Prostitution: the oldest profession in the world. The one profession which will never be sent into oblivion. Why? Because at our core we are animal, and who we are at our core can never be denied. Hidden, yes, but never can we truly separate ourselves from our insatiable lust for flesh.
I carved out some time this afternoon and made a detour to a hotel in the suburbs. Her thick accent made it difficult to understand her, but I arrived with some time to spare. I waited in my car for the appointed time. Then I went inside, discreetly made my way through the lobby, took the elevator up to the 5th floor, and found her room. I knocked on the door. The door opened. A voice invited me in.
“Kathy” is a slender middle-aged blonde from Europe. She’s visiting from out of town. Her miniskirt highlighted her shapely legs. She’s pleasant but a bit cool.
We quickly got down to business. I placed the envelope containing my “donation” on a side table. We shed our clothes and moved to the bed. She crawled between my legs and started pleasuring me orally. She’s quite talented, and I struggled not to come too early. She then took a condom out and covered me. Without saying a word, she climbed on top me, straddled me, and lowered herself onto my throbbing cock. I guided her hips with my hands and bucked up into her. She rode me steadily at first. Sweat trickled across my forehead. Moving faster, she rode me harder until my body spasmed. I moaned in pleasure.
She took off the condom and went to the bathroom. After a few minutes, she returned with a wet washcloth to clean me up. Then she sensuously ran her nails down my chest and stomach. She caressed my balls and ran her fingers across my inner thighs. I was already aroused again. She fetched another condom. Then she fell forward on her hands and knees. I seized the opportunity and mounted her from behind. My hands grabbed her ass, and I thrust in and out of her. I continued to pound her from behind, pressing myself deeper and deeper inside her, my balls banging hard against her, until with a groan I finally spurted into the condom.
I was spent after our vigorous fuck session, my animal passions released. Kathy gave me a bottle of water and complimented me on my shirt. “You’re nice,” she said. Then it was time to leave.
By the time evening came, I was already feeling again the pull of that “insatiable lust.”
“Porn has become a necessary escape by the sexual imagination from the banality of our everyday lives,” says Camille Paglia. But it’s more than just an escape. Porn can be profoundly liberating. Transgressing the traditional cultural taboos or religious mores surrounding sex, porn displays human sexuality in its raw and uncensored state. It subverts conventionally sanitized depictions of sexuality (“romance”). Porn is not bound by the constraints of marriage or bourgeois morality. Indeed, one scholar writes that “a sexual suspension of the ethical is a pre-requisite for seeing it pornographically.” Violating the taboos bound up with conventional morality is itself a source of pleasure. “To know that the sexual has triumphed over the moral could add to the sense of sexual liberation.” The “illicit triumph of sexuality” over morality is most vivid in “the fantasy of sexual desire overcoming some of the biggest taboos.”
One porn production company invites viewers to “give in to temptation,” boasting of scenarios where “mothers sleep with their daughters’ boyfriends, step-brothers shamelessly seduce step-sisters, and fathers eye their teen daughter’s best friend.” The premise is that “when passion takes over,” the moral compass is disoriented, and “what’s wrong seems right in the moment.”
“But behind closed doors, these Mormon girls are anything but innocent.”
“I always found things that are taboo attractive,” said the actress who depicts “Sister Rose” aka the Mormon MILF (“a total f*cking slut”) on MormonGirlz.com. As a dominatrix outside of adult films, she delved into religious role play. Eroticizing the religious can be a way of subverting sexual repression and its concomitant guilt. The sexual ethics of the Latter-day Saints are famously restrictive.
Yet there is also an inherent eroticism in Mormonism. One Mormon pornographer (really!) says, “Mormonism has always been seen as a place for secret sexuality. Ever since Joe Smith was secretly marrying [multiple] wives, people have thought of the Church as a sexually libertine one that was a danger to the mainstream way of life.”
MormonGirlz.com depicts sumptuous young women attired in temple garments as they navigate the rituals of a polygamous sex-crazed cult. Erotic explorations between missionaries in the bishop’s office and the insemination of these Mormon girls by the cult’s leaders in the precincts of the temple are standard fare.
