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“You’re a good size”

“You’re a good size,” Stephanie told me. After all, she had just intimately encountered it.

(I recall another escort telling me, “You have what every girl wants: a great cock!”)

I would describe my member as decidedly average. No man wants to be subpar in that department. So what is so significant about that part of the anatomy?

“The phallus is the source of life and libido, the creator and worker of miracles, and as such it was worshipped everywhere.”

Carl Jung

Rhonda knelt before me, the proper posture for worship. She faced my naked, erect penis. After a tantalizing glance into my eyes, she focused on my phallus. She believed a man’s cock was the embodiment of the divine masculine. My masculine power was on full display. She held my cock in her hands, absorbing my masculine energy. “I love how hard your cock is,” she whispered. Slowly, sensually, she suckled my lingam, beholden to its power. She was a priestess offering oblation with her lips, mouth and tongue.

This was cock worship.

D.H. Lawrence wrote:

But in a true man, the penis has a life of its own, and is the second man within the man. It is prior to the personality. And the personality must yield before the priority and the mysterious root-knowledge of the penis, or the phallus. For this is the difference between the two: the penis is a mere member of the physiological body. But the phallus, in the old sense, has roots, the deepest roots of all, in the soul and the greater consciousness of man, and it is through the phallic roots that inspiration enters the soul.

For Lawrence, the phallus is emblematic of a precognitive state, “blood-consciousness,” in which man is ruled not by his intellect but by the chthonic depth of nature. Here the animal emerges. An erection occurs only when a man abandons the “upper centres” of the mind and yields to passion. Virility is the connection to the primal force. The phallus engaged in ecstatic sexual experience is the instrument through which this connection is forged to our most authentic selves and we achieve “fullness of being.”

In Hindu Shaivism, the phallus is the object of cultic worship. In the Indian city of Rishikesh, there is a temple dedicated to Shiva. The temple consists of a small room, in the middle of which is a three-foot high phallic symbol. In Sanskrit, the word for phallus is lingam, which means “sign.” Alain Daniélou writes:

The lingam, or phallus, the source of life, is the form by which the Absolute Being, from whom the world is issued, can be evoked. . . . In the microcosm, which is to say in man, the sexual organ, the source of life, is the form in which the nature of the formless manifests itself.

In Shaivism and for Lawrence, the phallus is our connection to the life force itself.  “The penis is therefore the organ through which a link is established between man . . . and the creative force which is the nature of the divine,” writes Daniélou. Constance Chatterley in Lawrence’s John Thomas and Lady Jane says, “I know the penis is the most godly part of a man. . . . I know it is the penis which connects us with the stars and the sea and everything. It is the penis which touches the planets, and makes us feel their special light.” The phallus has a dual role, Daniélou writes:

the inferior one of procreation and the superior one of contacting the divine state by means of the ecstasy caused by pleasure (ànanda). The orgasm is a ‘divine sensation.’ So whereas paternity attaches man to the things of the earth, the ecstasy of pleasure can reveal divine reality to him, leading him to detachment and spiritual realization.

Orgasm, for both Lawrence and Shaivism, is a religious experience in which the self is transcended and we become reabsorbed, if only momentarily, into the life mystery, to “the stars and the sea and everything.” This is made possible by the phallus.

Personally, I have difficulty integrating my mind and my body. I live mostly in my head. My phallus, engorged with blood, seeking to unite with the feminine, is the antithesis to my intellectualism. Lawrence wrote, “I believe in the phallic consciousness, as against the irritable cerebral consciousness we’re afflicted with.” My cock doesn’t think; it fucks. It’s completely irrational, disconnected from reflective thought. Cogito ergo sum? No. Coito ergo sum.

