You Got Religion In My Porn!

Please note: This piece discusses my personal sex life, and my personal sexual fantasies, in quite a bit of detail. Family members and others who don’t want to read about that, please don’t read this. This piece was originally published on the Blowfish Blog.

Satan was a lesbian
If there are any other porn writers out there — pro or amateur — I’m curious: Has this ever happened with you?

And to all you porn readers out there: Have your reading interests ever shifted in this direction?

I’ve been writing more porn fiction lately. In the past, fiction never came easily to me, and I typically spent six months or more writing and re-writing a single story. Lately, though, a lightbulb has gone off over my head about how to write porn without needing it to be 4,000 words long or agonizing over every word (a topic for another piece), and of late I’ve been writing porn fiction at a much faster clip.

And a weirdly large amount of it has been about religion.

So I’m trying to figure out what that’s about. I’m not a religious person, and I don’t come from a religious background. I was raised by rock-ribbed agnostics: at most I’ve had a vaguely woo belief in some sort of world- soul; and today, I’m a hard-core naturalist/ atheist. And until recently, I was never very interested in religious porn. It didn’t gross me out or anything; I just never got the appeal.

So why the recent obsession with religion in my porn?

Scarlet letter
Part of it, I think, is actually the atheism. Not surprisingly, I spend more time thinking about religion now that I’m an atheist blogger than I have at any time in my life (since I was a religion major, anyway). So religion is just on my mind more… and consequently, it’s more in my libido.

Plus, being a critic of religion, the darker aspects of religion are particularly on my mind. And the erotic imagination/ porn- writing parts of my mind are pretty dark, and they tend to gobble up dark things like they were chocolates. Nom, nom, nom.

And of course, as Ingrid points out, anything that’s forbidden or taboo almost automatically becomes erotic. As an atheist, religious thinking about sex — imagining sex through the eyes of a fervent believer, putting myself and my libido into that mindset — feels kind of taboo… and thus it becomes more erotically exciting than it might otherwise be.

I think there’s something else, though; something other than the accident of what I happen to be thinking about these days. That’s probably why I started playing with it in the first place; but it doesn’t explain why I’ve been running with it so eagerly.

Tantra sex
I suppose I should clarify: My religious porn is not about spirituality. It is not about Tantric energy, or ancient Wiccan rituals invoking the Goddess, or Pan coming back to Earth and fucking it into enlightenment. It is not slash porn about Kali and Vishnu, or Jesus and Mary Magdalene. It is not about the saints, mortifying their flesh into transcendence. (Although that last one, now that I think about it…) My religious porn is about religion. Human religion, as humans practice it. It’s about religious followers being led by their faith into sexual lives they find disturbing and confusing; about religious leaders using their power to sexually manipulate their followers; about fervent religious believers struggling with sexual guilt. (Dark things. Nom, nom, nom.)

And I think my religious porn is about two things.

I love to write porn about borderline consent. I usually don’t care for porn about unambiguous non-consent: I tend to find it either horrific or unconvincing. I do, however, adore porn where consent is technically present but emotionally absent; porn where a character feels that they don’t have a choice, even if they do. And religion is fertile ground for that. Cult members desperate to please their leader; wives who comply with their husbands’ increasingly bizarre sexual demands because their faith teaches that marriage and obedience are sacred. People who are free to leave the sexual situations they feel forced into, as long as they’re willing to suffer eternal damnation. That sort of thing.

And I love to write porn about shame.

Shame-dame
Shame is often at the center of my fantasy life. And when it comes to shame, religion is very fertile ground indeed.

It’s not just the obvious sexual shame that many traditional religions teach. It’s not just the standard social shame at breaking the rules of your religion and disappointing your family/ neighbors/ religious teachers. It’s the deep, personal shame at disappointing God. It’s the belief that, no matter how secret you keep your sexuality, no matter how private and not- hurting- anybody your sex life is, God is always watching. God knows every dirty thing you do. When you fuck, or get spanked, or look at dirty videos on the Interweb, or even just whack off in the dark, God is watching, like an omnipotent voyeur. He’s even watching the dirty movies you screen for yourself in your mind. And unless your sexuality fits into his fairly specific vision, your sex life is letting him down. How selfish of you. You should be ashamed. (The details of that specific vision vary from religion to religion, of course… and of course, we have the puzzling question of why he created your sexuality that way in the first place… but let’s not worry about that now.)

As an atheist writer, I find this notion repellent and sad. It makes my heart hurt; makes me rage at pointless suffering and ruined lives. It makes me want to devote the greater portion of my writing career to battling it.

But as a porn writer?

Dark things. Nom. Nom. Nom.

So. Other porn writers? Other porn readers? Have you ever found your writing/ reading wandering into this area? This is sort of new territory for me, and if anyone has thoughts about it, I’d be very curious to hear them.

For examples of what I’m talking about:
Christian Domestic Discipline
Penitence as a Perpetual Motion Machine
“Deprogramming,” from X: The Erotic Treasury, edited by Susie Bright

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You Got Religion In My Porn!
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4 thoughts on “You Got Religion In My Porn!

  1. 1

    I’m another atheist spanking writer, and I think religion has a lot of potential for stories like those you’ve mentioned. It’s not a potential I’ve explored myself, but I have thought of it. Will probably try my hand at it later. I also have more of a love for stories involving mythological beings than you seem to do.
    One idea I’ve had, involves a god in a pantheon coming down and punishing his head priest for perverting his message to support her own views (though she wasn’t entirely aware that was what she was doing). I’m guessing that the whole idea of religious people being punished for their self-serving “piety” is appealing to me because of my atheism.

  2. 2

    I know what you mean. I’m an atheist myself, but I have often used religious imagery (worship, scourging, confession) in erotic writing and in BDSM play. A few years ago, a scene I was involved in very suddenly flipped into a ‘confession’ scene, with the poor ‘parishioner’ being beaten into admitting all kinds of terrible sins to the ‘priest’. Neither I nor my play partner had any idea where it had come from, but it seems that those tropes were pretty deeply ingrained in our cultural heritage, even though neither of us had been raised Catholic or even particularly religious.

  3. 3

    As a Don’t-Call-It-Smut writer for Ravenous Romance.com AND a Bay Area atheist activist (shhh!) I find I’m constantly slipping religion into my stories… (a co-ed seducing a pair of Mormon missionaries, a Victorian woman who leaves Jesus for a Hindu temple dancer, a romantic protagonist who is an open atheist, etc.) I try not to be TOO preachy about it, but I do love making readers think about atheism while they’re getting turned on…
    (Note to self: must send Greta & Ingrid invites to my fb page)
    -Kilt Kilpatrick

  4. 4

    Frankly, it’s hard for me to keep religion out of my fiction, be it porn or otherwise. For me, it’s because religion has been such a part of my life, has colored the good and the overwhelming bad of it, and impacts the way I experience sexual desire. I find that shame is an important state of mind in my fiction, like you.

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