“Quinn” at Starbucks has become my latest barista crush. With her blonde hair and sizable breasts that bulge through her apron, she’s made getting a pumpkin spice latte early in the morning more enjoyable. Trying to pray Morning Prayer from the Daily Office, my mind instead imaginatively undressed Quinn. I set aside the prayer book and went on social media to peruse possible engagements.

I discovered that Daniella would be visiting shortly. Her booker is friendly, and having had visited Daniella before, making an arrangement went smoothly. She confirmed the day before, and she sent me her location. The next day I arrived at the hotel a few minutes early. I texted her, and she texted back the room number and had me come up to her room. She left the door slightly open for me. I knocked and walked in.

She greeted me at the door with a hug in a skimpy red silk robe with very sexy lingerie underneath. She invited me in and offered me a bottle of water. We sat down and started off chatting. Her bubbly personality made me comfortable. She asked me to undress and lie on the bed for a massage, whereupon she poured scented oil on my back and rubbed it in. After a few minutes, she asked if I would like to massage her. She promptly took off what little she was wearing, revealing her petite yet curvy body in all its glory. We switched positions, she lay down naked, I straddled her and started rubbing her back. She commented on how soft my hands were. My hands made their way down to her shapely ass. She rolled over, gave me a few light kisses, and grabbed a toy from the nightstand next to the bed. I couldn’t resist licking and sucking on her pale pink nipples. This elicited some sexy low moans before she got some lube and stroked my cock. She put on the condom with her mouth and proceeded with a sensual blowjob, looking up at me the entire time with her lovely green eyes. She then laid back and started using the vibrator on herself. Her self-pleasuring heightened her arousal.

“I want your cock.”

She climbed on top and proceeded to mount me. So tight and so wet. That girl could move. She used a bullet vibrator on her clit as she rode me, slowly and sensually at first, then faster and harder. She noticed I was staring at her chest, so she leaned forward and thrust her tits in my face, begging me to lick and suck her nipples. The sight of those breasts bouncing in my face, the feel of her ass, her tightness, the sultry look on her face – I couldn’t last much longer. I erupted inside her.

With that she cleaned me up and retrieved another bottle of water. We laid down to talk for a bit. My arousal quickly returned. The condom came on again. I positioned her on the edge of the bed and was inside her once more. She got quite vocal as I pounded her, grabbing her tits and pulling her hair. I didn’t know such a tiny little thing could get so loud. She reached for her toy again and rubbed it on her clit while I was inside her. Then I took a look at her cute butt and lost it.

Spent, I collapsed on the bed. After a little cleanup we cuddled and talked for a few more minutes. As the end of our hour approached, I got up to wash up and dress. We walked to the door, where I kissed her goodbye.

“I watch Sex and the City, and I’m like, those whores!”

The serial sexcapades of the protagonists on Sex and the City elicited that reaction from a young New York professional. A minister’s assessment wasn’t much more positive: “Sex and the City is the iconic text of an age in which sex is everything…. the civitas diaboli of Carrie and company.” In contrast, Christianity Today (of all outlets) gave the film adaptation a positive review: “But it was refreshing to have a single woman’s sexuality acknowledged. In stark contrast, the last time anyone in a Christian setting spoke to the fact that I’m a sexual human being was in a college church group, where I was blithely instructed that ‘true love waits.’ Well, 15 years later, it’s still waiting.” (The critic sounded bitter that she hadn’t yet gotten laid.)

It’s hard to imagine Carrie and company pulling off their exploits in Peoria. I grew up in a small city in the American West and attended college in a relatively rural area. When I moved to New York after college, I was overwhelmed by the sexual energy crackling in the Erotic City. “The city is a sexual jungle, a Babylon of licentiousness and unnatural vice in which anything goes,” Elizabeth Wilson writes in The Contradictions of Culture: Cities, Culture, Women.

The more provocative dress of young urban women was immediately apparent to me — tall models strutting down Fifth Avenue in miniskirts and fuck-me pumps are hard to ignore. Despite intermittent recommitments to purity (one of the explicit conditions of the parish I served at was that I would refrain from sexual activity), the bountiful selection of escorts online proved irresistible. A memorable encounter was in Midtown with “Jacqueline,” an attractive brunette in her forties. I had arrived at her apartment directly from church. She had been an aspiring actress who, in her words, “didn’t make the audition” on Broadway. She had had ample opportunity to perfect her talents in bed, however, for after she got me naked, she got down on her knees, expertly placed a condom in her mouth, and slipped it on me. Then I took her from behind as she urged me on: “Come on, fuck me, fuck me harder.” Working up a sweat in her apartment as the city bustled around us, it confirmed Matt Houlbrook’s observation, “In modern times, the association between sex and the city has become almost axiomatic.”