My penis defines me as a man. It is the conduit for my dark masculine energy, my animalistic desire to dominate. My hard-on exhibits my primal masculine power. It isn’t politically correct. The female body is receptive, designed to be penetrated. A woman literally opens herself to the male. She is fucked. The phallus, in opposition to female passivity, is raw power. The phallus fucks. For a male, feminist Andrea Dworkin observed, “fucking is the essential sexual experience of power and potency and possession,” with “the penis itself signifying power.”

“In the end, my cock was all I had.”

Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

“You made my soul come”

“Sexuality is the fundamental pulse of the universe.”

Dr. Anya Trahan

At a cozy coffeeshop, Rhonda and I had a stimulating conversation that touched upon embodiment theology, transpersonal psychology and her new vegan blog. Rhonda was a self-described “sapiosexual,” which is another way of saying that intellectual discussions got her wet. The intensity of our intellectual intercourse was a prelude to another form of intercourse.

“The physical union of a man and a woman, in essence, is a supernatural act, a reminiscence of paradise, the most beautiful of all the hymns of praise…. it is the alpha and the omega of all creation.”

Samael Aun Weor

As I held her in my arms in the afterglow, she said dreamily, “You made my soul come.” Perhaps she meant, in D.H. Lawrence’s words, “the strange, soothing flood of peace, the sense that all is well, which goes with true sex.” I reflected on the communion we had effected. Our persons had merged bodily, and any alienation dissipated as I disappeared into her. My cock had not just fucked her pussy; it had penetrated her consciousness. During our intercourse, there was no past or future. The whole of existence seemed to be concentrated in our fucking. Our psyches were burdened only by the intensity of our ecstasy.

Rhonda sometimes teased me about my “puritanical” disposition. (“The church,” she complained, “is the last bastion of repression.”) She witnessed my sexual ambivalence. My “crackling sexual energy” (as her almost supernatural intuition quickly grasped) uneasily coexisted with a constrictive sexual ethic. For Rhonda, the sexual impulse coexists within our spiritual horizon and is integral to our humanity. According to J. Harold Ellen, “Spirituality and sexuality are part of the essence of being human. They are two expressions of the same inner life force.” Rhonda’s religious eclecticism and esoteric spirituality (she without irony called herself a “sexually liberated Christian”) allowed her to encompass a variety of erotic mysticisms — Kabbalistic, Tantric, even Gnostic Christian. Her spiritual quest included sexual experimentation. (She identified as bisexual, which was a turn-on for me.)

Rhonda believed sexual energy is the most powerful form of energy, which could explain why she liked to have a lot of sex. Our desire for sex is our most powerful spiritual expression. Sex is nothing less than than the power to create life, the essence of creation. Sexual energy is the connection to our Source. Rhonda had once spoken of having tapped into the “cosmic orgasm” during one of our “sex magic” sessions. When she came, she said, she had an intense experience of spiritual illumination.

Was our sex, then, not a form of prayer for her? Rhonda found spiritual sustenance in meditation. She encountered the transcendent when she contemplated nature. And, if her words are to be believed, she was spiritually nourished through sex. My religious background conditioned me to see sexual desire as a weakness of the flesh, a lower instinct to be overcome. There is a Manichean duality between flesh and spirit. But Rhonda’s religious imagination saw the profane as sacred and the sacred as profane. Sexual impulses, the satisfaction of our primal desires, are an expression of our spiritual yearnings. Our animal nature is inextricable from our divine nature. As opposed to my duality, she saw sex as a symbolic expression of the unity of the universe. When the polarity of masculine and feminine, the principles responsible for creation, fuses together in sexual union, it reenacts the sacred union of the Divine Masculine and the Divine Feminine (Shiva and Shakti). Or as a Gnostic proverb bluntly puts it, “When two people fuck, the whole world fucks.” No wonder she attributed a transcendental, mystical value to the sexual act itself. We were engaged in spiritual procreation. In her perspective, our fucking was an act of holy promiscuity that had cosmic significance. Her bed was an altar. Or to put it another way, sex is a sacrament. Sexual union expresses union with the divine.

