A Religious Experience:
Sex, Shame, Sin, and Love
by Beverly Fisher, Slut at Large and Woman of Easy Virtue

“We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.” — Carl Gustav Jung

By almost all religious standards, I’m going to Hell. I have not only sinned, I have actively sought sin, and enjoyed it besides. I wallow in fleshly lusts and hungers. I am a fornicator and an adulteress. Man, I do have a good time.

I love sex, you see. I really do. From romantic lovemaking to slutty fucking, and every point in between, I’m game. And yet my body is still a temple, a holy place of worship. My body is sacred. Yes, I am a blasphemer, too.

The thing is, it isn’t just my vagina that’s sacred. It’s my elbow, my left kneecap, my little toe on the right side. Blessed are my earlobes. Praise be my chin. Holy, all of it. And I celebrate my body in every way imaginable, and in a few ways that need diagrams.

There was an escort in Denver who had this marvelous anonymous quote on her website: “Religion is for people who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for people who have been there.” This I understand. I am a spiritual person, not a religious one. I have faith. I have beliefs. They just don’t match up with most religious traditions. No one can say for sure what really happens when we die. Sheesh, if Jimmy Swaggart is right, I’m going to fry for all eternity. But then again, some strange pygmy culture that worships trees could have the lock on spiritual reality, in which case I’ll be okay. I like trees.

Thousands of learned men and women from all spiritual and philosophical viewpoints have expounded on the nature of religion, and it’s relationship to sex. I can only speak to my own experience, my personal world view. If I offend, well, that’s probably a good thing. A little righteous indignation is natural, right? Of course, it’s also prideful, which we know is a sin... hmm. These little inconsistencies are problematic. And yet it’s the inconsistencies I find so fascinating.

In the beginning...

I first became aware of the concept of sin when I was eleven, much later than most. I went to church with a friend from school, a Baptist church. The pews were hard, beautifully polished wood with bright orange pads to sit on, pads that didn’t pad anything. It was hot and stuffy in that huge room, the ceiling far above, shimmering and indistinct in the heat. I sat in my stiff dress and itchy pantyhose, my maryjanes one size too small, uncomfortable, out of place. We bowed our heads and prayed. “God,” I prayed, “Are you real? Show me. Do something. How do I know you hear me? Give me a sign or something.” Amen. There was a roar of skirts and programs, as two hundred people sat on the creaking, moaning pews.

I was drowsy with the heat, conscious only of my tiredness (why does church have to start so early?), my pantyhose sticking sweaty to the back of my legs, my itchy dress, and my friend Kelly next to me, watching the minister, rapt with attention. Then I was jerked awake, stunned. The minister was yelling at me, pointing his finger, screaming. “You! You are a sinner! And you are going to Hell for your sins!” His face was contorted, black, twisted. I didn’t understand. Why was I going to hell? Why was I a sinner? I hadn’t done anything, hadn’t hurt anyone.

I held my breath, terrified. Only then did I realize he wasn’t yelling at me, he was yelling at everyone, all 200 people. No one else seemed afraid or upset. One man was asleep.

Finally, after innumerable prayers and hymns, it was time to go. Walking outside, the chill morning air hit me like a slap. I begin to shiver uncontrollably in my thin, stiff dress. I looked over at my friend from school. “Do you really thing we’re going to Hell?” I asked.
She looked over at me, her expression faintly disgusted. “How should I know? Don’t be a weirdo.”

But I was. I was a weirdo. I still am.

Sense and nonsense

When I was 12 years old, I asked my mother “what religion are we?” I honestly didn’t know. She didn’t either. Looking perplexed, she responded, “Um, I don’t know. Episcopalian, I guess.” Which I later learned meant “not Catholic.”

As a teenager, I read insatiably on the subject of religion; the Bible, the book of Mormon, the Koran, and other holy books, eventually moving into readings in “New Age” philosophy. When I was in middle school, we were required to read Dante’s Inferno. When I read that Plato and the other great philosophers were damned to Hell because they had not accepted Jesus Christ – despite the fact that Christ hadn’t been born yet, and thus the philosophers were denied even the opportunity for salvation – it was the death knell for Christianity, as far as I was concerned.

I had already been confused and dismayed by the conflicts and contradictions of Christianity: Adam and Eve vs. Evolution, the idea that women were seen as weak temptresses, imperfect vessels, incapable of knowing or bearing the Word of God. Like Plato, I was doomed to misunderstand the universe by accident of birth. Born female, I was wicked for no other reason that a chromosomal mishap.

