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.”

Doppelganger

I once fucked Britney Spears.

OK, it was actually a Britney doppelganger. I was in Chicago during a frigid January for a churchwide convocation. The desire to sample some local talent impressed itself upon me late one evening, so I browsed escort sites on my laptop. One particular lady seemed promising, and I made contact and quickly set up an appointment. Her face was obscured on her ad; I wasn’t sure what to expect. I prepared for her arrival and waited.

When she arrived, I opened the door and….

She looked like she was Britney Spears.

Some history: I entered puberty when Britney was at her Lolita-esque prime, suggestively writhing on stage with a python between her legs. Her naughty schoolgirl performance mesmerized me and probably triggered a fetish. As Kevin Smith put it at the time, “People are into Britney Spears because they want to fuck Britney Spears.”

I tried to take those thoughts captive. But I wanted to fuck Britney Spears.

Now several years later, a more mature version of my pubescent wet dream stood before me. I must have looked pretty harmless in my gray sweater because she didn’t bother to check my ID.

I had fantasized that Britney was a little freak in the sheets. I eagerly anticipated what her double would do. We undressed and got on the bed and….

She just laid there.

Talk about a letdown. We briefly conversed afterwards, then she put on her clothes and left.

So much for my fantasies.

Magic and Mystery

I love the female form. Soft. Round. Juicy. Hypnotizing. The lusciousness of her breasts. The curvature of her waist. The fullness of her hips. The suppleness of her skin. Her intoxicating fragrance. Her breath. Her creamy thighs. I sense the nectar in her womb. This erotic creature. This primal temptress. Both light and shadow. The Goddess emerges from within her. Her body is an exquisite temple of the Divine Feminine. Her legs spread. The temple gates open. I desire to worship Aphrodite. Warm. Wet. Receptive. Her sanctuary. A garden of unspeakable delights. Source of fertility. Embracing my masculine essence. Maker of sexual alchemy. She is Magic. She is Mystery.

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Darkness of Eros

Of the ancient gods, Eros was the most powerful and most elusive. Not even Zeus could resist Eros. The ancient Greeks believed Eros is a dark, amoral, dangerous power that undermines human volition. The arrows shot from Eros’ bow tear into the righteous flesh and obliterate rules, propriety, and conventions, compelling us to yield to the exigency of raw desire.

“Eros is the tragic god.”
Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros

Augustine associated original sin and the fall of humanity in the Garden of Eden with sexuality. Sexual desire — concupiscence, the “lust of the flesh — was the proof of and penalty for Eve’s inability to resist temptation. “The sexual desire [libido] of our disobedient members arose in those first human beings as a result of the sin of disobedience,” Augustine wrote, “…and because a shameless movement [impudens motus] resisted the rule of their will, they covered their shameful members.” All eros became dark.

For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is in my flesh. (Rom 7:18)

The sexual impulse, erupting from the depths of the human psyche and more powerful than other sensual temptations, eludes the control of reason and the will. Any sex that was driven by passion was the foul, unclean and wicked manifestation of disobedience to God’s will. “Sex, Augustine believed, was a shameful, sordid business,” writes James A. Brundage, as attested to by the very private nature of the sexual act. Even brothels, Augustine observed, preserved secluded spaces for whores to ply their trade. Sex is encased in darkness. “The shame of sex resulted from the ritual pollution that accompanied all sexual activity,” Brundage notes, finding its physical source in the genitals themselves. The intrinsic sinfulness of carnal desire in a fallen world, according to Augustine, makes life a perpetual struggle against the lusts of the flesh. This is reflected in the Calvinist doctrine of ”total depravity” in which sex can never escape the taint of sin.

If Augustine was the theologian of sexual pessimism, Kant was its metaphysician. Sexual desire was by its nature objectifying, reducing a person to a means of satisfying one’s sexual appetite. “Sexual love makes of the loved person an object of appetite; as soon as the other person is possessed, and the appetite sated, they are thrown away as one throws away a lemon that is sucked dry” (Lectures on Ethics 27: 384). To yield to sexual desire is to objectify oneself, sinking to the level of animals. Kant concludes, “In this act a human being makes himself into a thing.” Bernard Baumrim observes that “sexual interaction is essentially manipulative—physically, psychologically, emotionally, and even intellectually.”

