Sanctuary

“The sexual act itself, which is performed with such lust, seeks privacy.”
Augustine of Hippo

In the private sanctuary of her modest incall apartment, my shadow self is unveiled. Years of sexual self-denial couldn’t sublimate it. A lust for flesh burns within me. In this space my identities as a divinity school student and a church minister are obscured. As I take off my clothes, I discard my public persona. Now is not the time to be pious and proper.

Sex is a way to temporarily assume identities I’m incapable of inhabiting in real life. My parishioners can’t see my erotic shadow. I’m expected to be a model of virtue. I keep my pleasures secret. Only in this clandestine space can the shadow emerge. The desire for religion doesn’t obviate the desire for sex.

“Dionysus is a dangerous god, radically foreign to the order deployed by the world according to the logos.”
Anne Dufourmantelle

Bent over her bed, I admire the curvature of her buttocks. This temptress, as Oscar Wilde put it, represents all the sins I formerly never had the courage to commit. Now I can’t resist. As I penetrate her, I surrender any pretense to sanctity. My natural reserve melts away in the meeting of flesh. My pelvis rocks back and forth as I thrust in-and-out of her, propelled by instinct. I can feel my balls swaying. The intensity of this deep pleasure of the flesh overwhelms my cognitive faculties. In my will’s inability to control my sexual arousal, I have given myself over to lust. “In sexual intercourse man becomes like a brute animal,” Aquinas observed. My bestial grunts and moans indicate that I have forsaken the way of the spirit for the works of the flesh. I’m scarcely recognizable to myself. The creaking of the bed, our copulatory vocalizations, the sound of our skin slapping together — these are the elements of our sexual liturgy. In the rhythm and flow of sex, I escape the constraints placed upon me by my religion. Sex has an anarchistic power that shatters all restraints. It is an act of radical abandonment.

In this carnal union our fundamental identities as man and woman find their fullest expression. Julius Evola wrote, “Flesh and sex are the tools for an ecstatic approximation of the achievement of unity.” They have metaphysical significance. But that shouldn’t obscure the raw reality of our fucking. Henry Miller wrote, “What holds the world together, as I have learned from bitter experience, is sexual intercourse.”

“That’s real sex that is, real passion: where you abandon all your boringly sensible thoughts, and all that tediously responsible side of yourself, as you give yourself to what you know really matters more, deep in the core of you: frantic sex.”
Fiona Thrust

We go at it harder and faster. Drenched in sweat, I drive deeper inside her. My fingers press into her flesh. Right now it’s all about the fuck. The rawness of sex punctures all pretense. In The Republic, Socrates asks, “Do you know of greater or keener pleasure than that associated with Aphrodite?” This “raging frenzy,” as Plato puts it elsewhere, consumes me. A primeval force has been unleashed, and I am helpless to tame it. Schopenhauer located the essence of the “will to live” in the “ecstasy of the act of copulation.” When I first had sex, I thought the novelty of the experience would quell my youthful curiosity. Having “gotten it out of my system,” I could return to a life of purity. Instead, the more I fucked, the more I needed to fuck. I pursued theological studies and entered ministry thinking it would curb my lust. My lust only intensified. “The person, made for sex or needing it, devoted to it, marked by it,” Andrea Dworkin wrote, “is a person incarnated restless and wild in the world and defined by fucking: fucking as vocation or compulsion or as an unfulfilled desire not gratified by anything social or conventional or conforming.”

“And all around me in my fornication echoed applauding cries, ‘Well done! Well done!'”
Augustine, Confessions

“No language has been invented to describe that supreme moment of existence” (Liam O’Flaherty). My body begins to convulse. It is exquisite agony. That ineffable moment of jouissance. “The quivering, the quick devouring fire more rapid than lightning” (Rousseau). My sexual apostasy is complete.

Then it is all over. All the tension and the lust and the ecstasy dissipates. Ennui sets in. There is little to be said between us. She pulls up her panties. I get dressed in preparation for that evening’s Bible class, leaving behind my sexual persona. I can only anticipate my next pilgrimage to, in Henry Miller’s words, “the Land of Fuck.”

Taboo

Feeling extra lustful due to this heat? Come visit!

