female body is a locus of desire.
She sits across from me as we ride into the city. Long blonde tresses frame her pretty face. She’s intently reading her book. Light is reflected off her nail polish. She shatters my cool reserve. I try not to stare. My eyes dart from my phone to her presence.
She crosses her legs.
Her boots almost go up to her knees. Her skirt drapes her thigh. Dark stockings cover the rest of her legs.
“Legs are the gateway to what lays between them.”
“The female body always holds the promise, the suggestion of sex,” one female psychologist notes.
“The Birth of Venus,” William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1879).
In the Sumerian myth of Enlil and Ninlil, the god Enlil spies Ninhil bathing and is struck with lust at the sight of her naked body. His desire is then consummated in sexual intercourse with her. The myth affirms that the female body is visually attractive and sexually alluring, seductive and irresistible to the male gaze.
The inherent eroticism of a woman’s body dooms, for me at least, any covenant I may make with my eyes. Erasmus in his Enchiridion Militis Christiani identified the female body as a provocation for lust. In Whitman’s words, “what was expected of heaven or fear’d of hell, are now consumed” by the appearance of the female form.
A lingering cold tempered my lust the past few weeks. My cough finally subsided, and this morning at church I was overcome by carnal desire. I scanned my options. Many providers screen and so require advanced notice for an appointment. My class schedule couldn’t accommodate the drive to see Betty. “Hayley” seemed intriguing, but she was also located some distance away. So I turned to an old standby I hadn’t seen in a while. I called Joyce and booked an “extended lunch” with Sara.
I made the drive to the old city and stealthily made my way to her cozy loft. As promised, Sara was there. She was wearing a tight black teddy and high heels. She offered me a glass of water and some pleasantries followed. She led me to the bed. After an invitation to “get comfortable,” I stripped down. It was impossible not to notice my erection. At the foot of the bed, Sara positioned herself on her knees and commenced a slow, sensual blowjob. I tousled her blonde hair as she pleasured me, bringing me to the edge and back. Then we got on the bed. I lay on my back as she teased me before finally straddling me and offering me the forbidden fruit between her legs. I groped her breasts as she fucked me. Having been deprived of intimate relations for several weeks, it was an emancipation of the flesh. I came so hard, I was afraid I had broken the condom.
I recently stumbled upon Linda Kay Klein’s Pure: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a Generation of Young Women and How I Broke Free. It details the personal journey of a young women who came of age in the purity culture and how it warped her sexuality. While the book is narrated from a female perspective, I recognized much of the culture she described from my own personal experience. Girls were admonished to dress and behave modestly lest they become “stumbling blocks” for boys. An “impure” girl was considered to be damaged, akin to a chewed-up piece of gum. Sexual impurity isn’t confined to actions; inappropriate thoughts and feelings can also render one impure. There was even an Abstinence Study Bible. It all gave the impression that sexual abstinence was essential to living one’s Christian faith. As a young evangelical woman said, “Sex is the big issue that…marks your spiritual standing with God.”
Klein found that a common experience among women formed by the purity culture was sexual guilt and shame. (Klein recounts how, even after she had left the church, she thought she was a “slut” for attempting to have sex with her boyfriend.) Premarital sexual experimentation only exacerbated this. (“Masturbation is what got me through so many years of chastity,” one woman explained.) Sexual dysfunction was common among those who practiced abstinence before marriage. (A common theme in purity literature is that a woman devoted to chastity will turn into a tigress in the bedroom upon her wedding night.)
A couple of thoughts:
I recall that girls were taught to not be “stumbling blocks” because men were easily provoked to lust. The message I received is that women, at least in part, are triggers of temptation and responsible for a man’s fall. I remember one encounter with the Deaconess in which I felt surge of contempt for her because she had not guarded her purity and had led me into sin.
While it may be more keenly felt by women, I can also relate to conflating my identity as a Christian with sexual purity. As my sexual behavior has deviated from that rigid standard, I’ve struggled with doubt.
Sex cannot be separated from guilt for those formed in this culture. Some researchers have concluded: “It turns out that those who are sexually active and have experienced abstinence education and/or have stronger beliefs that the Bible should be literally translated [a core tenet of evangelicalism], have more sexual guilt.”
Pornography is not a distortion. It is not a sexist twisting of the facts of life but a kind of peephole into the roiling, primitive animal energies that are at the heart of sexual attraction and desire.
Camille Paglia
Pornography entered my life at a relatively late age (post-college), but I soon became transfixed by it. Porn’s anarchic depiction of sexuality resonated with me as I began to express my own sexuality in ways that departed from the narrow prescriptions of traditional Christian morality. (Porn also served as a crude but remedial form of sex ed, which I had been denied at my conservative school.) The word itself is transgressive. In Greek, πόρνη (pórnē) and γράφειν (gráphein) mean “writing about prostitutes.”
I’m not supposed to look at it. Officially my denomination states “pornography is sinful.” Consumption of pornography by one in lay ministry is considered a form of sexual misconduct by my synod and subjects the offender to church discipline. Even the threat of sanction doesn’t deter me from watching porn.
Porn exposes the base desires inherent in human sexuality. Watching men and women fuck with impunity on-screen has confirmed for me that sex is untethered to emotional commitment or any other value. It’s all about getting off.