A similar dynamic animates something else I’ve recently been getting off to: nun porn.
It’s not a theme new to the Internet age. Sally Munt remarks that “a whole subgenre of sexually titillating manuscripts” exploring the sexual desires of nuns has been produced for centuries. “Nun pornography is…one aspect of the vast, diffuse eroticisation of Catholicism enjoyed throughout Western culture.” Venus in the Cloister (1682) depicts a novice learning about sexual pleasure through frequent liaisons with monks. In La Religieuse, Diderot depicted a young nun ravaged by her lesbian abbess. The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was the work of a 19th century Canadian which presented convent life as unrelieved debauchery. Italian filmmakers in the 1970s produced a series of “nunsploitation” films such as The Sinful Nuns of Saint Valentine.
“The nun is the woman above sex,” wrote a British psychiatrist. The habit and veil attempt to conceal her sexual identity. Yet veiled desires, nun-themed pornography suggests, cannot long be supressed. In the Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe writes of one alluring nun, “Hers was the contour of a Madonna, with the sensibility of a Magdalene.” There is a dialectic between the chaste and the erotic. Her attempt at desexualization is never completely successful. The nun’s habit is the testimony of her purity, a purity which is nevertheless precarious.
That purity is despoiled in porn. Profane lust overwhelms the sacred. Virtue is no match for vice.
My regular “go-to girls” are no longer available. Betty is on hiatus. Sara retired. But Tammy the secretary is back looking to reunite with old clients. I gave her a call. We made an early evening appointment.
Tammy’s boss, she told me during an earlier appointment, permits her to keep a flexible schedule. (The boss is obviously unaware that she leaves the office to moonlight as an escort.)
I navigated through the brutal rush hour traffic and arrived at her downtown hotel. Tammy was delayed, so I waited in the lobby. Finally she texted me to come up to her room. Once inside, she greeted me in casual attire – a pair of jeans and a tight sweater which showed off her ample bosom. She had lost some weight since the last time I saw her. She’s a friendly MILF and asked about my day. I told her about some of the stress I’m under. “Well, I’ll just have to take care of that!” she responded. She leaned in to kiss me, her body grinding against mine. She remarked that we were both overdressed. I helped lift her sweater off of her. She got up and pulled down her jeans. She reached around her back and unhooked her bra. My finger playfully tugged at the side of her thong panties. Soon those were off, too. I hurriedly undressed in response to the sight of her round ass and plump tits. She caught sight of my erection. She positioned me on my back on the bed, then pulled a condom from the drawer. She slowly kissed her across down my chest, then went down and started licking my balls. She gently stroked me, using my own precum as lubricant, then put on the condom. She lowered herself onto my cock and guided my cock inside her. My hands grabbed that ass. She rode me slowly at first, her big breasts in my face. My mouth sucked on her perky nipples. Her moans heightened my arousal. I enjoyed the feeling of her warm, fleshy body atop mine. Then she started riding me harder, her breasts bouncing. I responded, thrusting faster and faster, harder and harder. She leaned down and kissed me hard, her tongue deep into my mouth. My body tensed, and I let out a deep groan.
We disengaged, and Tammy got a warm, wet washcloth from the bathroom. She suggested a couple of local restaurants where I could get something to eat. We dressed, gave each other a quick kiss, and I left the hotel into the chilly evening.
“The Christian church plays the central formative role in limiting and thwarting our sexual phantasie.”
Carter Heyward
German liberation theologian Dorothee Soelle wrote of Phantasie, the use of imagination to transcend the limits of present reality. Sexual phantasie can be conceived as sexual imagination, the dynamic expansion of our sexual horizon. And at the heart of sexual phantasie is fantasy, the imaginative escape from real-life sexual restraints.
My sexual imagination was forged in the crucible of a religious culture which imposed an “obsessive, proscriptive attitude” toward sexuality. From purity culture, I learned that one’s essential worth consists in maintaining “purity,” that is, in abstaining from being sexual. When I wasn’t suppressing my sexual urges, I was convicting myself of the sinfulness of unrepressed sexual obsessions. “Impure thoughts” were condemned as adultery against a future spouse. My erotophobia stifled any sexual exploration.