I excused myself from church and made the hour drive to see Betty. She met me at her incall apartment in a thin black robe and invited me to sit on the couch. We engaged in a little small talk about the culture clash of driving in the South as opposed to the Northeast. I spied a book she had been reading lying on a side table. It was about the Clinton-Lewinksy scandal. After a few minutes of pleasant chatter, she stood up and undid her robe, revealing a lacy bra and pair of panties. I followed her to the bed. I complimented her on how pretty she looked.

“You look fine yourself, handsome!” she replied.

She took a condom out. First we shed our clothes, then I shed my inhibitions. I stood in front of her, my erection signaling my arousal. Then I was lying on top of her naked body. Tangled bedsheets and the faint scent of sex witnessed to our exertions.

As we lingered in bed afterwards, covered in sweat, she talked a little about her clandestine occupation. “There’s the whole taboo aspect of it,” she briefly noted. We hadn’t just broken the law — we had transgressed. And on my part, it had intensified our encounter.

“Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family–in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature,” writes Camille Paglia. The prostitute symbolizes uninhibited female sexuality. She is a rebuke to the puritanical religion of my youth, the antithesis of the “good Christian girl” saving herself for marriage. To a repressed Lutheran boy, her tantalizing offer of sweet forbidden sex elicits desire. She embodies the taboo. Georges Bataille wrote, “With prostitution, the prostitute was dedicated to a life of transgression. The sacred or forbidden aspect of sexual activity remained apparent in her, for her whole life was dedicated to violating the taboo.” Taboo, in the original sense of the word, means both prohibition and sacredness. As one sex therapist notes, “Eros thrives when boundaries are crossed.”

I recall Stephanie once lamenting about how the stigma surrounding her profession forced her into subterfuge. Paglia retorts, “The stigma of the prostitute is the badge of her identity. That is why the client goes to her. If he wanted someone without a stigma, he’d go and screw the lady next door.”

“Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop.”
Camille Paglia

I’m leading a weekly study on C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity. Tonight we reviewed Lewis’ thoughts on sexual morality. “Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues,” Lewis writes, upholding traditional Christian sexual ethics. “[T]he old Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’” I explained Lewis’ argument. My conservative parishioners nodded in agreement. They’re oblivious to the fact that just a few hours earlier, I was briskly fucking a call girl. No one is privy to my secret transgression.

Lusts of Their Hearts

I recently discovered that the Deaconess has resigned from rostered ministry in our denomination and is “no longer eligible to receive a call.” I haven’t been in contact with her since we broke off our entanglement, so I have no way of knowing what prompted her decision. Part of me wonders if her struggles with chastity and fidelity drove her from ministry.

After one steamy encounter with the Deaconess, in a surge of post-coital guilt, she awkwardly confessed to having fervently prayed for “deliverance” from her “bondage” to sexual disobedience. She struggled with her unanswered prayers.

Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity (Rom 1:24).

Paul uses the word paradidonai (“handed them over to”) to describe God’s act of judgement on those who “took pleasure in wickedness” (2 Thess 2:12 KJV). Another way of putting it is that they have been “abandoned” by God.

It’s a frightful passage. Right now I’m under no illusions about being capable of seriously pursuing a life of purity. The lust (epithumia) that grips my heart craves that sin which is forbidden. “The heart is deceitful above all else and desperately wicked. Who can understand it?” (Jer 17:9). The extent of my impurity (fornication, soliciting prostitutes, adultery) indicates a downward spiral into sensuality. I know I am without excuse. I’ve prayed, fasted, memorized Scripture, committed myself to ministry. My craving to indulge my fleshly desires, however, has only intensified. Have I passed the point of no return?

I think back on those furtive couplings with the Deaconess. Despite our positions in ministry and grounding in Christian morality, we couldn’t seem to resist our “degrading passions” (Rom 1:26). Had we, too, been abandoned?

Youthful Passions

One of the Bible verses burned into my memory growing up in the “purity culture” was 2 Timothy 2:22: “Flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness.” With “a pure heart,” we were exhorted to battle lust (which I understood to be synonymous with sexual desire) and guard our chastity. We were not to give in to the desires of the flesh. A single sexual sin could jeopardize our relationship with God. We were encouraged to resist mounting pressure from our peers and the media to have sex. “Holiness” was synonymous with “purity.”