That should come as no surprise. Sociologists in urban studies have demonstrated that sexually is spatially constructed. That is, sexual practices are shaped by the physical and cultural forms of modern life. In Hypersexual City, feminist scholar Nicole Kalms observes contemporary commercial urban culture, writing, “Hypersexualized representations of women increasingly pervade urban spaces.” A recent visit to Times Square confirmed that. Augustine in De Civitate Dei wrote, “Lust requires for its consummation darkness and secrecy.” The city provides cover for sex. Houlbrook writes that “the apparent anonymous and atomized qualities of urban life, the sheer size of the metropolis” erode the social boundaries that can inhibit sexual behavior. The greater freedom cities offer as compared to traditional rural communities enables a diversity of sexual spaces, both physical (i.e. red-light districts) and conceptual. “In Sex and the City, one of the consistent themes is that each of us decides what sex will be for us, such that sexuality is the medium for self-actualization,” writes David Matzko McCarthy. Sexual expression thus becomes “a basic means of self-expression.” The city is the setting where this quest for sexual identity occurs. One scholar says that “the city has become a sign of desire: promiscuity, perversion, prostitution, sex.”

Autumn. A season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Falling leaves and pumpkin spice.

And sex.

My libido does not drop with the temperatures. So with Fall Break upon us at the seminary I teach at, amid the crush of grading midterm papers, I decided to reserve some time for some hedonism.

“Sophia” had been on my radar for quite some time. Her beauty and sense of style captivated me. During the time leading up to our visit we exchanged some playful e-mails. When the day arrived, I took a long train ride to her apartment in the Bowery. When the door opened, we made eye contact, and I was invited inside. Wearing a lovely blouse and a long skirt, she offered me a glass of wine, and she sat close to me on her couch. We exchanged some pleasantries about our autumn plans and her upcoming travels. After a while she leaned in for a kiss, light at first, then slower and deeper as my hand wandered inside her skirt and over her stocking-covered thighs. Her fingers stroked the side of my face as my cock swelled and stiffened. I slowly unbuttoned her silk blouse. She then stood up and dropped her skirt, revealing a set of red lingerie. She asked to take my pants and shorts off, and I obliged with her request – she unbuttoned my shirt and unzipped my pants. She kissed me down my chest and stomach as she worked her way down to my cock. She stroked my cock, then began a slow, wet, sensual blowjob. She asked if we could move to the bed. Once there, she gave me a series of deep kisses before moving again down below. My breathing became more shallow. She finally removed her lingerie. She reached for a condom, tore open the wrapper, and covered me. She then mounted me and began riding me, saying my name as she maneuvered herself up and down on me. I cupped her breasts as she rode me, my hips thrusting deeper and harder off the bed. She turned around to ride me reverse cowgirl; the image of her ass bouncing off me is ingrained in my memory. She asked for me to cum. I acquiesced to her request. Afterwards she got up to go to the bathroom and retrieved a hot wet towel to clean me up.

We then cuddled and talked. After awhile we resumed kissing and touching each other. I kissed her soft breasts and sucked on her erect nipples. Once more I was hard. “C’mon, like this,” she whispered as she again covered me with a condom, led me to the window, and guided my cock into her pussy as I stood behind her. We fucked standing up as the city street bustled below us. “Bite my neck,” she said, and I did. “Spank me,” she said, and I did. I proceeded to grab onto her slender waist while penetrating myself deep inside her – slowly at first, then more quickly – but with every thrust the intensity built up until I couldn’t hold out anymore.

We collapsed onto the bed. I held her in my arms while she talked about her travels in Europe and experiences in the industry. She had an evening engagement she had to prepare for, so she rose from the bed and got dressed. We shared an embrace as we said our goodbyes.

This semester I’m teaching a course on church history. It’s the first seminary-level course I’ve taught, and despite its attendant challenges, I’ve enjoyed it. I’ve especially enjoyed the presence of “Lydia” in class. Young, pretty, tall and willowy with long light-brown hair, she’s become the object of many a fantasy. On more than one occasion, I’ve desired to bend her over a desk.

“The cultural fascination with professor-student affairs seems to have grown in step with policies restricting them,” Amia Srinivasan wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed piece. She notes that the vast majority of institutions of higher education now have policies prohibiting even “consensual” sexual relationships between students and faculty. Because of the inherent power dynamics involved (the logic behind these policies goes), it is impossible for these affairs to be truly consensual. Srinivasan wants to move beyond the paradigm of consent, however, and examine the issue from an academic perspective. “Rather, it is whether, when professors sleep or date their students, real teaching is possible.”