In that sense, our sex was a consecration. In penetrating Rhonda, I penetrated a mystery. All boundaries dissolved. Certain ancient mystery texts affirm that in sex the mystery of union is ritually reenacted. For a few seconds, as I came inside Rhonda, my ego was obliterated. I had transcended myself in the only way I knew how, surrendering in the abyss of ecstasy, tasting (if only for a few seconds) mystery and infinity.

More Sex and the Secular

Yet more thoughts on the relationship between sex and secularism….

“I used to be a born-again Christian.”

“You were?”

“But I gave that up a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“I wanted to have sex.”

– A 46-year old woman on her loss of faith

In his essay on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault associates our cultural obsession with sex with the “death of God” and the decline of traditional religious belief. Personal liberation is sought not through participation in religious institutions but through sexual experience. In his book Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion, Phil Zuckerman wrote a chapter entitled “Sex and Secularity.” Based on numerous interviews he conducted, Zuckerman determined that sex (or rather the traditional religious strictures surrounding sex) makes “apostates” out of a lot of former believers. The “ultimate spiritual battle,” as one woman described it, between faith and sexual desire often results in the loss of the former.

“I couldn’t be a good Christian and have sex. And I guess my hormones took over and that became more important.”

– A twentysomething woman, formerly Pentecostal

The internal struggle between religious ideals and sexual urges summons contradictory impulses. “Oh, I’m not supposed to be doing this but I want to do this,” a woman remembers thinking in high school. Sexual desire itself was seemingly condemned. Many were burdened by the guilt that accompanied sexual exploration. A woman who recalls wearing a “love waits” ring in high school said, “Oral sex was all over tenth grade and — we knew we weren’t having sex — so technically we weren’t doing anything wrong that way. But we would feel guilty and cry about it…and just feel really bad.” Zuckerman concludes that suppressing one’s sex drive in accordance with traditional religious teachings can be emotionally damaging and result in a loss of faith.

“That was the first time I ever went down on a guy. And I remember being SO guilty about it…it was, like, such a deep guilt — like I had let down my future husband, I had let down God….I would just cry and cry and cry.”

– A 20-year old female college student, a former nondenominational Christian

Dr. Laura Schlesinger succinctly summarized the sexual ethics of most religions: “Holy sex is between a husband and a wife…. Unholy sex is everything else.” When the desire for greater sexual expression conflicts with this narrow definition of what’s permissible, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that many reject the worldview that produced it. Such a restrictive view of sex is, in fact, unnatural. “If there is any one form of human interaction that is ‘natural,’ surely it is sex,” Zuckerman writes. “We are neurologically wired for it, emotionally dependent on it, and physiologically designed for it.” There is evidence that secularism leads to better sex. According to multiple studies, avowedly secular people report experiencing less guilt and fear surrounding sex, as well as engaging in more sex with more sexual partners in a wider range of sexual practices, including oral and anal sex.

Sex and the Secular

Mark Regnarus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, has penned an op-ed piece in The Washington Post with a blunt thesis: “It’s not science that’s secularizing Americans — it’s sex.” The sexual revolution has engulfed the church. Changing mating patterns (which include fewer and later marriages) have had an impact, all of which are due to the ready availability of sex. “Sex has become cheap — that is, not hard to get — because it’s much less risky and consequential in the era of birth control.” For evangelicals, it has become harder to recruit new members from the unchurched because traditional sexual ethics “are making less and less sense.”

As someone who thinks a lot about religion and sex, and has uneasily accommodated them through dual identities, the article piqued my interest. Millennials have abandoned the church en masse, largely due to the incompatibility between traditional sexual ethics and their own sexual behavior. Forced to choose between the two, they unsurprisingly choose sex. Sex is understood solely in the terminology of medical science and psychology, outside (in Peter Berger’s words) the “sacred canopy.” Religion seemingly has nothing to say to their sexual experience.