“But I see in my members another law waging war” (Rom 7:23).

My erection betrayed me.

In youth group, when I would shyly interact with “Summer,” I tried to honor her purity. I averted my eyes as best I could from her protruding bust, her round rear. I did my best to banish impure thoughts about her. We always behaved chastely when we were together.

But Summer made me hard.

Philosopher Alain de Botton observes, “[T]he wet vagina and the stiff penis function as unambiguous agents of sincerity.” My erection revealed, to my shame, the true depth of my lust. No matter how hard I tried to take those thoughts captive (cf. 2 Cor 10:5), those unforgivably dirty thoughts I had about Summer always came back. I believed that I was called to be pure in heart. If erections are “particularly true and honest indices of interest,” as Botton suggests, what did every hard-on, every dirty thought, every intense desire to violate my pledge to remain pure reveal about my heart’s intentions?

I had been invited to facilitate a Bible study one night for our parish’s support group for single moms. Somehow the discussion turned to sex. (Awkward. Despite my obsession with the matter, I find it hard to talk about sex in public.) One of the participants (young and pretty, she reminded me of Alexis Bledel) startled her peers by saying, “No normal human being can abstain from sex. And God doesn’t really expect us to. I know God will forgive me for having sex.”

My faith tradition continues to place severe restrictions on sexual expression. As one official Lutheran theological statement bluntly puts it: “Sexual intercourse engaged in outside of marriage is forbidden by the Scriptures and must be condemned by the church.” The New Testament explicitly condemns πορνεία (porneia), commonly translated as “sexual immorality.” Accordingly, I made a commitment to my church that as a single person I would “live a chaste life.”

“It was like entering a time warp back to the 1950’s,” she said, referring to encountering our denomination’s policy mandating celibacy for single persons seeking ordination. “There’s this assumption in the pews that you just don’t have sex.” She thought the prohibition patently unrealistic. “We’re not monks and nuns.”

She had spent time at a Lutheran seminary as well our mainline Protestant school. On each campus, she discovered that most unmarried seminarians are sexually active. Some were in committed relationships. Some were having casual sex. Monastic self-denial clearly was not characteristic of seminary life. “Seminarians have sex, too.”

She didn’t feel comfortable discussing sexual behavior with anyone in the church. In candidacy committee meetings, she dreaded the possibility of being asked if she was living in accord with our church’s teachings. She fantasized about announcing at the next meeting, “I have sex!” and seeing what the reaction would be. (Pastors and church leaders aren’t naive. During a developmental interview, she was advised to exercise “discretion.” In other words, she wouldn’t be pressed on her sexual activity as long as she kept up an appearance of propriety. Don’t ask, don’t tell.)

She wasn’t alone. Apparently a lot of unmarried Christians are, as one commentator tartly puts it, “saved and having sex.” One recent survey determined that among young evangelicals, 80% have had sex, 64% have had sex within the previous year, and 42% are in an ongoing sexual relationship. Adolescents who had made abstinence pledges were five years later no more likely to have refrained from sex than their peers who hadn’t. Anecdotal evidence seems to confirm this. One writer told of a friend who recently ventured into online dating. Apparently the Christian women he’s dated “want to jump right from a very public conversation and a vanilla latte at Starbucks to very private whispers and physical exchanges between the sheets.”

“Kylie” is an evangelical at a secular college. She was raised Lutheran but identifies as a nondenominational Christian. She’s active in her campus’ InterVarsity Fellowship. She enjoys engaging in spiritual conversations with her fellow believers and sharing her faith journey. There’s one thing she doesn’t disclose to her colleagues in InterVarsity, though.

Kylie has sex.

She’s sleeping with her boyfriend. She doesn’t see anything wrong with it. “I started to question a lot of the teachings of my church specifically about sexual impurity including sex before marriage and homosexuality,” she wrote in her journal. She dismisses the notion that “a line in the Bible” should determine her sexual conduct. Having sex doesn’t affect her relationship with God, she believes. Her religious life and her sex life are separate. Kylie’s double life, according to Donna Frietas in Sex and the Soul, is not uncommon “even within evangelical subcultures.” Frietas writes, “Because of the strong hold of purity culture, many students learn to practice sexual secrecy, professing chastity in public while keeping their honest feelings and often their actual experiences hidden.”