Undoubtedly were I to have sex with Lydia, the pedagogical relationship between us would be inexorably altered. For instance, in gratitude for her sexual availability, I might be tempted to grant her a higher grade than she may deserve. (One escort I visited told me of the how she seduced her accounting professor. Needless to say, she got an A.) More fundamentally, our sexual partnership would cloud our status as scholars. The desire for learning can be improperly channeled into sexual desire. Srinivasan concludes, “The teacher who allows his student’s desire to settle on him as an object, or the teacher who actively makes himself the object of her desire, has failed in his role as a teacher.”

Like the therapeutic relationship, the pedagogical relationship can be sexually charged. “[T]eacher and student are not just abstract intelligences, but embodied creatures,” Srinivasan writes. A college instructor in Francine Prose’s novel Blue Angel observes, “There’s something erotic about the act of teaching, all that information streaming back and forth like some bodily fluid. Doesn’t Genesis trace sex to that first bite of the apple, not the fruit from just any tree, but the Tree of Knowledge?” Having taught in the church and now in an academic setting, I can personally attest to this erotic charge. Laura Miller wrote a few years ago in The New Republic, “Students sometimes nurse crushes on their teachers, and teachers sometimes lust after their pupils; these are facts of life so commonplace as to have become the ultimate cliché: a porn motif.” Philosopher Stephen Hicks holds open the possibility of an ethical sexual relationship between a professor and a graduate student as long as there is “a real commitment by both to the integrity of the educational experience.” My experience with sexuality, however, is that it can obliterate all other values. My interest in Dr. Sheffield, especially when she wears her black boots, admittedly transcends my wanting to acquire her knowledge about the origins of the Dead Sea Scrolls. (As a student, I confess that I’d rather “know” her intimately than learn more about the Essenes.)

A dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy came from Christina Nehring in Harper’s twenty years ago. In a disquisition on “academic eros,” she described the erotic energy that fuels much academic work: “To say that chemistry between a student and a teacher distracts from learning is like saying that color distracts from seeing. It does not distract; it enlivens, enhances, intensifies….” She went on to say that “sex is a great ‘leveler.'” That is, sex can open up communication between persons of dissimilar backgrounds and broaden perspectives. History is laden with notable scholarly lovers, from Heloise and Abelard to Hannah Arendt and Martin Heiddegger. Or as one student put it in a Cosmopolitan article entitled I Hooked Up With My Professor!, “My school prides itself on cultivating close student-professor relationships. Let’s just say it succeeded. Oh, and I got an A in the class.”

The prohibition of these relationships paradoxically heightens their allure. Knowing that a tryst with Lydia is verboten makes me want to bend her over the desk that much more.

“Come inside and close the door,” she whispered.

“Holly’s” provocative posts on Twitter intrigued me. A late cancellation enabled me to see her Saturday night. She met me at the door in a simple black dress and invited me into her apartment near the university. As I entered, I was stuck by her features. Slender with long black hair, dark eyes, and alluring lips, she looks like a cross between Anne Hathaway and Stoya. She offered me a bottle of water and invited me to sit next to her on the sofa.

“I can’t say that I’ve ever been with a theologian before.”

Then she told me a little about her own background. “Being raised a conservative Catholic was not easy,” she said. “If the ladies at church only knew.” She’s a community activist and academic when she’s not entertaining men behind closed doors.

“So what are those thoughts that are whirling between your ears?” She seductively placed her hand on my thigh.

From there it was on to the bedroom.

She reached for my belt and unbuckled it. She unbuttoned my pants and pulled the zipper down. When my pants came down, the bulge in my boxer briefs signaled my arousal. She slowly pulled my underwear down, then gently stroked my cock, drawing out a few drops of precum. Then, still in her black dress, she dropped to her knees. I gazed into her eyes as she took my cock into her mouth, her tongue swirling around my shaft. I put my hand on the back of her head as it bobbed up and down. The sensations were exquisite.

But I needed to be inside her.

She got up, peeled off her dress, and removed her bra and panties. Grabbing a condom from the nightstand, she tore open the package and rolled it on my cock. I lay on my back on the bed, and she moved her lithe body on top of me. As I felt the tightness of her cunt wrap itself around my cock, I let out a deep sigh. She placed her hands on my chest and slowly started to ride me. My hands grabbed her waist and guided her. Our movements harmonized, a symphony in flesh. She began riding me harder. I felt myself moving more deeply inside her. By now she was wantonly fucking me, her breasts bouncing, primal sounds coming from her mouth. My hips thrust back in response. In that moment, we were purely animal. I felt a surge of sensation in my groin. I did my best to prolong the pleasure. But I was about to be overtaken by orgasm. That sound, so familiar yet still so alien, emerged from my throat. I felt myself erupt into the condom.