I had become cynical. Science made sense, then, for it offered proofs and evidence that organized religion not only shunned but in fact strictly forbade.

I had to believe that, like scientific laws, the nature of the earth, the nature of mundane reality, could offer insight into the nature of the sublime, the spiritual.

Going to church

Every Sunday, my family would pile into the car and go up to the Colorado mountains for a picnic. My father said, “You can get a hell of a lot closer to God up in the mountains, than in some church full of hypocrites.”

We went all over, anywhere within a two hour drive of home, and that covered hundreds of miles of mountains, valleys, lakes.

Close to home was the Hogback, so named for its sharp rocky peaks, resembling the back of a razorback hog. On the steep, almost vertical sides of the Hogback, my brother and I clambered up sheer stretches of rock, nestling into the huge shallow impressions in the yellow stone – dinosaur footprints. We ran our fingers across the rock, tracing the marks left by giant creatures we could barely envision, listening to my father describing a Colorado underwater, a rich wet place where wooly mammoths and brontosaurs roamed. He talked of volcanoes and upheaval, the land contracting, contorted and twisted, the rock splintering and thrusting upward to form the Hogback.

We closed our eyes, imagining ourselves under the water, and leaned back into the footprints, the physical evidence that remained of a time long before Adam and Eve.

Our family picnicked in pristine meadows, and I imagined that we were the first human beings to come to these places, the first to see these stretches of earth. We always stayed all day, lying on scratchy wool army blankets, eating, playing tag, napping, and reading, always reading. I read Stranger in a Strange Land above timberline, on top of Mt. Evans; I read Camus’ The Stranger in a meadow in Estes Park; I read a hundred books under the thorny gorse bushes on Green Mountain.

Throughout the seasons we went to these places, our private churches, and watched the cycles move across the land. Aspen trees were rich in summer, bright green leaves a canopy overhead, thick meadow grasses a royal carpet for a middle-class princess in blue jeans. In the fall we drove to the groves of aspen to marvel at the rich golds and reds that suffused the leaves, the hillsides alight in a blaze of color. Winter, we picnicked in our army surplus polar underwear, our scratchy wool blankets warm between us and the snow, the barren branches of the aspen stretching white and frozen into the sky, like giant ice crystals.

In the spring, the trees came back to life, the leaves reincarnated, bursting bright into the air. Crocuses poked up through the snow. My mother always delighted in these, the first flowers of spring. I followed her, roaming hillsides clutching tattered botanical textbooks, identifying flowers. Crocus, snow phlox, pistil, stamen, pollen.

Spring was magic. Sitting quietly on my picnic blanket, immersed in a book, my mother would call me back to reality. “Look...” she would whisper. Baby rabbits, or deer, or raccoons would be just beyond her pointing finger.

But we saw a darker side, too. My father would comfort us when we found the baby birds, flat and still, fragile constructions of bone and feathers that seemed too ethereal and delicate to have ever been alive. Foxes caught and killed baby rabbits in our meadows. Finding skulls and half-consumed deer carcasses were not unusual occurrences. But were never afraid, never disgusted.

My father explained about food chains, survival of the fittest, ecosystems. It was beautiful, a symmetry, a perfect dance. Some things died so that others would live, learn. Some things died only to be reborn stronger, bigger, more resistant.

And it was a world where I belonged.

I saw the feminine, like me, everywhere. It was an integral, vital part of the cycle. The fragile ecosystem could not survive without the lowliest of plants. The male could not survive without the female, and vice versa. Female plants worked with male plants, pollinating and creating more plants, which fed the rabbits so that they could mate and make more rabbits, which fed the foxes so that they could mate and make more foxes, which in turn were fed upon, their bones and flesh fertilizing the earth, giving life to the plants. Some things lived and some things died, but those that died gave themselves to the continuation of the living.

I watched it all, beneath the aspen trees. Lying on my scratchy army blanket, clutching the latest science fiction novel, I felt the earth and nature whirling around me in its gentle and perfect dance, moving on its own perpetual momentum.

As we packed up to leave our temporary picnic grounds, we carefully searched for all signs of our presence, the plastic cups and wrappers, cigarette butts or soda can pull-tabs. We usually collected more than we had brought, remnants of other visitors.

My father would gather up the army blankets, and we’d use a fallen tree branch to sweep the flattened meadow grasses, resurrecting them.