I used to know a girl from a church young adults group named “Rebecca.” I recall she used to sanctimoniously condemn premarital sex. I later heard whispered rumors that she had slept with other guys in the young adults group. It would be easy to judge Rebecca a pious fraud, a hypocrite. Viewed more sympathetically, Rebecca simply couldn’t live up to her ideals. A primitive impulse had seized her body and compelled her to violate her values.

The incongruence between my religious beliefs and my sexual behavior has been a source of anguish. There is a cost to violating deeply ingrained values. As a young Christian, I adopted a set of strict morals regarding sexual behavior (i.e. the only acceptable sexual expression is confined within the context of heterosexual marriage). Eventually my behavior could no longer align with that code. “The moment I knew sin, I fucked.” At the heart of my spiritual struggle was this dissonance between my religious commitments and my sexual sin. My lofty aspirations couldn’t overcome my carnal desires. Once while dating a “respectable” girl from the church who (because True Love Waits®) refrained from all sexual expression (we didn’t even kiss), I hooked up with some other girl from my “Old Testament Method” course and visited escorts because I just couldn’t help myself. As a spiritual leader, I feel pressured to be above temptation. But in the midst of moans and cries of pleasure, as I was overpowered by the sinful flesh, the truth was revealed: I was incapable of chastity.

Veritas in coitu. Foucault said, “At the bottom of sex, there is truth.” Sex is self-revelatory. In bed we expose our true selves. There is a raw honesty in the sexual act itself. Literally stripped naked, we abandon any pretensions when we fuck. Author John Hubner writes, “Sex strips away identities it takes a lifetime to build. A naked aroused man is not a brain surgeon or a university president or a Methodist bishop. He is an animal with an erection.”

An animal with an erection. When I stand naked before a woman, my hard-on blazing, it’s a moment of confession. Regardless of my efforts to control my sensuality, my sexual appetite has confounded my attempts at mastery of the flesh. My arousal deconstructs my personality. My other attributes and commitments wither away. The shy, quiet seminarian becomes uninhibited during sexual passion. (As Stephanie teased, “You’re not reserved during sex!”) My pledge to purity could not withstand the white heat of lust. And so I kissed purity goodbye.

According to one psychologist, sex is daimonic. That is, sex has the power to seize control of the individual, overwhelming one’s rational faculties and obliterating consciousness. Freud observed that we were compelled by subconscious primitive, irrational forces. Lust exposes the primal self beneath our civilized facades. D. H. Lawrence wrote, “My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh.” He meant that our instincts contain a primordial truth obscured by he called “cerebral consciousness.” The strongest natural impulse is the sexual instinct. “In sex we have our basic, most elemental being.” This instinct is not abstract. It seeks consummation in the fleshly union of male and female in the act of sexual intercourse. “Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges,” writes Camille Paglia. Whores, wrote Sade, are the “only authentic philosophers” because they see sexual desire at its rawest, denuded of sentiment and morality. The Dionysian pursuit of sexual satisfaction brooks no restraint.

“Sex is as important as eating or drinking, and we ought to allow the appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.”
Marquis de Sade

I’ve lost the battle for purity. I haven’t been able to navigate between my sexuality and my faith. I haven’t fled youthful passions; I’ve succumbed to them.

Sex and the Conservative Church

“I began to associate sex with sin, and I imagine that it had to do with being surrounded in a conservative religion in my home, church, and school. My attitude about sex and sexuality was that it was something that only married or sinful people engaged in.”

– A young Christian woman

In Sex, God, and the Conservative Church, Tina Schermer Sellers diagnoses conservative Christianity as an incubator of sexual shame and dysfunction. Based in large part on her experience as a therapist treating clients struggling to reconcile their faith and their sexuality, Schermer Sellers explores the church’s “sex negative” ethic, which she attributes to “two millennia of sexual baggage.” (She deems the purity culture “one of the more ascetic and toxic eras in sexual ethics in the last 100 years.”)

