Guilt

For as long as I recall, my sexuality has been intertwined with guilt. (Hence this blog’s title.) For years this guilt inhibited me from expressing myself sexually. According to a book entitled The Erotic Mind, this same guilt may be fueling my behavior. Author Jack Morin writes that “the erotic equation” includes “the interplay of impulse and restriction,” for “whatever tries to block our urges can also intensify them.” Guilt, paradoxically, can be an aphrodisiac.

“Guilt is the price paid for the privilege of continuing to be bad.”
Robert Stoller

A few months ago, I wrote about a rabbi who argues in an article entitled “Guilty Pleasures” that sexual desire can be intensified by the imposition of rules designed to restrict it. The guilt produced by the violation of prohibitions, Morin says, can be an erotic charge. A repressive religious upbringing is especially conducive to being aroused by violating prohibitions. “Those who grow up in sexually restrictive environments are almost certain to discover the erotic potential of breaking the rules.” Morin summarizes this dynamic as “the thrill of naughtiness” and sketches out a cycle of arousal:

ATTRACTION → GUILT → EXCITEMENT → REMORSE → ATTRACTION

Disobedience demonstrates that desire overrides prohibition. Sexologist Robert Stoller writes, “Guilt is not the price paid for being bad but the price paid for the privilege of continuing to be bad.”

“I was raised Catholic so I know a little something about guilt,” writes one sex worker. As a “recuperated Catholic,” she confesses to feeling residual chronic guilt. It hasn’t prevented her from pursuing her work. “I now give in to my deep lust.” She’s discovered that “sometimes guilt can be an erotic accelerant.”

She couldn’t look me in the eye. The arousal fueled by illicit desire had dissipated. Her face was frozen in despondency. We had just egregiously sinned. The air felt heavy as I dressed. This is the last time, I promised myself. Guilt consumed me afterwards. We had abandoned ourselves “to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity” (Eph 4:19). But it wasn’t long before I started to get turned on again. The forbidden fruit lay between her legs, and it held a magnetic attraction. That night I sent her a text….

My eroticism is primarily defined by the drama of transgression. It’s fueled by an inner conflict between the anti-sexual restrictions imposed on me (or I have imposed on myself) and the desire to break free of those restrictions. During sex there’s an incredible sense of liberation as I allow my secret sexual alter-ego to express itself in contradiction to those repressed aspects of my personality. Then after the ecstasy comes the agony, sometimes as soon as I’ve orgasmed. Remorse overwhelms me as the erotic haze lifts, and I can’t escape the aftermath of my transgression. “My sin is ever before me.”

Until I’m aroused by the thought of doing it again.

Guilty Pleasures

As I unfastened her long blue skirt, I was reminded of the woman in a Graham Greene novel who, with “fear and pride,” confessed, “We’re going to do a mortal sin.” As I gently brushed my hand against her crotch, I felt damp fabric – she was creaming her panties in anticipation of her sin. She removed the rest of her clothing but continued to wear her engagement ring and the cross on her necklace, symbols of the two sacred pledges she was now about to violate.

In “Guilty Pleasures: When Sex is Good Because It’s Bad,” feminist Jewish rabbi Rebecca T. Alpert explores the irony of how rules intended “to limit and control sexual desire unwittingly enhances the power of sexual desire.” She writes from the perspective of Judaism, but its implications apply to other creeds. “Regulating sexual behavior is a significant dimension of most religious systems,” distinguishing between licit and illicit desires. Traditionally in Judaism, sex was valued almost exclusively for its procreative potential. “For the purposes of procreation, sexual desire is understood as useful, but it is still called yetzer hara, an evil inclination, and must be controlled and limited.” Narrowly circumscribing sexual activity has the result of “making sex seem bad, dangerous, and shameful.” It also acknowledges that sex is daemonic. “Forbidding people to act out on sexual desires affirms that sexual desire is dangerous.”

Sexual desire is not so easily tamed. “The erotic is connected to wildness, chaos, and disorder–just what the rabbinic tradition wishes to tame and make orderly.” Sexual regulation invites its own subversion. “The efforts to control desire make it more desirable.” A medieval mystical Jewish account of the story of Adam and Eve suggests that sexual desire came from eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge. The forbidden is erotic. “Illicit sex is appealing because it is an opportunity to do what is forbidden, to test the rules.” Desire is heightened, not diminished. “Sex with the wrong person at the wrong place or time enhances erotic pleasure.” In a system that regulates sex, people whose desires do not conform to the regulations must hide their erotic selves. Yet “the pleasure of illicit sex is enhanced through secrecy.” As it’s been said, the best sex is the sex you can’t tell anybody about.

There are “unintended liberating consequences” to all this. Not only can transgression heighten erotic experience, “it has the potential to challenge the privileged status of licit relationships.” Alpert notes that in both contemporary Orthodox and liberal Jewish sexual ethics, sex is attached to commitment and intimacy. Sexual pleasure per se is devalued as a good. Transgressive sex outside of committed monogamous relationships subverts this paradigm and challenges the assumption that sex is merely instrumental to other values.

At that moment, we were nothing more than two sinners fucking. The engagement ring. The cross. Solemn promises abjured for a few moments of furtive pleasure. Her mouth on my neck, her nails in my back, her legs clamped around my waist. As her pleasure intensified, she took the Lord’s name in vain. Her little blasphemies are almost liturgical in their cadences. In their desperation, I detect a plea for divine mercy for her sin. And as I thrust into her over and over again, I continued our erotic liturgy, one “which makes flesh a deity” (Shakespeare). Our sex was unprotected, but conception was not our intention. Nor was it a sign of romantic commitment. The truth was starker: we fucked because we could.

“Could I enjoy what was forbidden for no other reason except that it was forbidden?”
Augustine, Confessions

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.