“The selfish trajectories of sexual excitement have been problematic for Christian theology since the time of Augustine,” Arthur J. Mielke writes in Christians, Feminists, and the Culture of Pornography. Feminist literary critic Camille Paglia says that there’s a dark power at work in sexuality which pornography illuminates. Psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller concluded that sexual excitement was rarely generated by love and affection. For feminist theologians, the locus of reflection on sexuality is the relational bond between two people rather than traditional strictures on particular acts. This putatively progressive reimagining of sexual ethics takes a wayward trajectory if relational commitment turns out to be largely irrelevant to sexual desire. As Mielke puts it, pornography’s challenge to theology in both its traditional and feminist expressions lies in its transgressive exposure of raw sexual desire. Pornography “subverts the communicative possibilities of sex, reminding its users that desire is a profligate and faithless master.” The “pornographic imagination” is “an inescapable part of the sin that sex is, whether sanctified by marriage or not.” A “psychodynamically informed Christian theology” must grapple with this reality and recognize that pornography testifies to “deep longings for sexual satisfaction.”
In my encounters with “progressive” or “liberal” Christian sexual ethics, I’m struck by how fundamentally conservative they are. Even ethicists who challenge the traditional paradigm, such as Margaret Farley and James Nelson, emphasize commitment and mutuality as values by which to judge any form of sexual expression. The notion of “sex as gift” is espoused. Susan Sontag countered in her seminal essay on pornography that “sexuality remains one of the demonic forces in human consciousness.” Sex can easily be experienced as curse. After being expelled from Eden, the first thing Adam and Eve are recorded as doing is fucking (Gen 4:1). One aspect of porn I find fascinating is how joyless it is. Most of it is an endless spasmic succession of cold animalistic motion. Therein lies its appeal. And its power.
Today is Reformation Day. A couple of years ago, I wrote a short piece on sex and the Reformation.
A bad cold kept me from last weekend’s party. Tonight’s class at church was preempted by Halloween, so I secluded myself at the library for much of the evening. On my way home, I stopped at a nearby convenience store. I live in a neighborhood in close proximity to a number of colleges, which means tonight the store was patronized by a number of nubile young women in revealing costumes. I found myself in line behind a fetching brunette dressed as Minnie Mouse. I struggled to hide my arousal.
Female modesty was highly prized in the Christian subculture in which I was raised. Girls were taught to not be “stumbling blocks” to young men by tempting them with revealing outfits. Long skirts and little hint of cleavage were the norm.
Fast forward to tonight, and I’m surrounded by girls in slutty costumes. Their sluttiness does have a pedigree. According to Suzanne Labarre:
Whence sexy costumes? “The historical precedent would be the sexy costumes at masquerade balls, which were wildly popular from the 18th and 19th century on,” says Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at FIT. “Respectable women would wear pantaloons or short skirts and milkmaid outfits when they went to costume parties. At the masquerade parties in London, you had costumes with a degree of body exposure. You also had artists’ balls–in Paris especially–where you had revealing costumes and some nudity.”
We’ve long had sexy costumes; it’s just that the boundaries of “sexiness” have changed. In The Masked Ball at the Opera, an 1873 oil painting by French impressionist Édouard Manet, women are depicted in disguises that show off their legs–a bold subversion of the social mores of the day. One even appears to be wearing a sailor’s outfit. “That would’ve been the equivalent of today’s sexy pirates,” Steele says. Back then, throwing on a costume, provocative or not, was a potent form of escapism. “Any time you’re allowed to wear a costume, you’re also allowed to engage in activities outside your normal behavior,” says Nancy Deihl, director of costume studies at NYU Steindhardt.
I recall Stephanie a few years ago saying she was planning on getting a sexy Little Bo Peep costume. I regret not seeing her in it.
On October 31, 1501, the Papal Palace hosted the Banquet of Chestnuts. According to a diary account by Pope Alexander VI’s master of ceremonies Johann Burchard, it was an eventful evening. William Manchester described it in A World Lit Only by Fire:
After the banquet dishes had been cleared away, the city’s fifty most beautiful whores danced with guests, “first clothed, then naked.” The dancing over, the “ballet” began, with the pope and two of his children in the best seats. Candelabra were set up on the floor; scattered among them were chestnuts, “which,” Burchard writes, “the courtesans had to pick up, crawling between the candles.” Then the serious sex started. Guests stripped and ran out on the floor, where they mounted, or were mounted by, the prostitutes. “The coupling took place,” according to Burchard, “in front of everyone present.” Servants kept score of each man’s orgasms, for the pope greatly admired virility and measured a man’s machismo by his ejaculative capacity. After everyone was exhausted, His Holiness distributed prizes – cloaks, boots, caps, and fine silken tunics. The winners, the diarist wrote, were those “who made love with those courtesans the greatest number of times.”
The fete was dramatized in The Borgias, narrated by Burchard:
It is my sad duty to report that the said habits did not remain on the comely maidens long beyond the first course. They flaunted their nakedness for the cardinals with the abandon for which Roman prostitutes are noted.
Item: 200 candied chestnuts.
The festivities began at ten and descended into debauchery around midnight. La bella Farnese distributed the chestnuts on the floor and challenged the valiant damsels to pick them up using only their nether regions, in which enterprise they showed considerable invention.
The orgy inspired German illustrator Heinrich Lossow to paint The Sin (1880).
Lutheran Guilt 