But there was Genevieve.
Genevieve was a fellow freshman at my private Christian high school. Petite and pretty with long brown hair, I couldn’t help but notice her. And I couldn’t help but notice her massive chest. I had only the most rudimentary notions of sex (I thought oral sex was talking about sex), but I fantasized about Genevieve. I wondered what wonders lay under her skirt. As I marveled at the fullness of her breasts, admonitions to take thoughts captive sounded hollow. Guilt inevitably accompanied my erotic imaginings. Whenever Genevieve shyly smiled at me, though, I lusted in my heart.
Despite my best efforts to control it, my erotic imagination intensified. I undressed Miss Singer, my comely young English teacher, in my mind. I furtively sneaked off and masturbated to images of Anna Kournikova. I developed a fetish for the lacy lingerie that (barely) covered my favorite Victoria’s Secret models. My religiosity tempered my fantasies and clothed them in shame, but they couldn’t be quelled entirely.
Oh, Anna….
Tina’s kids are watching VeggieTales in the nursery. She’s in my office for more adult pursuits. I press her against the wall, hike up her skirt, and pull down her panties. She wraps her legs around me. I hear some other parishioners in the hallway outside. No matter. I roughly fuck her against the wall — hot, wet, sticky, creamy. She strains to muffle her moans of pleasure. I’m intent on sending her back to her kids with my sperm swimming inside her….
My erotic imagination has certainly expanded since then. My exposure to porn surely has contributed. More so, becoming sexually active has allowed me to penetrate (no pun intended) the mystery of erotic experience. My hypersexual imagination now filters much of my life through an erotic prism. As I write this sentence at Starbucks, I’m spying two young college girls in line, their tight leggings hugging their legs. Visions of the blonde going down on her friend dance in my head.
My sexual imagination has a momentum of its own.
I drew closer to Sister Agnes. “I don’t think you’ll be needing your habit any longer.” I reached for her veil and slowly took it off her head. She removed the pins from her hair and allowed her beautiful brown tresses to frame her face. Then she slowly removed her habit, which she allowed to fall to the church floor. She stood before me in her simple underwear: a plain white bra and white cotton panties. She unclasped the back of her bra and allowed it to fall down.Her round, pointy-tipped breasts were quite lovely. She reached down and slipped off her panties, revealing an unshaven patch of dark brown pubic hair. She took my hand, and I led her to the altar. I told her to lie on it. She hesitated, then climbed on top of the altar and spread her knees wide. I climbed on top of her and guided my cock to her opening. She shivered as it started to slide it in. I felt the tip of my cock against her hymen. I paused for a second, marveling at the thought at what I was about to do….
Freud believed sexual fantasies were a window into the psyche. Sex researcher Justin J. Lehmiller made an interesting discovery:
People who were religiously affiliated and who, presumably, had the most sexual constraints placed upon them, tended to fantasize more about breaking free of them. Specifically, they were more likely to fantasize about a range of novel and taboo sex acts. They seemed to be demonstrating what psychologists call reactance, the idea that when our perceived freedoms are threatened or when we’re pressured to adopt a certain view or attitude, we respond in a way that’s opposite of what the authority or requestor wants. In other words, rather than getting in line, we rebel.
My hands run through Khloe’s blonde hair as she aggressively sucks my cock. Kara plants a deep kiss on my lips before joining her sister on her knees before me. As Khloe continues to work on my shaft, Kara takes one of my balls into her mouth. Then Kara positions herself on the edge of the bed and spreads her legs. Khloe looks on as I penetrate her sister. I establish a steady rhythm before Khloe comes in to make out with me.Minutes pass before Khloe pouts that she wants to get in on the fun. I lie on my back. Khloe gets on top and furiously rides me.Now its time to make out again with Kara. Or is it Kara who’s riding me as I passionately kiss Khloe? It makes no difference….
Shadow Self
I’ve long struggled with my shadow self, that dark part of my psyche which contradicts my public commitments. I’ve been incapable of accepting my erotic imagination. My personality is fractured. In the struggle to repress my desires, I’ve lost control of them. My fantasies expose the perversity at the heart of my sexual rebellion.