Ayn Rand saw sex (as she saw everything else) as devoid of any altruistic impulses whatsoever: “[S]ex is the most profoundly selfish of all acts, an act which he cannot perform for any motive but his own enjoyment — just try to think of performing it as an act of selfless charity!” (So much for the “mercy fuck.”) It is an act of “self-exaltation” that exposes our sentimental illusions. “Only the man who extols the purity of a love devoid of desire is capable of the depravity of a desire devoid of love.”

“Cruelty is natural.”

Marquis de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom

Feminist critic Camille Paglia finds that eroticism is dark and irrational, fraught with anxiety, aggression and violence. “Eroticism is a realm stalked by ghosts.” Sexual liberation is a “modern delusion.” She agrees with Freud that the sexual instinct is amoral and egotistical. Sadomasochism is not an aberration but instead makes explicit what is implicit in sexuality. “The sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex.” Sexuality is neither nurturing nor affectionate but comprised of “hostility and aggression.” It finds its preeminent literary expression in the works of the Marquis de Sade. “For Sade, sex is violence.” Nature in its chthonic depths inescapably emerges in sexual passion. In sex, we surrender to “the blind grinding of subterranean force, the long slow suck, the murk and ooze.” It escapes logical analysis. “Sex cannot be understood.” Love is no more than a “perverse fascination.” Sexuality in its “dark, unconsoling mysteries” overwhelms reason and volition so that “the element of free will in sex and emotion is slight.” Sexual freedom is an oxymoron. “In sex, compulsion and ancient Necessity rule.” We are captives to the barbarism of lust. When it comes to sex, guilt is inescapable. “[S]ex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture.” Paglia concludes that “a perfectly humane eroticism may be impossible” for sex “is a descent to the nether realms.” Doggy style may be the paradigmatic sexual position since it “represents the animality and impersonality of sex-experience.” Sex ultimately evades attempts to establish moral boundaries around it. “Prostitution testifies to the amoral power struggle of sex, which religion has never been able to stop.” She applauds pornography for its unsentimental portrait of sex. “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality stripped of its romantic veneer.”

The sexual act itself is violent. Some radical feminists have interpreted the act of penetration as an inherent act of dominance. Luce Irigarary defines heterosexual intercourse as a “violation.” When the penis forces apart the labia, a woman’s bodily integrity is compromised. They’re on to something. The phallus indeed penetrates, conquers, dominates, takes possession of the woman. Andrea Dworkin flatly declared, “Fucking is the means by which the male colonizes the female.” Freud noted that the act of sexual intercourse bears a striking resemblance to violent struggle, marked by raw physicality, sweating, grunting, vigorous thrusting, bodily penetration. The aggression in sex is part of its thrill. Women have internalized this dynamic, as evidenced by female erotic literature and women’s sexual fantasies which prominently feature the theme of being taken by force. Richard Tristman concurs, saying, “All sexual relations involve relations of dominance.” Orgasm itself can be understood as a burst of violence, “a kind of fury” in Sade’s words.

Schopenhauer believed the sexual urge was a manifestation of the Will-to-live, a futile drive to ensure immortality through procreation. “The sexual impulse is the most vehement of all craving, the desire of desires, the concentration of all our willing.” In denying this, we delude ourselves. The illusion of pleasure dissipates when confronted with mortality, bringing misery. Eros cannot exist without Thanatos, according to Freud. Sex brings death in that the other person is possessed or annihilated in the sexual act. Death casts its shadow over sex because sexual pleasure is tinged with the knowledge that such pleasure will permanently cease at death. La petite mort.

Does the fact that most sexual activity transpires at night have any significance? “Throughout the whole world it is at night, above all, that men and women unite,” Julius Evola observed. We copulate under the cover of darkness, as if to hide our transgressions.

And transgression, according to the Gnostic, is our only option. As identified by Murray S. Davis, the Gnostic concurs that sex is dirty and dangerous, so our only recourse is to succumb to the depravity. Prohibition only heightens the allure of sex. Resistance is futile. In this respect, Sade is a prophet.