As we hiked away, I would look back over my shoulder, and I couldn’t tell where we had been, that we had ever been there at all. I could only see one of a thousand perfect meadows lying open to the sun and moon.

You should be ashamed of yourself

And so I came to develop a pantheistic, pagan personal philosophy. I see the holy in all things, trees and people and rocks and Post-It notes. Perhaps especially Post-It notes; surely evidence of divine Love. I see the feminine and the masculine in all things, each equally valuable, important. I see the cycles of life and death and rebirth everywhere I look. And I see sex, everywhere, the dance between the male and female that ultimately creates life.

Yet I also had internalized Judeo-Christian values, and especially shame. I couldn’t help it. We are barraged with messages from the media, from our parents, from the people we meet on the street, our friends from school. In one study, rock videos show sexual images simultaneously, or within a few seconds of, religious images. Shame, guilt, and above all, fear, are the ugly threads woven throughout the tapestry of organized religion. The conflict, to me, is that western philosophy preaches love from one side of its collective mouth, and fear and judgment from the other. The concepts are, to my mind, mutually exclusive. I do not have a degree in philosophy or religion; I don’t claim to be an expert on anything. I only know what I personally think, believe, and feel to be true. I am willing to accept that I might well be wrong. My problem is that most organized religions are unwilling to make that same statement, with as little proof as to the nature of reality as I have.

But shame over my thoughts about sex, my feelings and desires, my very sexuality, was an integral part of my personal sexual experience. As a teenager, I would have graphic sexual dreams, masturbating to quell them, and feeling intense shame for doing so. Hell, just having the dreams was enough to make me feel guilty, like somehow I should have control over my subconscious and unconscious self.

I was ashamed that I had sexual feelings towards women. Homosexuality was just plain wrong, except in the case of cute effeminate gay men in the movies, the sexual clowns of Hollywood. But of course, you would never want to watch them kissing, or holding hands, or doing anything even slightly sexual. That would be dirty and wrong. Probably evil.

One Christian website I found stated that the Bible indicates that all homosexual activity is sinful, whether or not the couple feel love for one another. There are no committed, consensual homosexual relationships described in the Bible. It further pointed out that the Bible refers to homosexual acts; it does not talk about sexual orientation – and thus the author condemned the notion that people can be naturally queer. It is traditional Christian belief that homosexuality is a “lifestyle choice” – as if anyone would choose to be hated, reviled, and often times live in fear of abuse and even death at the hands of his fellow man. Some choice.

Further, we are told, homosexual behavior is one of a small group of behaviors that will prevent a person from attaining salvation and going to heaven. In the Bible, Leviticus tells us that homosexuality is an abomination. Of course, so is eating shellfish and wearing polyester (mixed fibers), and it’s okay to own slaves. Leviticus had some interesting ideas.

That’s one of those inconsistencies that fascinates me. Why do we take some parts of the Bible and use them, and discard others? Why is it okay for ministers to wear polyester suits and eat shrimp? Why do some sects seek to allow same-sex marriages, and not others? Can’t we agree to disagree, and simply allow people to live their lives – and let God sort it out later? Who are we to decide who may love and who may not?

Heterosexual sex, we are taught, is okay, but only in the context of marriage – and for the truly hardcore, only for procreation. One website, www.allaboutworldview.org, had this to say about premarital sex:

“Yes, sex is pleasurable, but in God’s view, the primary purpose of sex is not recreation, but rather re-creation. In other words, sex is for reproduction. God does not limit sex to married couples to rob pleasure from those who are unmarried. Rather, God commands against premarital sex in order to protect unmarried people from unwanted pregnancies, from children born to parents who do not want them, and to protect children from parents who are not prepared for them. Imagine, for a moment, a world without premarital sex. There would be no sexually-transmitted diseases, there would be no un-wed mothers, there would be no unwanted pregnancies, there would be no abortions, etc. According to the Bible, abstinence is God’s only policy when it comes to premarital sex. Abstinence saves lives, protects babies, gives sexual relations the proper value, and most importantly, abstinence honors God.”

Statements such as these take a simplistic view of the reality of relationships between men and women. To imagine that a married couple might never choose abortion is folly. Not all married couples want children, not all women choose to be mothers, not all married people are prepared for the realities of raising children. And to imagine that reserving sex for marriage will ensure that all babies have fathers is a joke. Divorce is a reality, even if it, too, is condemned in the Bible. In fact, the divorce rate amongst Christians is alarmingly high, higher than the rates for non-Christians, according to a recent study by the Barna Research Group.