As one in ministry in the church, I am bound to publicly uphold my church’s teachings on sexuality, which largely accord with the traditional ethic. My intense erotic desire has made me incapable of living out that ethic. The dissonance between my putative beliefs and my behavior, that “dance of dichotomies,” fuels much of the drama of my life.

Adapting sexual ethics to sexual reality appears, at first glance, to be a remedy. A number of theologians and ethicists have made that their project (culminating in some queer theologians finding spiritual value in anonymous gay sex). Difficulties arise, though. In Protestantism, the Bible has been the primary source of reflection for ethical deliberation. It takes some creative exegesis to explain away certain texts that seem to have clear implications for sexual ethics. The hermeneutical challenge is greater then first imagined. Historical-critical contextualization can only go so far. An integral progressive sexual ethics can be developed without much of a biblical foundation, but it then ceases to be distinctively Christian. It’s also hard to believe that theologically conservative churches will suddenly accede to this effort. (Interestingly, those churches in liberal mainline Protestantism that have accommodated themselves to the sexual zeitgeist are in steeper decline than their more conservative counterparts.) Traditional sexual ethics will remain within Christianity in some form or another.

Perhaps there’s something more fundamental going on. Is the nature of sexual desire so antithetical to normative religious practice that it’s impossible to reconcile one to the other? Most religions have adopted an ascetical approach to some degree when it comes to governing sexual behavior. Sex is seen to be potentially dangerous if not hostile to religious observance. Placing limitations on sex (whether it be monogamy, celibacy, heterosexual exclusivity) is considered vital for religious practice and spiritual development. But sexual desire is not so easily tamed, as evidenced by how frequently those limitations are transgressed. Even the threat of divine wrath cannot deter it. The church fathers condemned sexual passion because of its inherent unruliness. According to Augustine, its insidiousness comes from its irrationality, its inability to be controlled by the will.

It was Freud who famously observed that the libido is the primal energy that animates human life. It cannot be repressed. We are swayed by passion, propelled by a primitive, irrational force. Raw sexual desire arises out of the chthonic depths, evading mastery and mocking our pretensions to civilized conduct. Think of orgasm. During orgasm, one completely surrenders to passion and loses control, possessed by the sexual spasm. Eros’ dark power subverts our ideals, even our spiritual aspirations, drawing us into its vortex.

Eros and agape do not easily coexist. In Agape and Eros, Anders Nygren calls the latter the “most dangerous rival” to Christian faith. Eros promises a form of salvation that doesn’t rely on divine initiative. It seduces the soul, “terrible as an enchanter,” according to Plato. Eros is compared with raging flood waters that sweep away everything in its path. “Eros and Agape belong originally to two entirely separate spiritual worlds,” Nygren concluded. Karl Barth agreed, depicting eros as a ravenous desire at odds with Christian charity.

I’ve managed to maintain my religious identity only by compartmentalizing my life. Others have succumbed to sex, leaving the pews conspicuously empty.

Revolution

“The Sexual Revolution brought the fresh air of honesty into religious communities and laid an axe to the root of the tree of medieval sexual values,” writes Raymond J. Lawrence, Jr. in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. The Sexual Revolution was a revolution in the truest sense, in that the social order was completely upended. It was a backlash against the sexual restrictions of the Christian church, both Catholic and Protestant. Other than the abolition of clerical celibacy, Protestantism largely continued the aversion to sex that characterized medieval Catholicism. The liberalizing attitudes of the Anabaptists (i.e. free love) were were crushed along with the Anabaptists themselves. The Pietists of the 18th century ignored Luther’s progressive legacy by discounting any compatibility between holiness and sexual pleasure. (John Wesley’s sad sexual life typified Pietistic attitudes.) Actually, Catholic cultures were less sexually repressed than Protestant ones. Prostitution has historically been tolerated in Catholic countries, as opposed to Protestant lands that outlaw the practice. Extramarital sex is also more accepted in cultures marked by Catholicism. (Lawrence attributes this to Catholicism’s hierarchical structure. Sexual probity was the special concern of clergy and religious. Protestantism’s “priesthood of all believers” imposed a uniform standard of conduct.) Sexual repression reached its apex in the Victorian era, when sexual desire was divorced from marital affection. (Not susrprisingly, prostitution flourished.) Convinced that a whole-grain diet could tame the sexual impulse, Rev. Sylvester Graham invented a cracker to depress carnal cravings.