A dualism which tore asunder soul and body is largely to blame. This attitude owes more to Greco-Roman culture than the teachings of Jesus. Plato idealized the world of the forms, disparaging the material. Sex was to be transcended through self-discipline. Later philosophers deemed sexual pleasure as inferior to other human pleasures. Stoicism subordinated bodily passion to reason, which was supposed to guide human behavior. As Christianity emerged in this milieu, it absorbed these philosophies, stamping its ethics with a perspective far removed from its semitic Palestinian roots. Early Christian ascetical practices such as fasting and the exaltation of virginity reflected this mindset and were later institutionalized in monasticism. St. Paul was certainly a formative figure in this tradition. Paul’s apocalyptic expectation gave preference to celibacy and colored his view on marriage as a means of fighting temptation (“For it is better to marry than to burn with passion” [1 Cor 7:9]). His ethics focused on the avoidance of porneia, the immorality born out of sexual frustration.

Patristic theology sought to marry Platonist thought with Christian revelation. Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Pseudo-Dionysius were notable in this regard. But it is Augustine, who Schermer Sellers calls a “sexually troubled soul,” who is most responsible for the spirit/body dualism at the heart of traditional Christian sexual ethics. Before becoming a Christian, Augustine had been a Manichaean, a Gnostic, ascetical sect which sharply divided the spiritual from the material. Peter Brown in Body and Society writes, “For Augustine the Manichaean auditor, sexuality and society were antithetical…. Intercourse, and especially intercourse undertaken to produce children, collaborated with the headlong expansion of the Kingdom of Darkness at the expense of the spiritual purity associated with the Kingdom of Light.” Not only was sexual activity abhorred; even sexual thoughts were verboten. Augustine later renounced and condemned the Manichaeans, but he retained a deep-rooted suspicion of sexuality. Augustine believed sexual “desire was the result of human sinfulness and disobedience to God,” according to Merry Wiesner-Hanks in Christianity and Sexuality in the early Modern World. Augustine’s profound pessimism about human nature was at the heart of his doctrine of original sin. “In his view, no other after Adam and Eve had free will; original sin was transmitted to all humans through semen emitted in sexual acts motivated by desire, and was thus inescapable.” Sexual pleasure itself was a product of concupiscence.

Augustine cast a long shadow. “His legacy of shame, fear of the body, and suspicion of its desires is with us today,” laments Schermer Sellers. Eventually it was institutionalized. The Penitentials, guidebooks for confessors assigning penances, contained, according to Margaret Farley, “detailed prohibitions against adultery, fornication, oral and anal sex, masturbation, and even certain positions for sexual intercourse if they were thought to be departures from the procreative norm.” Gratian’s Decretum, a compilation of canon law, in Farley’s words, “contained regulations based on the persistently held principle that all sexual activity is evil unless it is between husband and wife and for the sake of procreation.” The Reformation, spearheaded by the Augustinian Martin Luther, retained a negative judgement on sexual desire. Descartes’ reduction of knowledge to deductive reasoning and being to cognition can also be seen as a philosophical outgrowth of this attitude.

Go-To Girl

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“Betty” has become my latest “go-to girl.” I’ve seen her several times during the past few months. I found her on Backpage before it was shut down. She’s tall and well-built, with long hair dyed blonde. (As a brunette, she very much resembles Kristen Stewart.) She hosts in a small, drab apartment about an hour away, which makes seeing her inconvenient. (I have to drive across two state lines.) But she’s friendly in a low-key manner and very attentive.

(During our first appointment, she confessed to being nervous when meeting a new client. She apologetically checked the envelope that contained my “donation”; someone the week before had attempted to rip her off. She then invited me to tell her something interesting about myself. I gamely tried to respond, but it led to a pleasant conversation.)

Today I was stressed and frankly needed a sexual release. The virtue of a go-to girl is that she’s easy to connect with and will reliably perform. (Sara was one such provider.) A text to Betty was promptly responded to, and we arranged a mid-day appointment. She met me at her place in a blue sundress. The apartment was lit only by candlelight. After some small talk, she unbuttoned my shirt. I was already hard. She leaned into me and gave me a wet kiss. I reciprocated.

“What do you want to do?”