The spectre of sexually transmitted disease is a common tool used by Christian groups to instill fear in believers. And it is true: if you don’t have sex, you won’t get herpes. If your partner doesn’t have sex, he won’t have herpes. But how many people enter into their marriages virgins, as many Christians interpret the Bible to say? I’ve seen innumerable Christian bulletin boards, where people who have formerly sinned and lost their virginity have now come to God, and wish to be washed clean of this sin. Perhaps God does indeed forgive them, if they maintain abstinence from then on, but the initial deed is done. Not all Christians are virgins on their wedding night, even those with the best of intentions.

Aside from marriage, sex in any other context, and to some, even enjoying it, is one of the many sins of the flesh. The flesh is inherently weak, evil. We are slathering dogs, gluttons, creatures bent on satisfaction of physical lusts. Yet our fine human minds can overcome this weakness. We can resist temptations. We can overthrow our weak, earthly desires. We must be strong, to withstand this ultimate test, these fleshy bodies that house our souls. God wants us to be tested every day of our lives. We are sinners, all of us, born of sin.

I can’t buy it. I just can’t. I’ve tried on that suit and it just doesn’t fit. Babies steeped in sin from the moment of birth? Come on. Anyone who’s ever held a baby knows they are holding the most pure, innocent being on earth. There is no hatred, no jealousy, no judgment, no shame in a baby. They simply are. We are all babies once. The shame and greed and anger comes later. We learn that stuff.

Good vs. Evil

I don’t know. Maybe I’m a puppet of Satan. Maybe I’m so lost in evil I don’t even know I’m there, with hideous demons crouching on my shoulder, whispering justifications for my sinful ways. Could be, I suppose. But here’s the thing: I don’t feel like a hateful, mean, evil person. I feel like a good person, and I want to be the most loving, giving, accepting person I can possibly be. I want to give as much of myself as possible. I want to love as much as possible – and I think the possibilities of love are infinite.

I do love sex. And I do agree that sex can be evil, and also harmful. It’s all about the context, the way in which sex is given and received.

I found many Christian websites on the Internet explaining (sometimes pedantically) why premarital sex is a sin, and how abstinence is the only way to honor God. Often the reasons are because of the negative feelings engendered by sexual relationships outside of marriage. I think in some cases this is true. One Catholic researcher wrote “sex hinders communication,” and I can see this to be true in some of my teenage sexual relationships. I was so busy having sex, I never learned how to communicate, to develop a friendship with my partner, to build a stable relationship. I was wallowing in lust and forgetting the most important part of being in a relationship with another person, caring and giving for and to each other. When you’re a teenager, you’re a flaming ball of hormones, rocketing through life blissfully unaware of the consequences. Teenage sexual relationships almost always end in heartache, for everyone concerned.

Extramarital affairs, adultery, similarly cause painful emotional upheaval. But part of the reason for this is that we are operating on the assumption that monogamy is natural to the species, and I disagree with that notion (but there’s another rant).

It’s important to note that not all Christian groups take such hardline stances as I’ve mentioned above. The Religious Institute on Sexual Morality, Justice, and Healing, in their Declaration, state that “Sexuality is God’s life-giving and life-fulfilling gift.... Our faith traditions celebrate the goodness of creation, including our bodies and our sexuality. We sin when this sacred gift is abused or exploited. However, the great promise of our traditions is love, healing, and restored relationships.” They believe that “Our culture needs a sexual ethic focused on personal relationships and social justice rather than particular sexual acts.” The group openly advocates same-sex marriage and ordaining women, as well as access to voluntary contraception, abortion, and HIV/STD prevention and treatment.

Sex is like anything else. Food. Clothing. Drugs. Alcohol. Exercise. It can be and is often abused. That’s when things get evil, when we use sex for fueling an addiction, or for hurting ourselves or others. Sex should be what it is: a wonderful connection between two human beings, a giving and a sharing experience, a way of demonstrating feeling toward one another. I think that this is possible even in the most casual relationships, even between a prostitute and a client. We attach more meaning to the act via our religions and morals, to protect ourselves from hurt. Yet we create the hurt. We decide that this act, and the consequences of it, can hurt us.

I don’t believe that there is such a thing as meaningless sex. All sex has meaning. But we decide what that meaning is.

