“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.
A brief weekend excursion out of town concluded with a visit to “Isabelle’s” hotel room. I had arranged an appointment with her a couple of weeks earlier. Petite, busty, and a bit curvy, she met me in a sheer black robe. She’s in her early 20s, and her long brown hair framed her almost cherubic face. She’s a cosmetologist when she’s not escorting. Like a number of companions, she took an interest in my work and schooling. Then she said something interesting.
“Everyone has a right to their secrets. What goes on in here is for us to know, and them to never, ever find out.”
Then she started to seductively strip.
Soon we were on the bed and my head was buried between her thighs. She responded enthusiastically as I ate her pussy.
“Yes! Yes! Ohh, yes!”
She ended up on her hands and knees. (“My favorite position,” she teased.) I grabbed her luscious round ass cheeks, held on tight, and started pumping in earnest. The bed rocked as I thrust in and out at a steady rhythm. Soon she was meeting my thrusts. I let out a guttural grunt of satisfaction as I exploded, then I collapsed panting on top of her.
As we recovered, she suggested indulging in a little roleplay the next time we meet.
Despite the distance it takes to drive to her incall, I’ve been visiting Betty almost every week for the past few months. Her tall slender figure, pretty face, and pleasant, professional demeanor make her an attractive playmate.
Today she was attired in a demure black dress which nevertheless accentuated her ample bust. We settled into a few minutes of pleasant, innocuous conversation as I undressed her with my eyes. Then it was time to get down to business. The black dress finally came off, we both got “comfortable,” and we moved to the bed. I rubbed her shoulders, and we started to kiss. I was already rock hard. She wrapped me with a condom and started to perform a CBJ. I ran my fingers through her silky hair. She got on top of me and established a nice rhythm. I enjoyed how tight she felt. As she was riding me, I kissed her glorious tits, losing myself in the sheer eroticism of the moment. I had completely succumbed to the desire to sin, crossing the threshold between good and bad, purity and impurity. I asked her to flip over. She got in position for doggy style. I started slowly, then started to thrust harder. It was so dirty, and because of that it felt so good. One Freudian writes that “the sexual emerges as the jouissance of exploded limits, as the ecstatic suffering into which the human organism momentarily plunges” into a realm of self-shattering. I ended up on top of Betty. My body was in a frenzy by this point. For this transgressive act I had risked it all. Then came that point in which I lost control of my body, in Shelley’s words, that certain “faintness” and “abandon.” For a moment my consciousness was obliterated.
Betty retrieved a warm washcloth to clean me up. We lay in bed for several minutes and chatted. Then the alarm on her cell phone went off. It was time. We dressed in silence. She gave me a chaste kiss on the cheek goodbye, a pledge until our next rendezvous.
I was frustrated at church yesterday. A conflict with a fellow staff member left me shaken and angry. (Anger is an emotion I’m extremely uncomfortable with, and I’m averse to conflict.) I was upset all day. My class didn’t go as well as I had hoped. I needed relief. Some men (and pastors) reach for a bottle after a bad day. I’m apt to order a woman. So I braved the frigid weather, rented a room at a hotel and called Tina at the service. She recommended “Chloe.” I showered, shaved, and waited for her to arrive.
I heard a knock at the door. A cute, petite blonde with shoulder-length hair had shown up. She wore a stylish black leather jacket and tight black pants. I invited her into my room, and, after she verified my identity, we sat at the edge of the bed. Chloe is in her mid-20s, but she looks younger. The smell of her perfume was pleasant. We awkwardly made small talk. She wants to return to school and teach math.
Then she leaned in and kissed me.
Before I knew it, we were undressing. I lay on the bed stripped down to my boxer briefs. Chloe was on top of me in only her black bra and panties. We made out for a while. I reached around her back to remove her bra. I was rewarded with a pair of perky breasts with cute little nipples. I gently traced her areolas with my index finger. She pulled down my underwear and took my uncovered cock into her mouth. I ran my fingers through her soft blonde hair as her head moved up and down. I softly asked if I could get on top of her. She reached for a condom on the nightstand. As she spread her legs and I slid myself inside her, the tumult of the day was a distant memory.
I collapsed on top of her.
“You’re different,” she said as we lay in bed afterward.
I inquired how so.
“You’re so quiet and shy. Not like most of my clients.”
We talked for a bit. She was seeing a guy, but the status of their relationship was undetermined. She had been escorting for about a year. “I don’t want to do this long-term,” she said.
She got up off the bed and retrieved her clothing. After she had dressed, she asked, “Do you want me to go now?” I sensed she wanted to leave. I accompanied her to the door. We said “Good night,” and she departed.
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.”
Lutheran Guilt 