I motioned to the bed. She pulled off her dress and revealed that she hadn’t been wearing any underwear. Her full breasts and neatly trimmed patch of pubic hair captured my attention. We moved to the bed. Spying my erection, she said she was impressed that it didn’t require any action on her part. I complimented her on how pretty she looked. She wrapped her hand around my cock and gently stroked me. Then she took me into her mouth. I ran my fingers through her blonde hair as she pleasured me.

Betty straddled me. She started riding me, up and down on my cock. My hands grasped her waist. She swiveled her hips. My hips rocked against hers. We got into a rhythm. She leaned in toward me. I grabbed her luscious breasts. I sucked on her nipples as she continued to ride me.

Then I got on top of her. I felt her legs clasp around me. Driving myself deep inside her, I issued a series of beastly grunts. Having succumbed to passion, I fucked her with wild abandon. I strained to reach orgasm, but I finally exploded.

We talked for a short while afterwards. She said a benefit of her work was getting to “meet the opposite sex.” (Her other job as a home health care worker provides little opportunity for that.) Then the alarm on her phone went off. It was time, so we got dressed. She saw me out with a hug and kiss.

Briefest of Relationships

My holiness cannot compete with my horniness.

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Sarah the flight attendant e-mailed me this week that she was in town, making for an excellent way to release the stress from finals. She promised the briefest of relationships, no strings attached.

Sarah greeted me in her upscale hotel room with a hug and a kiss. Her voluptuous body was clad in only a blue bra and a pair of blue panties. Her red hair, green eyes and 36DDD breasts beckoned the prospect of intense pleasure. Our conversation was pleasant, but mischievous fun awaited us.

Ooh!

Yes!

Don’t stop, baby!

Sarah got on all fours. I positioned myself behind her and continued my exertions. It was sex, raw and unadulterated. I marveled at the graceful curve of her back and her deliciously plump ass. I reached underneath and fondled her breast. Mid-thrust, she turned her head back and threw me a sultry glance.

Then I lost it.

“Some things don’t change”

“Did you hear about Backpage?” Stephanie asked me as we lay naked in bed.

I told her I had read that the feds had seized the online classifieds notorious for advertising “adult services.”

Stephanie had never utilized Backpage. Many of her clients did use it as a source for providers. She didn’t understand why they didn’t stick to the more reputable local board. Some were searching for “the diamond in the rough.” On Backpage, there was a lot of rough.

I didn’t tell her that I saw a number of women on Backpage. I tread carefully on there. Amidst the flotsam, if a lady appealed to me, I’d search her reviews on The Erotic Review (TER) to see if she was legit. I managed to meet several attractive, talented professionals that way. They were probably the exceptions, though.

Now TER no longer operates in the U.S. due to SESTA/FOSTA, federal legislation recently signed into law by President Trump, who Stormy Daniels says once tried to pay her for sex. The law seeks to stop sex trafficking online by holding websites accountable for hosting solicitations for illegal sexual commerce. Of course no distinction is made between consensual activity and genuine exploitation. Some in law enforcement have expressed concern about the predictable effect of driving sex trafficking underground onto platforms that are harder to monitor.

Stephanie had just come back from visiting New Orleans for the first time. She toured Storyville, the notorious early 20th century red light district, where she saw a few of the handbills the ladies distributed. They contained offers of services remarkably similar to online ads. “Some things don’t change,” she mused.

Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force.
Camille Paglia

Steph has an established clientele and a modest online presence, so she won’t be affected much. For other providers things will become more difficult. As a client, it disrupts established ways of seeking out companions. Hopefully this dumb law will be overturned in the courts. I regret that my position in the church restrains me from publicly protesting it.

Flight from the Self

“Thus the climax of sexual union is also a climax of creativity and sinfulness…. [T]he instincts of sex are particularly effective tools for both the assertion of the self and the flight from the self. This is what gives man’s sex life the quality of uneasiness.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man

Over spring break, I took a brief road trip to another city. Staying overnight, I decided to sample some of the local “talent.” I made an appointment with “McKenzie” a few days in advance.

She arrived at my hotel room wearing a sweater and a miniskirt. Her black heels elevated her a few inches. Her long brown hair was accentuated by a few blonde highlights. She was quite cute and looked very much like the girl next door. I offered her a glass of Zinfandel, which she accepted. She sat right next to me on the short couch. In a heavy New England accent, she talked about a hockey game she had attended the night before. I peeked at her shapely legs. She must have sensed my interest, because she put her hand on my leg and sweetly suggested we head to the bed.