There were exceptions. The Oneida Community in upstate New York in the mid-19th century practiced “complex marriage,” a form of free love. Everyone in the community was considered to be married to everyone else. Mormonism in its infancy famously practiced polygamy. But they were anomalies. “From Luther to 1950, nothing much changed.”

The Sexual Revolution changed everything, tearing asunder the bond between sex and heterosexual monogamy.  The forces behind the Sexual Revolution were varied and complex. Alfred Kinsey’s work played a role, as most certainly did the advent of “the pill.” (Lawrence goes so far as to assert that “the sex life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King helped push the sexual freedom movement forward.”) The churches? Not so much. “The leaders of the various Protestant churches had to be dragged, for the most part, kicking and screaming into the Sexual Revolution.” Unlike Catholicism’s hierarchical system, Protestantism’s more democratic structures had to account for the sweeping changes in attitudes and behaviors. Catholic dissent has tended to be suppressed by the Vatican. A French Dominican priest named Jacques Pohier was one such dissenter. “An increasing number of priests and religious of both sexes no longer feel that to abstain from all affective and sexual life, or repress it, is a privileged means of achieving the goal,” Pohier said regarding the backlash against the discipline of celibacy. He advocated for sex education that promoted the pleasures of sex. He accused the Church of stealing sexual pleasure from the faithful. He even proposed that open marriage was not incompatible for believers. This was too much for the Vatican. Pohier was the first theologian disciplined by Pope John Paul II.

Among Protestants, special note should be made of the “clinical pastoral movement,” which began in the 1920’s, which dramatically altered how religious leadership was trained. The good of the person, as opposed to doctrine, was emphasized. It took into account the insights of psychology, especially Freud. Practically, this meant more tolerance for forms of sexual behavior previously deemed aberrant. Anton Boisen’s contributions to this movement deserve particular attention. Lawrence warns that the achievements advanced by the clinical pastoral movement in the realm of sexuality need to be formalized, otherwise “Protestantism will remain in danger of reverting, if only by implication, to the safe harbor of sex-phobic medieval teaching.”

Theology in the Bedroom

Can sex be a source for theological reflection? Not the phenomenon of “sexuality,” understood in its broadest sense, but actual sexual experience?

The Wesleyan Quadrilateral is a methodology that recognizes four sources for theological reflection: scripture, tradition, reason, and experience. Pastoral theological reflection treats lived human experience as the key source. Any authentic examination of human experience cannot exclude sexual experience. Nor does our subjectivity, our capacity for religious experience, cease when we take our clothes off.

Sex doesn’t easily lend itself to discursive analysis. “There is something about sexual passion that language cannot comprehend or represent and at best there is no reason to try…,” writes Sara Maitland. Any understanding of sex starts with having sex. And sex itself is a form of knowing. (The Hebrew understanding of the term is quite illuminating.) A female Unitarian Universalist seminarian — who brags, “I love God and I love fucking” — engages in casual sex as a way to widen her perspective: “God is important to me and I believe that if I wish to know God, I need to really know myself and know other people in a variety of contexts…. Each partner is a new perspective, a new approach to connection….” Encountering another person sexually allows access to a dimension of personally that’s undisclosed in a non-sexual context. Embodiment also means that we encounter in the flesh the creative force she calls God. Even casual sex, suggests Rowan Williams, provides access to “the body’s grace.” This grace extends beyond the boundaries of heterosexual monogamy, according to some theologians. Promiscuity provides an opportunity to extend and enjoy, in Nancy Wilson’s words, “bodily hospitality.” Some queer theologians in particular have identified sex as an inherently religious experience which illuminates the mystery of God. Patrick Cheng describes the trinity as an orgy.  Agape can be understood through eros. Sex, “the smell of our bodies when making love, our fluids and excretions, the hardening of muscles and the erectness of nipples,” in Marcella Althaus-Reed’s words, is a privileged mode of experience.

