Sexual Freedom

Father Antonio was an impressive man. Dark and strong as Italian men come, he could make the female teachers at my boys-only Catholic school swoon, as he charmed them with his vocal harmonics and suave ways. Indeed, his status as an ordained minister of the church was, perhaps, the only thing that kept the women at bay.

This strapping man – also a doctor by training – taught a subject that gave them the giggles and aroused them, all at once. Father Antonio was our in-house sex guru, and his fascinating accent and exaggeratedly proper manners made him quite an engaging speaker. He compared watching porno to observing a master chef conjure up a dazzling meal on television.

“It’s utterly pointless,” he would say, shaking his head. “You reach out and want to taste it, but can only touch the screen…and wish.”

The women would nod, the boys would stare – everyone apparently mesmerized by this man’s wisdom. Father Antonio was very convincing.

But he was also celibate, and herein lies one of the greatest ironies of my conservative Christian upbringing in India: I learned about the ins and outs of procreation and the devils of pornography in a 90-minute crash course for 14-year-olds taught by a man who was, himself, sexually inexperienced.

The curriculum was standard fare: We have sex to populate God's good Earth. Stick to the basics. Forget about all those dirty pictures you've seen on newsstands. Pleasure was left out of the equation.

But then, this was India – an ancient land known for its lurid eroticism, and reminders that sex wasn’t just about making babies missionary style was everywhere. Take, for example, the exquisite stone carvings on the outer walls of the celebrated Chandela temples of Khajuraho. Carved painstakingly into the facade are some of the most stunning depictions of erotic sex, steamy enough to make East Hollywood porn stars blush.

One carving shows a naked man performing a headstand, legs entwined with those of his lover, who is being held up to his gonads by two buff-bare women on either side. The attendant women are being simultaneously pleasured by the man's free hands. How's that for an involved position?

At first, I struggled with these images and the contradictions they stirred up in my impressionable mind. Where did these carvings come from? Did these men and women enjoy what Father Antonio might call “satanic pleasures?” Was I sinning if I fantasized about actually being in one of those carvings?

Every thought made me want to dash to Confessional.

After a few agonizing months, I decided to confront some of my more liberal-thinking teachers about the cognitive dissonance wreaking havoc on my sanity. They greeted my earnest queries with glee, then armed me with a reading list and directed me to the city library.

I read voraciously. The learning curve was steep, but it cleared up a lot of confusion. I learned first that the carvings weren’t intended to shock the senses, and contrary to popular belief, they weren't commissioned by lecherous monarchs in obscene luxury. Rather, these sculptures had practical and spiritual purpose. Some believe they were employed as tools for sex education.

"Since most people visited temples, it was an appropriate place for mass communication," the late K.L. Kamat notes, an authority on the interpretation of the erotic in Hindu architecture.

Another possibility is that the art was meant to stir feelings of passion, promoting the pleasures of sexual union.

"It is possible that at the time just preceding the construction of these sculptures, monastic Buddhism was prevalent, people were losing interest in the householder life, and the temples were built to attract people to sex and family life, and to renew Hinduism," Kamat adds.

Whatever the rationale, one thing is certain: In 10th century India, even the gods found pleasure in the plait of erotic love. Sex was not simply a procreative act, but also an intensely pleasurable exercise – something my virgin tutor in high school didn't quite comprehend.

I was now beginning to develop a deeper understanding of my erotic heritage and what it all meant. I was learning very quickly that Christianity didn’t quite fit the cultural paradigm. I came to believe that the Christian influence in India, and the rest of the world, had contorted our view of sexual pleasure.

The evidence was everywhere. Even the Kamasutra, India's ancient book of love, was considered pornographic and ungodly, yet the tome was written by a holy man. I found the incongruity rather perplexing, and the question I raised then became an influential one in my life. Why has right-wing Christianity reduced ancient eroticism's spiritual roots to forbidden sleaze?

The answer didn’t seem readily apparent, but I felt it had something to do with the way conservative Christian groups think about women in general. I had often heard religious leaders speak of the "natural use of women." In essence, these pundits saw sex as the method by which men use women to produce offspring and propagate the faith. Whether the woman was sexually fulfilled during intercourse seemed to be of little concern.

And in this, I concluded, lay the problem. I promised myself then that I would break from this tradition of mechanistic sexuality handed down to me by my Christian upbringing. I would become reacquainted with the erotic sexuality of yore. I would restore the Kamasutra! I would view women not merely as carnal subjects, but as sexual beings with needs and desires that I needed to grasp for the full enjoyment of erotic pleasure.