“The ego…may use the passion of sex, without reference to the self and the other, as a form of escape from the tension of life. The most corrupt forms of sensuality, as for instance in commercialized vice, have exactly this characteristic, that personal considerations are excluded from the satisfaction of the sexual impulse. It is a flight not to a false god but to nothingness.”
Reinhold Niebuhr

What followed was a blur of flesh and sweat, of thrusting and bouncing, of physical passion unadulterated by emotional entanglement. I ended up behind her, standing at the edge of the bed, my hands on her buttocks, our bodies jerking back and forth. Groans I couldn’t suppress escaped my mouth. I felt my face contort in tension as I pounded her. My fucking took on a desperate quality. Oblivious to everything but the slender female body bent in front of me and the surging pleasure in my loins, I strained toward that apogee when, if only for the briefest of moments, I would annihilate myself and plunge into unconsciousness.

“We fuck in order to escape and stifle the excess of the dream that would otherwise overwhelm us.”
Slavoj Zizek

“Sex Always Wins”

Can religiosity lead to sexual obsession?

Perhaps religion and sex aren’t quite that antithetical. Sexologist Dr. Susan Block observes, “Sex and God are quite often at odds, but sexuality and spirituality actually have certain key factors in common. The mystical and the erotic experience are the most intense in human life; both connect desire with awe, love, anguish, ecstasy, terror, pain and extreme logic–defying pleasure.” No wonder during the throes of erotic passion, we cry out the divine name.

The God of monotheistic religion, however, is markedly sex negative. “[T]he Bible contains far too many rules against way too many kinds of sex.” The doctrine of original sin, Dr. Block avers, links sex with sin, historically condemning sexual pleasure as literally damnable. (She predictably attributes this to the sexual dysfunctions of St. Paul and St. Augustine.) Fueled by shame, adherents of traditional religion are taught to abhor their desires.

The irony is that repression can breed obsession. Religions emphasize the restraint of primal impulses, writes psychologist Nigel Barber. Sexual modesty is stressed. Sex outside the parameters of heterosexual marriage is condemned. Sexual expression nevertheless eludes restriction. “If a devout person wants to eliminate all sexual thoughts as potentially sinful, this is much easier said than done.” It’s a basic psychological insight. If you’re told to not think about, let’s say, baseball, you’ll most likely to think about baseball. When told not to think about sex, you’ll think about sex. (This might explain the lure of pornography for sexually frustrated religious believers. Porn star Angela White says a lot of the subscribers to her website come from Utah and the Bible Belt.) “So the research evidence suggests,” Barber continues, “that, contrary to their principles, religious people are unusually bad at restraining their sexual impulses…. Perhaps religious people are poorly equipped to deal with the reality of their own sexuality.”

Excessive religiosity, especially when married to extreme sex negativity, can lead to sexual obsession and a fascination with illicit sex. Religious repression of sex feeds sexual curiosity and breeds taboos. Dr. Block writes, “Of course, the irony of creating a taboo is that, once something is forbidden, it becomes very exciting, kinky and very, very sexy. Everyone knows that naughty sex is hot sex!… So, if, according to your religion, sex is bad (and it usually is), then ‘bad’ becomes very sexy.” The French philosopher Georges Bataille believed that transgression is at the heart of eroticism. Or to put it another way, sex has to be bad to be good. Convinced that sex is bad and dirty, the religious sexual obsessive can only experience arousal if sex is experienced as sinful. The taboo thrill and the guilt, the dread and the desire, the insatiable urge — all are wrapped up in what Hawthorne called “lawless passion.” An example was given of a woman whose attendance at Bible studies and church services coexisted with sexually provocative dress and promiscuity. (Even those who have left intense religious environments report being still marked by those attitudes. An escort brought up as a Pentecostal said, “Religion made me the dirty girl I am!”)

“The secret passion of the erotic is that it puts us in touch with our animal nature,” Block writes. “So, Sex and God are pretty much at odds. An ongoing struggle between organized religion and natural human sexuality pervades civilized history. And though religion is powerful, sometimes seemingly all-powerful, somehow sex always wins.”