“Integration of sexuality and spirituality may call for some experimentation,” Daniel Helminiak says, “and along the way one may make some mistakes.” Has my personal sexual experimentation given me insight I would not have attained otherwise? Through the sweat and the groans and the guilt, has my erotic education been, in Tillich’s words, a “way of opening up new human possibilities?” It’s intriguing to consider that my theological formation includes the bedroom as well as the classroom.

“Theology is just like sex, the art of penetrating the mystery.”

Leon Bertoletti

No Strings Attached

I’m considering putting some effort into finding a fuck buddy. Strictly speaking, I haven’t had one before. Rhonda was sort of a “friend with lots of benefits.” The brief arrangement with the Deaconess became complicated when she developed “feelings” for me. I’ve hooked up, but never established an ongoing arrangement with a woman for casual sex.

The allure of a fuck buddy is that it’s a purely physical relationship. A “friend with benefits” describes a relationship, albeit non-romantic, with a sexual component. With a fuck buddy, all pretense to anything deeper is discarded. It’s only about sex, which both parties explicitly acknowledge. Unabashed carnal pleasure unfettered by emotional commitment appeals to me. I don’t want “feelings” to intrude. I want to keep romance out of it. I don’t want to fall in love. To be blunt, I’m looking for physical satisfaction and nothing more.

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Having a regular partner for sex would give my hyperactive libido another outlet. (Twice a week would be ideal.) Ideally, we’d meet, exchange pleasantries, fuck and say goodbye. We’d expect sex from each other and nothing more. Coffee date? Watching a movie together? No, thank you. Our arrangement would be completely compartmentalized from the rest of our lives.

Despite my preternatural shyness, I’m considering experimenting with some “casual dating” apps. Landing a sex partner with the swipe of a finger is appealing. I also have my eye on “Amy.” She’s an attractive classmate seeking ordination in my denomination. Our theologies and personalities clash, but I get the feeling that she’s a minx in the bedroom. Broaching the subject with her would be awkward, though. Perhaps at a party after she’s had one too many. Perhaps she’s also on Tinder?

Dark Ages

The Dark Ages were especially dark for sex, according to Raymond J. Lawrence in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom. Pope Gregory the Great’s (reigned 590-604) vision of sexuality was even more austere than Augustine’s. A protégé of Benedict of Nursia, he condemned the pursuit of sexual pleasure even within the bounds of marriage (“…the pleasure itself can by no means be without sin”). Sex outside marriage warranted eternal damnation. Clergy in the West should be monasticized, he maintained, although it took until the Gregorian Reform of the 11th century for celibacy to be canonically imposed. The Venerable Bede agreed with Gregory that pleasure accompanying procreation was sinful. He maintained that persons should refrain from entering a church until having washed and waited a certain interval of time since intercourse. The “Penitentials,” manuals used for assigning penances during confession, were filled with sexual proscriptions. Sex was intended only for procreation. Even various sexual positions, such as retroposition (man behind woman) and the dorsal position (woman on top), were condemned.