Adrenaline (and testosterone) pumping, I couldn’t wait to marry my true love so that, together, we could begin our grand restoration. I met my ex-wife in 2001 on a teaching exchange program in China. She was Idahoan, sharp, quick-witted and good looking. I fell in love with her quite easily.

There was, however, one kink in the mix: She was Mormon and, in bed, she seemed to take her cues from the conservative playbook of Father Antonio. Still, an eternal optimist, sprung from traditionalist roots myself, I assumed that in time I could help her cross the bridge into the realms of eroticism.

She began the journey slowly and apprehensively; stopping each time we hit a religious roadblock. Some sexual positions were good; others were bad. The act was all black and white; gray was harder to endure. Needless to say, we weren’t rushing into any alternative lifestyles in a hurry.

And then, one night, she surprised me.

We were lying in bed, talking about our days, when she asked: “Do you think it’s possible that I might be bisexual?”

In these moments, your jaw drops, you shout, something like“No way,” before you clasp both hands over your mouth.

I paused, stunned for a moment.

“It’s possible,” I said. “Anyone in particular?”
“Yes.”
“Do I know her?”
She mentioned the name of an old roommate.
“Do you mind if I contact her?” she asked.

Mind? At the end of the day, I wanted us to be trailblazers in our conservative families. We would pursue sexual rapture in the interest of complete fulfillment in marriage. If my wife wanted to explore her sexuality, by golly, I was going to let her.

We began cautiously. Tentitavely. We set ground rules. She would spend three days with her lover and four with me. We wouldn’t intrude in each other’s space. If things appeared to be going wrong, we would abort the exercise. Our marriage would not suffer because of this. We felt liberated and powerful.

It all looked great, but the practice of it proved more challenging. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer once wrote: “Naiveté in grownups is often charming; but when coupled with vanity it is indistinguishable from stupidity.”

I thought we were indestructible. But within a few short weeks, things had spiraled dangerously out of control.

For starters, I rarely saw my wife, and the time we did spend together was fraught with tension, mostly because we weren’t saying much to each other. Our ability to talk 19 to the dozen into the wee hours of the morning had suddenly given way to small talk. No more lively discussions about God and religion, Republican politics, sexuality or any of the other weighty issues over which we’d bonded. Certainly no talk of where our relationship was headed, now that we'd added lover girl to our hitherto balanced equation.

The silence bothered me. I wanted her to say something, anything at all.

“Baby, tell me stories."

This, in our relationship, was an invitation to chatter. It’s how we had learned so much about each other back in China, as we lazed on the grass watching the children play while the sun dipped below the horizon. Tales of past loves, betrayal, religion, you name it and we had a story.

“What’s left to tell? You already know them all.”
“Why don’t we say much to each other anymore?”
“I don’t know. We spend all day together. What’s there to talk about that we haven’t already discussed?”
“I don’t know. Is there something you’ve been wondering about? Is there anything about our new arrangement that you think we should go over? Baby, do you still love me?”
“You know I love you.”
“I know that you loved me.”
“That’s it. I don’t want to have this conversation anymore.”
"You say all you want to say to her, and then you come home to me to fulfill an obligation,” I pointed out.
“You can think of this however you want,” she shot back. “In fact, if that’s the way you think of us, I’m going to spend the night at her place.”
“You’ve already spent most of the day with her!”

I was in mid-sentence when she hopped off the couch and out the door. I heard it creak and then slam.

Again, I felt the silence creep up on me. One more lonely night. I began to dabble in Tarot cards around this time. They seemed less obscure than my faltering relationship. I searched for answers in the occult, and they came. The prognosis was ominous. I stumbled on a Web site that allowed me to do free readings – three-card spreads, five cards, an 11-card Celtic Cross that’s supposed to sort out even the most muddled of messes.

The Tower: Alas, you’re about to get a very rude awakening. You will be shaken up, torn down and blown asunder.

As if my life wasn’t already in the gutter! Another card turned up with increasing frequency.

Death: This is a time for change. Time for something to end.

Not what I wanted to hear. I needed to pray. In a strange sort of way, I supposed that this whole episode was an early immersion in purgatory for trying to emulate the erotic traditions of my forefathers – payback time for the neo-pagan.

I prayed almost constantly on those lonely nights.

“God, please bring her back to me. Help us be a family again. I’ll never ask anything else of you!”

I chanted it over and over, like a mantra, until it became a part of me. There were times during the day when I’d catch myself lip-synching the words in idle moments. I feared I was going insane. I confronted my wife again and begged her to end the experiment.

“I can’t,” she said.

Her tone was sympathetic, but that was all she could offer. She wasn’t going to give up her lover.