Pangs of Guilt

“The proof that sex is a very crucial point in the spirituality of sinful man is that shame is so universally attached to the performance of the sexual function.”
Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man

Sometimes I feel guilty about not feeling guilty enough.

Growing up in a conservative religious environment, sex became associated with sin. I was taught about the “dark side” of sex. Anything outside of the biblically defined parameters of marriage (fornication, sodomy, pornography, masturbation, immodesty, lust) was sinful. Sexual sins were different. Sexual sins were committed against our own bodies, which were not our own, but temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:18-20). Sexual sin corrupted body, mind and soul. I inferred that my sexuality was inherently sinful and that my desires must be overcome.

I was condemned by my own sex drive.

When I could no longer conform my behavior to my beliefs, I felt guilt and deep shame. I suspect that guilt and shame, to some degree, will always be inseparable from sex for me.

Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.
Genesis 3:7

Augustine linked the Fall to sexual sin. Modern biblical scholars and theologians dismiss this, but what if he was on to something? Reinhold Niebuhr concedes that puritanism and Christian asceticism have contributed to this sense of shame. He also discounts the Freudian analysis that the sense of guilt surrounding sex is due to the repressiveness of civilization’s conventions. Shame, according to Niebuhr, antedates these conventions. It’s primordial, inherent in the act itself. “Man, granted his ‘fallen’ nature, sins in his sex life.”

Think about the sexual act itself. We use those parts of our anatomy we keep most hidden, commit acts we usually use euphemisms or vulgarities to describe, abandon our rational selves to flights of senseless passion, all in a process designed to propagate the species but rarely engaged in to do so. I can see why shame arises.

Sex is explosive. It blows up our moral imagination and leaves our prudential judgment in tatters. When I do experience pangs of guilt, memories of her scent or the curvature of her body banish them from my mind.

Pastoral Matters

ninfomani-cristiane

“Don’t do the pew,” we’ve been admonished at seminary. That’s one boundary I haven’t crossed…yet.

“Maggie” is an active parishioner at our church. She teaches Sunday school. Married with two small children, she’s a curvy lady in her late 30’s with short blonde hair. She teaches at a local elementary school. Maggie is a gracious Southern belle with a sweet accent who’s friendliness is intertwined with an air of propriety. She’s a Republican who passionately adores Coca-Cola, Margaret Mitchell and her favorite college football team. She’s a devout Christian, raised Southern Baptist before she found her way into Lutheranism. (Our parish’s liturgy appeals to her.) Her Facebook page is filled with pictures of her family and Bible verses. She’s fond of pearl necklaces and low-cut blouses that reveal a bit of cleavage. She radiates sexual energy.

Our paths cross occasionally at church. Maggie is a bit flirtatious (although I admit I’m not very good at recognizing such signals). I recall her staring at me with her blue eyes, playfully running her fingers across her necklace. Was she sending me a signal? I decided to find out. Last Sunday, I took her aside and asked if she wanted to discuss some “pastoral matters” over coffee at Barnes & Noble. I was busy this week, so I couldn’t meet with her until Friday afternoon.

I arrived at the bookstore and sat down in the café. She texted me that she would be a few minutes late. I anxiously waited her arrival.

Maggie walked in wearing a low-cut pink dress and a white shawl sweater. She gave me a wide smile when she spotted me. Unexpectedly, she reached out and gave me a big hug, then told me she was going to order some tea. The enchanting scent of her perfume stayed with me.

After she returned with her beverage, I asked her how her Sunday school class was going and how I could be of help. She replied that she appreciated my offer of assistance, but her class was going well. Our discussion of church-related matters wasn’t going to last very long.

I had to be careful. I wanted to signal my interest in her, yet not so overtly as to provide grounds for sexual misconduct.

I asked her how things were at home. Perhaps her marriage was troubled.

Maggie responded with a long monologue about her kids and school and their many extracurricular activities and the vacation they took to Washington, DC and the relatives who were going to visit at Christmas and yada yada yada.

I sensed my seduction of Maggie was stillborn. If she had any real interest in me, she would have signaled it by then.

We continued our conversation for another half-hour before she had to go pick up her kid at something or other. As we said goodbye, she gave me another big (but chaste) hug. Any fantasies about a torrid fling with Maggie remain just that — fantasies.

“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.