Cumclave

or why does God hate sex pistons?

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“God is a disgruntled cuckold.”

The first time I’d say this out loud was at a brunch on a sleepy, rainy day in the PNW 10 years ago. I was contemplative in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to be for months and when I grew too fatigued to secure the floodgates, that’s what poured out. I remember eye rolls at the table, my friends convinced I would say anything for a laugh— Nia, the ceaseless showman. It wasn’t a joke but rather a sentiment my brain had been grinding toward for ages, like weathered rocks smoothed in persistently choppy waters. The former church girl life had lent me a combative gaze towards Him, the Christian God as sold to me by both the Catholic and Southern Baptist Church. I had no restful moment in my faith (if it ever existed). It was endless questioning, stiff backs in a pew paranoid that being wrong this time about this thing, would have consequences I wasn’t prepared to survive.

I’d approach the altar some mornings, fingers flexing tightly against each other as I passed off virulent pleas and bargains for prayer, tears threatening to expose me for the anxiously non-believing heretic I imagined myself to be. I grew so preoccupied with the rites of worship that I challenged them to become my God, figuring works without faith was a way to encounter a deity, whether they already existed or I’d reverse engineered their creation. If I conceded to the possibility of a higher power having put me in the rat race, the least they could do was watch me ardently try to make it work before counting losses and retreating.

In the church, they say you can find God in everything. That every breath and thought, belief and action is orchestrated by God and you have two options: succumb to His will, or resist it and be punished. It’s a great vehicle of control, one that conveniently cast light on a God as voyeuristic and demanding as the society bred to bend in supplication towards Him. When God is everywhere, we’re taught to find God in everything and usually can do so, forever. These teachings aren’t of consequence to me these days, I left the church ages ago. Finding God in all the places Christianity said it was impossible but the place I find God most, where I think it’s comedic and poetic is well, porn.

I don’t watch porn much. When sex is your business¹, it can be hard to view editorialized fucking as anything less than the production. And on the rare day I can suspend my professional brain, I still have no desire. Personally, I like my voyeurism IRL and have been spoiled for far too long for its digital counterpart to feel like anything more than a paltry appetizer. But if I open my laptop and load the thing, God has met me in the same place every time— the kneel. You all know it. If you’ve ever watched cishet porn then you’re well acquainted with this phenomenon. At some point, the female performer falls to her knees, tilts her head up and assumes a gaze so familiar to me I could call on it like an old friend.

This look is one of animated yearning, a silent plea that says “I’ve surrendered.” To what? Is up for interpretation, always.

And despite my hyper vigilance that this is indeed a production, and a porno, the christian part of my brain that I’ve long starved curdles with hunger as it recognizes its kin. Her gaze invites me in, challenges me to share a moment with her in devotion. Her stance is one assumed across the world by church girls, taught to desire deeply for intimacy and closeness to God. We find our heads turned up with slack mouths whether for dick or divinity, the motivation indistinguishable on our features.

We come to sex the same way we come to God, hesitant perhaps, but always motivated by a desire and hunger you couldn’t articulate well if you tried. I saw a video go viral of a female pastor at a mega church saying “Only Jesus can satisfy.” It reads like a plea more often than an attestation. Life would be much simpler if we just stopped wanting, stopped seeking satisfaction because the good book tells us to, because it says any satisfaction past God’s, is evil. Though I don’t believe that to be true, the sentiment infected me as much as the next person and by in large produced this cycle of deferring, succumbing to, then agonizing over desires, whatever they might be: sex, food, comfort, security, a fulfilling life. Within this logic, it never felt wrong to already have, only to want if you don’t— under God’s eye, we’re all masochist I suppose.

There’s a preoccupation, in our world, with things making sense. We measure history and time through logic and formulas, binary code and math; they all have their place, but I worry we expect logic to explain the inexplicable too often though it pains us to do so. Yes, there’s a science behind socialization, connection, desire, sexual impulse and we should remain interested in it but it’s not the sum of these things, of who we are. The world was spinning eons before we attempted to notate and understand its axis, we danced amongst the cosmos before we attempted to name them. There’s comfort in that, how often things just happen without seeking our permission.

Total freedom I’ve imagined, lies in the ability to exist unfettered by the confusion or attentiveness of elements around you. For centuries since the colonial era began, we’ve been primed to believe our humanity lies in adamant restraint, ones ability to detach, suppress, remain stoic in the face of terror, cool in a boiler. If it couldn’t be reasoned away, it was beneath humanity. This was the logic of the church, and of the freakishly evil empires pursuing “valor” in its name. Everywhere I look, I see echoes of this marriage to restraint, in our dress, language, hair and physical expression.

As a descendant of victims of Chattel Slavery, the “primative” class of people, I realized my ability to reclaim the pride and veneration I was robbed of required me, all of us really, to not just reject the colonial overlords but also their restraint. It’s high time we stop allowing the groups who’ve behaved the least civilized in the name of expansion and capital to define what civility, least of all, humanity means. To reject the totality of the human experience, is to reject the soul of humanity, empire is soulless and we can only exist peacefully within it if we too commit to soullessness.

For those of us that refuse to abide by soullessness, we yearn to reclaim excitement, curiousity, desire that requires no explanation. That’s the crisis is it not? Everyone is tired of the rules (because they don’t work) but is too afraid to demand the world be better, that it embrace humanity without oppressive confines because it’s hard to imagine what we’ve never known. And though we’ve never known it, it’s important to remember that people have known it. There was a world prior to colonialism and Christianity and the constant spectre of terror trailing us no matter where we go. The issue isn’t what humans do when they’re not restrained, it’s what empires do in the name of restraint.

I never feel more human than when I embrace my desires wholeheartedly. Desire is what motivates all change. A desire to eat, to love or be loved, to fuck, to hurt what has hurt you, to be free even if its pursuance can kill you. They’ve robbed us of the beauty of desire because it creates a chasm between what we have been, what we could be and what we should be. If our satisfaction is limited to what is here and now and known and “proper” then we need never seek more or better or just, we simply exist. That feels decidely anti human.

In a world as diseased as ours, Jesus is the only thing that satisfies because he’s the only thing allowed to bring us satisfaction. No one demands we explain away faith, the fervent prayers and tongues, the endless sacrifice of the poor that we call tithing, it’s limited logic with innumerable grace for it. And contrary to what we’ve been told, we can choose to apply that same grace to all of our wants, whether its polite to express them in a pew or not.

I ache with lust so intensely it feels I can peer into the past, present and future of human connection. The face of a lover takes shape with a magnificence that can only be described as godly. Sweat tastes like ocean mist, flesh between my teeth feels like every perfectly ripe fruit I’ve been blessed with, the curve of a spine registers just as marvelously as a towering tree in a forest. The electricity is in the wanting and pursuing it, wantonly. The hours on our knees, be it in a pew or a porno remind us that you can only want if you’re alive, and if we expect the world to care about the living, we must act on our aliveness as often and brazenly as possible. It’s the most natural way to assert our personhood, what about us actually matters.

If you can learn denial, you can learn desire. I believe we all should yearn to know it more. And hey, if you’re that concerned with the sanctity of your soul, there’s always a hail mary to spare.

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It’s important to me that you know this piece was in progress prior to the passing of Pope Francis. Some may find the title crass, blasphemous even and to that I say, I think he’d have liked it, have you ever met a priest?

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1. The author is a whore, the literal kind and does various forms of sex work, porn being one of them.