Dr. Sheffield’s undergraduate students would never imagine this. Their cool, calm professor, who has mastered Ugaritic and is an expert in the Dead Sea Scrolls, was utterly servile before me: bent over her desk, skirt pulled up, her panties stuffed in her mouth. Her heart-shaped bottom was as red as a rose, but I wasn’t done yet. SMACK! She flinched and whimpered as she endured yet another spanking. SMACK! She had discovered the pleasure that can only come from humiliation and pain….
Sexual fantasies are the ultimate expression of erotic freedom. In my “straight” life, I hide and suppress my deepest, darkest desires. Even as I have become more sexually adventurous, my inner erotic life is marked by a yearning for deeper exploration. In my sexual phantasmagoria, all is possible. I can athletically bang Amy Adams. Or the young barista behind the counter. A threesome with Mrs. Sexton and her nubile daughter is vividly enacted. Molly the prudish librarian is stripped of her virginity in the stacks, and no pretty pastor’s wife is safe from debauchment. Liberated from social, religious and moral strictures (as well as the constraints of time, space, and plausibility), my erotic imagination occupies a liminal space between right and wrong, good and evil, the sacred and the profane. It’s a space of raw uninhibited honesty.
Journeying to the deepest and darkest corners of my psyche, I’m confronted by a deep reservoir of shame. “Some desires aren’t desirable,” I recall being told. My rigid conservative upbringing narrowly defined “normal” sexual behavior. The things I dream of doing, the unspeakable thoughts that sear my mind and make my pulse race — they are condemnable. Yet my polymorphic perversities are not so easily tamed. I filter sex through a dark lens.
This week a colleague called me “quiet and poised.” Little does she know of the lust that burns inside me.
It was this lust that directed me to Sarah’s hotel room. Having received her e-mail detailing her visit, I promptly set up an appointment. Having seen each other before several times, we’ve developed a nice rapport. Friendly conversation soon leads to us disrobing and our bodies twisting on the bed. Tonight my hands latched onto Sarah’s thick hips as she rode me. As I watched her big titties flop up and down, I heard her breathy, girlish squeals. The sounds that come from sex are primal. As my preternatural shyness dissolved, I caught myself emitting some low moans. Then we moved on to doggy style. The air was punctuated by her squeals and my rhythmic grunts. Then she shrieked. I started to lose myself in the throes of passion. My grunts grew deeper and louder. I couldn’t restrain my animalistic urges. As I came, a cry I couldn’t suppress escaped my throat.
I live in an area populated by a number of smaller colleges. One of the benefits is espying college girls on a warm spring day.
This afternoon at a coffee shop, I had an eyeful of young, nubile college girls. In short skirts. Shorts. Tank tops. Long billowy legs. Cleavage. My hypersexual imagination went places.
The girls at my conservative Christian college dressed much more modestly and were (theoretically, anyway) committed to purity. These girls seem to advertise their sexual availability.
I’m not that much older than them, but part of their allure is that they have an aura of the forbidden about them. I haven’t been with a college girl. I’m hoping to do some teaching at the college level shortly, and more than once have I fantasized about having a cute little undergrad on her knees before me. Or bent over a desk.
I recently discovered a new escort listing site. Taking a break from my final paper on Lacan and the “triumph of religion,” I browsed the site and happened upon a comely young blonde visiting from the Midwest. Despite being pressed for time, I couldn’t resist. I contacted “Hayley,” got screened, and arranged an early evening appointment.
Petite but busty, Hayley met me in her hotel room attired in lacy red lingerie. She’s a quiet girl, younger than I anticipated, and our efforts at conversation were halting. She subtly removed her lingerie. I followed suit and removed my clothes. We climbed on the bed. She let me caress her silky soft porcelain skin. My hands found their way to her breasts. My mouth then found its way to her nipples. More caresses and kisses, then she whispered in my ear, “Are you ready to be inside me?” The condom went on. She lay back and spread her legs. I climbed onto her and pressed the head of my cock between her pussy lips, easing slowly into her. She spread her legs wider. My body rocked on top of her, my mouth kissing the smooth flesh on her neck. I began to pump furiously for what seemed an eternity, then I finally reached bliss.