The whole truth

I stated earlier that my vagina is holy. I believe this to be true. And so is the rest of my body. I value each and every part of my self. They are beautiful creations. Too often, it seems to me, we place value on only our genitals, and ignore the rest of our bodies. It is therefore “special” when we have sex with someone, but not special when we use our mouths and eat with someone. It is wrong to have sex for money, to use the vagina as a means of garnering income, but on the other hand, it’s okay to use your arms and legs and muscles to work a construction job. A construction worker is selling his body just as I sell mine; and yet his act doesn’t carry the same meaning. Why do we attach emotional feeling to one act, and not the other? Perhaps, if I was a construction worker (one of the few jobs I haven’t done), I would feel that my muscles were holy, that my strength was my gift from God. That would be right. Instead of attaching emotion and meaning to one act, why not give every act, everything we do, meaning?

Which brings me to the whole notion that, perhaps, sex is a gift from God... and that all this stuff about abstinence and everything else is just an early form of crowd control, keeping the masses in line. In other words, a form of day-care for adults, who desperately crave direction and order in their lives just to be able to make sense of the world around them.

Spiritually, I am no longer a child. I don’t need the fear of Hell to keep me from doing wrong. I define wrong as “hurting myself or others.” Pretty simple. I define right as being as loving a person as I can possibly be, giving as much to others as I can, while still caring for myself. It took over 20 years of therapy to get that “caring for myself” point in there. It is not selfish to care for oneself. Selfishness comes from caring for oneself at the expense of others. Sometimes, the most loving thing we can do for another is to take care of ourselves.

In the past few years, I have been studying Tantric principles, from various cultures, and incorporating these traditions with modern Wiccan/pagan theory. The idea is startlingly simple. Western philosophy tends to suggest that the body, mind, and spirit are separate entities, the flesh being evil and capable of ruining the soul’s chances for Heaven. The mind is the only thing that has control over that lusty body, and the mind needs religion to teach it how to control the flesh, thus allowing it that ticket to Heaven.

In Eastern philosophy, the mind, body, and spirit are separate and yet one; that each of these things is not some kind of diabolical test, but rather a gift from the Universe. Tantra teaches that only through exploring the mind and spirit, and also the body, learning the arts of love, can one truly begin to know the Divine. We are meant to be whole people, not divided against ourselves.

Indeed, writes well-known Tantric master Shri Aghori Ji, “Tantra is different from other traditions because it takes the whole person, and his/her worldly desires into account. Other spiritual traditions ordinarily teach that desire for material pleasures and spiritual aspirations are mutually exclusive, setting the stage for an endless internal struggle. Although most people are drawn into spiritual beliefs and practices, they have a natural urge to fulfill their desires. With no way to reconcile these two impulses, they fall prey to guilt and self-condemnation or become hypocritical. Tantra offers an alternative path.”

When I learn something new, I am expanding my mind, and thus honoring the Universe. When I feel love, and give in a loving spirit, I am nurturing my soul and the Divine. When I make love, when I fuck, when I spank someone who wants a spanking, when I lovingly share the bounty of my body with another, I am completing myself, growing closer with the Gods and Goddesses, the imagined personifications of the male and female energy in the Universe.

I am still not entirely free of shame. I wish that I were. I feel shame when others judge me. I feel shame when I know that I am, in the eyes of society, a criminal and a sinner. Perhaps shame isn’t even the right word – what I feel is not shame for my actions, but hurt at the judgment. It is painful to know that others find my behavior hurtful, when I know the opposite is true.

When I hold a quadriplegic man in my arms, and let him know that he, too, is desirable and wanted in this world, I know I’m giving something truly special back to the Divine. When I hold a whole man in my arms, and let him know that he isn’t alone, that he isn’t untouchable, I know I am giving love back to the Universe. When I laugh and play and talk dirty, I’m celebrating all that it means to be human and sexual in our world, exploring our fears and desires and bringing them out into the light, to be honestly examined.

Sometimes, I imagine that I am a conduit, a channel for sensual love. I open myself up to the world, to men and women, and take what they have to give, cycle it through my body, and give back to them a hundred times over. Sex and sensuality flow through me, physical love that can be shared and given ad infinitum. As I open my body up to the Universe, I give an aspect of myself that is nothing short of holy. It humbles me with gratitude, that I can give love in this world. Love, all love, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual – is what makes me, and any of us, whole. And as whole beings, we become one with the Divine.

 

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