“The Monk Sleeps with the Wife While the Husband is Praying,” by Unknown

In comparison, Muslim scholars were relatively liberated about sex as opposed to their Christian counterparts. By the second millennium, “the claim that the best people have the least amount of sexual pleasure, was fixed and remained dominant even into modern times, in both Catholic and Protestant cultures.” The Cathars took this obsession with sexual purity to extremes, forbidding intercourse even among married couples. (They denigrated the lax medieval church as ecclesia carnalis, “the church of the flesh.”) Crushed by church authorities, they bequeathed a legacy of spiritual otherworldliness and the notion of romantic love untainted by sexual desire (including the rituals surrounding weddings that persist to this day). The medieval mindset persisted to the time of the Reformation. Thomas More’s hairshirt, worn to quell the concupiscence of the flesh, is a fitting metaphor for the epoch.

Animal

“He felt he had touched the most savage state of his nature. . . . How poets and all the others tell lies! They make you believe that they need sentiment, whereas the thing which they need more is that acute, destructive, tremendous sensuality . . . sensuality without phrases, pure, burning sensuality.”

D.H. Lawrence

“You’re reserved, but you’re passionate,” Stephanie told me as she drew her naked body close to mine.

Words others have frequently used to describe me are “quiet,” “reserved,” “reticent.” I don’t easily express emotions. I can come across as aloof.

It is only in the realm of sex where my passions are unfettered.

The raw physicality of sex entices me. All my senses are engaged. My general discomfort with physical contact with others disappears during sex. During sex I’m unconstrained, unbridled, enthusiastic. There is no more physical act than entering a woman’s body.

Rhonda remarked that I intellectualize the world around me. I’m decidedly left-brained. I usually live in my head. My commitment to rationality is swept away by sexual passion, an act that by its very nature obliterates reason. To be carnal is to be of the flesh, that is, in the body. Alan Goldman writes, “Sexual desire lets us know that we are physical beings, and, indeed, animals.” Is my deepest, most hidden yet truest self revealed in the sexual act?

D.H. Lawrence thought sex “is our deepest form of consciousness…. It is pure blood-consciousness.” By “blood-consciousness” Lawrence means pre-reflective, pre-cognitive, subconsciousness. “The ecstasy of copulation,” in Schopenhauer’s words, causes us to evacuate self-consciousness. The Greek word ekstasis means literally “standing outside oneself.” Only to the extent that the intellect can be disengaged is ecstasy possible. Perhaps the most distinguishing mark of homo sapiens is the capacity for reason, for conscious thought. This capacity disappears in sexual ecstasy. One’s sense of individuality is attenuated as two physical bodies merge together. Instinct, not reason, controls the body. Bestial noises are made by the participants. In sex we surrender our intellect and self-consciousness and open ourselves to our primal self—so that we become animals.

I live from what Lawrence called the “upper centres,” the level of self-conscious thought. Most of the time I’m wary of passion and slightly embarrassed by bodily functions. I try to defy the primal self. Is this, however, all simply an false denial of my primal self? Sex is a refuge from tyranny of the intellect. Lawrence argued that in sex we are most true to who we really are. “Sex is our deepest form of consciousness.”

“My religion is belief in the blood and the flesh, which are wiser than the intellect.”

D.H. Lawrence

Benedictine monk Sebastian Moore said that we must acknowledge that even our animalistic desires are God-given.

During one of our earliest encounters, Stephanie speculated that my reserve concealed something more primal. “There must be an animal in there somewhere,” she said with an impish smile.

Then Stephanie said in her irresistibly sweet girlish voice, “Sometimes a girl just wants to get fucked.”

Animal lust soon consumed us. We yielded to sexual abandon. Stephanie got on her hands and knees. I knelt behind her, marveling at her round buttocks and arching back. I wrapped my hands firmly around her waist, squeezed her soft flesh and entered her from behind. Soon I was feverishly thrusting into her. Fucking doggie style, in the manner of animals, we abandoned any pretense to dignity. Both of us emitted the most primitive, inarticulate sounds. I grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her back onto me as I thrust, fucking her even more intensely. The Wild Man had taken over, released from the cage of propriety, his masculine primal power on full display.

Later, Stephanie complimented me on unleashing my “wild side.”