I decided to sneak in a little fun just prior to finals. I called Joyce to set something up with Sara, but I found out that Sara is no longer available. Joyce recommended “Alexis” instead. I took her advice, prepared myself, and drove downtown to the high-rise apartment complex where she based her incall.
Upon arriving, I was buzzed in. I surreptitiously made my way through the lobby to the elevator. I got off on the 16th floor and found the apartment. I rang the doorbell and waited. The door opened slightly.
“Philip?”
Alexis is a tall, cool blonde. Her blue lingerie showed off her attractive figure. She offered me a bottle of water, and we made our acquaintance. Our conversation was brief. Soon she invited me to join her in the bedroom.
She invited me to “get comfortable.” She put on some Sade for ambiance. I undressed and removed my glasses. Unexpectedly, she stared into my eyes.
“They say eyes are the widows to the soul,” she said.
She maintained eye contact as she dropped to her knees and started pleasuring me orally. The sight of her staring at me with my cock in her mouth was exquisite. I ran my fingers through her long blonde locks. Her gaze triggered something. Before I anticipated it, my balls tightened; I had reached the point of no return.
I came in her mouth.
She got up and excused herself to the bathroom. I apologized upon her return, but she reassured me there was nothing to apologize for. She invited me to join her on the bed. She briefly asked me about my studies. Then she gently stroked me. I quickly got hard again. She covered me with a condom and lay on her back, her legs spread. I entered her and started to rock my body on top of hers. Her legs clasped around me. Increasing my pace, I thrust deep inside her. Perspiration trickled down my face. I fucked her intently, compelled by the pursuit of ultimate pleasure. Then my body spasmed as I could no longer restrain myself. I collapsed on top of her, satisfied.
A pastor in a moment of searing honesty lamented that we have been endowed with “sex drives that virtually impel us to break rules God laid down.” The Bible’s moral standards regarding sex seem starkly at odds with sexual reality. Theologically it can be explained by original sin. Corrupted by the Fall, sexual desire becomes lust. We are enslaved by concupiscence, the “rebellion” of “vicious desires,” in Augustine’s words. Yet we are to “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires” (Rom 13:14). (Paul reluctantly endorses marriage for those who “cannot exercise self-control” lest they “be aflame with passion” [1 Cor 7:9].)
Nature has its own imperatives. Sex is a natural appetite. Francis Bennion puts it bluntly: “The male…is programmed instantly to fecundate every woman within his grasp. From puberty onward, his testicles produce nonstop the fluid called semen. His body is designed to void this fluid at frequent intervals.” Frustration of this instinct is deleterious to psychological well-being. (He even advocates the use of “erotic Samaritans” to achieve sexual release.) The pursuit of sexual gratification “is honesty to human nature.” This leads to his conclusion that “the Judaeo-Christian rules on sex are bad, since they arise from a stance that negates and dismisses the natural sexuality of human beings.” Sexual repression, according to Wilhelm Reich, is “the insoluble contradiction between between instinctual drive and moralistic compulsion.”
Those “Judaeo-Christian rules on sex” that are so “bad” are nonetheless deeply embedded into my values. Values that conflict with the appetites that propel my behavior. I am unable to solve the conflict within me between sexual demands and moralistic inhibitions. Apparently I’m not alone. One psychologist observes that religious believers may actually have higher incidences of problematic sexual behavior. No wonder Karl Barth wrote, “As God’s creatures, we are possibly nowhere so much on our own as in respect of our sexuality.”
“Eros is a great and dangerous god.”
Camille Paglia
Recent Christian reflection on sexuality, in an attempt to disown its Augustinian heritage, has reimagined “sex as gift.” In one document, my denomination states that “human sexuality was created good for the purposes of expressing love and generating life, for mutual companionship and pleasure.” Seen within the context of “original blessing,” sex is a participation in divine creation.