“I want to support her desire to go to school, I want to share a home with her, I want to be there for her,” on and on she went.
“What if I can’t go through with this, though?” I asked.
“Then we’ll have to go our separate ways.”

I felt a searing pain tear through me like a white-hot knife cutting through my flesh. I was angry and hurt; I felt betrayed, but all I could do was cry. I couldn’t live without her, but I couldn’t live with her either. Not this way.

I didn’t see her the rest of that day. We had met over coffee earlier in the afternoon. I hid myself in the library until midnight, when it closed.

I went home. The apartment was quiet. Too quiet. I bolted the door and tiptoed inside. The living room was warm, and the fire in the fireplace crackled. This had become my room. My wife and I hadn’t been sleeping together for several weeks. She had said she needed the space.

I was about to lie down on the couch when something caught my eye. The curtain to our bedroom was drawn closed. This was odd. She never drew the curtain. The curtain kept the heat out, and she loved the warmth. I parted the curtain a crack and peeked in, squinting in the dark until my eyes could make out the naked shapes on the bed.

Lover girl was wrapped in my wife’s embrace, her scrawny, tattooed frame facing me. I felt the bile in my stomach churn. I might have thrown up right then, but I caught myself. I could feel the rage welling up inside me. I wanted to take off my clothes and jump into bed with them, force them to fulfill my every sexual whim. I wanted her lover to feel my wrath. The whole thing gave me a strange hedonic thrill. It was a roller coaster of black emotions: arousal, fear, anger, remorse, all swirling around in my gut.

Yet, all I could muster was a weak: “Baby, why this?”

She stirred. My memory of it all is still a blur. Lover girl hid under the blanket as my wife hurried me out of the room. I was wailing and pounding my fist into anything inanimate. The cats scrambled for cover.

“Calm down,” she said. “I’m sorry. I never meant for you to see…we just lost track of time.”
“Why this? Why in our bed?” I moaned.
“I don’t think of this as our bed anymore, beau,” she said matter-of-factly.

I felt completely lifeless, hit by a semi on the expressway. My wife rushed me out of the house so that lover girl could dress.

“I want to talk to her,” I said.
“Beau, she doesn’t want to face you. Especially now.”
“I just want to talk to her.”
“No. We’re going to go for a drive, and when we get back, she’ll be gone.”

I don’t remember that half hour in the car. I remember is weeping uncontrollably. I remember asking, “Why?”

“I don’t know,” my wife replied. “And I don’t want to think about it, because right now I have the self-esteem of an ant.”

We left it at that. Lover girl was gone when we got home, and I went to bed on the couch, sick to my stomach. The end was near, and I could feel it.

The fights got worse and more frequent after that night. Lover girl weighed in with e-mails and notes, the latter plastered all over our house.

“I love you. Come away with me,” one read.
“I have never been a home breaker, but my evil side tells me I should persist,” said another.
“If you come with me, I’ll be the happiest person.”

My wife and I didn’t say much to each other after that night. Speaking was painful. Most of our time together was spent eggshells, our relationship all but dissolved into a cesspool of our own making.

What followed was as heart wrenching as it was inevitable.

Divorce isn’t easy – especially if you're not the one saying good-bye. It happens too quickly, emotions beyond reason, exchanges too fierce, tempers teetering upon the knife-edge between love and hatred. You say things to each other that you never thought you'd say. You hear things you want to squelch. Life seems like it's about to be devoured by a storm of madness.

Sexual freedom, that keystone of social liberalism, is a bit of a hot potato. At the end of the day, emotions follow no rules. Total sexual freedom has an addictive quality, a quality that can sometimes ruin marriages. Perhaps, in our rush to emancipate from tradition, we ought not to have so hastily dismissed society’s long-standing sexual order.

Perhaps there is virtue in gradual change.

I’ve wrestled with my liberal self since the day my wife and I parted ways. Sometimes, Father Antonio haunts me, and I hear his quiet voice in my head, preaching the gospel of sexual propriety. Should I have listened? Should I listen now? Or did the ancients have it right? Would my ex-wife and I be exchanging more than an occasional e-mail today had we played it straight?

I’m tempted to ask what is truly wrong with morbid sexual craving? Isn’t man, at his heart, a carnal creature? A mere animal with an evolved intellect? Isn’t sex a natural extension of his animal heart? Why have we woven so much dogma and fear around this basic instinct?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know this: sex and guilt don’t blend. Perhaps we ought to question those beliefs that link the two. At the end of the day, emotions follow no rules. Sexual freedom is a bit of a hot potato.