But what about “sex as curse”? Ethicist Christine Gudorf, who has affirmed the positive potentialities of sexual pleasure, warns that in an overly beneficent conception of sex “the power of sexuality is denied along with the demons long understood as animating sexuality.” Some years ago, the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. commissioned a study to articulate a contemporary approach to human sexuality. The resulting document asserted “the basic goodness of sexuality,” emphasized “justice-love” as the primary ethical criterion, and endorsed an interpretation of the Bible informed by one’s experience as a sexual being. Feminist critic Camille Paglia tore it to shreds. With “its view of human nature naive and sentimental,” the study “reduces the complexities and mysteries of eroticism to a clumsy, outmoded social-welfare ideology.” Informed more by sexual liberalism than scripture or the Reformed tradition (Paglia archly notes that there’s nary a mention of the commandment forbidding adultery), the paper denies “the dark drama of sex” with its “eternal perversities.” The report’s appeals to “intimacy and interpersonal communication” blithely neglects the possibility that eroticism “may in fact be most itself” denuded of intimacy. “The body has its own animal urges, just as there are attractions and repulsions in sex that modern liberalism cannot face.” It ultimately descends into self-parody. “‘Eros,’ says the report’s glossary, is ‘a zest for life.’ Is this a soap commercial? Eros, like Dionysus, is a great and dangerous god.” Paglia, a self-described “lapsed Catholic of wavering sexual orientation,” has more insight into our vexing sexual predicament than the putative heirs of John Calvin.
Daemonic Sexuality
For me, sex is experienced as a burden, not as a “gift.” “Sex is daemonic,” Paglia writes, subject to those lower spirits that resist the mastery of reason. In my religious formation, sexuality was subordinated to the higher ends of marriage and procreation. I pledged to order my sexual expression accordingly. But my personal experience of sex is that it is untamed and untamable, compelling the untrammeled satiation of desire. Once I could no longer maintain my pledge to purity, I was in thrall to the erotic impulse.
I just read a review of a new biography of Thomas Merton, whose work I have long admired. The Trappist monk late in life fell for a young student nurse and found himself unable to keep his vows. Merton wrote of her, “I keep remembering her body, her nakedness…. [we] drank our wine and read poems and talked of ourselves and mostly made love.” “He wanted the best of both worlds,” the reviewer writes, “as a holy preacher and a covert sinner.”
Still, I can’t escape a nagging sense of shame. A clinical psychologist who has written on the intersection of sex and Christian life advocates a “sex positive Gospel” as a means of reducing sexual shame. Augustine is probably closer to the mark when he observes that a “natural sense of shame” accompanies the sexual act, an act that we are biologically programmed to engage in. Such is the inherent conflict of eros.
I recall a listing Stephanie posted this time last year:
Easter is coming up. What is it that rabbits do?
As I struggle to complete my dissertation proposal and deal with the business of Holy Week, I needed a respite. Or to put it another way, I wasn’t feeling particularly holy at the time.
Betty has relocated to a new town and gone on hiatus. That left Sara available on short notice. I called Joyce and arranged a lunchtime getaway.
Arriving at her incall loft in the city, Sara greeted me in a red teddy and high heels. We exchanged pleasantries, she offered me a glass of water, then it was off to the races. After a brief makeout session, she positioned herself on her knees and took my cock into her mouth. I looked down and savored the view of her pleasuring me. Then I gripped her head. Sara permits CIM, and I was going to take advantage of her liberality. I prolonged the pleasure as long as I could, but Sara is too talented at her craft. I felt my balls tighten, my body shook, and a hot and creamy load burst into her mouth.
She went to the sink to spit and rinse her mouth. The radio softly played in the background. It didn’t take long for me to get hard again. Sara aims to please, and soon this bouncy bunny was on top of me. She ended up on her hands and knees.
What is it that rabbits do?
The sound of my hips slapping against her ass echoed in my ears. Gripping her hips firmly, I pounded away. When I first became sexually active, I assumed that, having sated my sexual curiosity, I could return to a life of purity. I should have heeded Kerouac’s warning: “Woe unto those who don’t believe in the unbelievable sweetness of sex.”
I erupted inside of her in several bursts.
After I had cleaned up and dressed, a familiar post-coital sadness settled upon me. Sara and I amiably parted ways, and I emerged from her loft into the spring sunshine.
Lutheran Guilt 