Nudity Content Must Be Over 18

Sex without Sin--Why Bother?

by Christian Shapiro

The wisdom of Nana Shapiro, questionable though it may have been, was meted out to us wee Shapiros in hard-chewed sound bites that attempted to mix gruff affection with outright threat. I hear her throaty European whine as if it were harping at me and my quaking siblings only yesterday. Our grandmother had found a cache of crumpled and crusty Kleenex haphazardly shoved into the drawer where she kept her peekaboo panties. "Listen to me you little mixed-race shitheels," the wizened matriarch hissed. Her bony claws flitted from one of us to the next, the curled fingernails resting momentarily upon each of our closed and trembling eyelids in turn. "Sex is as natural as the birds and the bees. Even Mexicans can figure out how to do it. Go ahead and yank that thing until your paws cramp up. You'll never go blind. You'll never grow any hair on your palms. Just clean up after yourselves, is all I ask. If I find a mess of tissue like this again, I'll cut the pee-pees off all three of you. And don't listen to your mother. That groveling papist bitch will fill your minds with rot."

Mama, a Corrigan of the Massachusetts branch who had inexplicably strayed from her Our Father-mumbling flock and wandered within range of the smarmy charm exuded by our oily-haired, Sephardic father, had given up ever gaining Grandma Shapiro's approval through any alignment of ethics and attitudes. Against the wishes of her vocally abusive in-law, my saintly, tippling, profoundly mismarried mother attempted to impress her three sons with the view that our erotic impulses were a gift entrusted to us by God. He Who Rules on Earth and Above had granted unworthy us an extension of the life's force that was not to be toyed with lightly. "You screw around without the blessings of the holy sacrament of matrimony, and you've taken your first, irrevocable steps on the twisted path to Hell. Just like your father has taken before you."

What perverse strain in my character impelled me to adopt, and then transgress at every opportunity, the tight-sphincter mores of my mother rather than accept the laissez-lay ways of Grandma? I guess I'm just a born moralist in my heart. At a core level, I have been greatly impressed with the existence of right and wrong, and with the impossibility that the two would ever mingle. Consequently, I am not one of these sleazy people who believe that sex is inherently dirty or unhealthy and who then slither along belly-to-belly like slimy reptiles mucking about in all manner of unclean perversity. No, my view of carnal love is that, when done the right way, the activity is a fundamentally kind and proactive source of succor and encouragement extended from person to person in a spirit of joyful generosity, a blissful covenant entered into by questing, well-meaning humans who are striving in our limited way to touch one to another the tentacles of our souls. But there is a catch. You see, I am drawn to doing it wrong. Drawn might be too weak a word. More accurately, I am addicted to doing it wrong, and to the memory of having done it wrong.

When I say wrong, don't go picturing me engaged in anything so egregious as date rape, infliction of bodily affection upon a family member or a minor, or shaking hands in a lingering manner with another male. That's more wrong than even I, transgressor of transgressors, could enjoy being. I mean to evince an innocent type of wrongness, such as the exultant sensations to be savored when prowling as a preteen through the neighborhood and peeping into the windows of newlyweds and philandering housewives in the company of those wives' kids; when groping, stroking, and shooting wads at the hands and mouth of a babysitting big sister while her sibling charges have been sent away to spend one dollar each at the drive-in theater snack bar; when shivering and frigging Christmas Eve away with a pot-smoking catechism chick in the darkest corners of the parking lot outside of midnight Mass; when attempting Tantric congress with a poetry-spouting proto-feminist while her dorm partner feigns sleep in a single bed not six feet away; when sneaking off with a bridesmaid from some lame dick's wedding reception and leaving your filled condom in the ashtray of the honeymoon car; when locked pelvis-to-pelvis with a comely coworker upon the desk of the boss who departed hours earlier, leaving all the work to the two of you; when tossing a missionary-position boff in muted lighting into the enthusiastically gripping thighs of a long-term girlfriend who a week or so earlier you'd broken up with for the fifth and final time. What harm lies in this brand of wrongness?

Now, my sex life is mired in the good, and it is doomed to stay that way unless I am willing to risk divorce for something so insignificant as happiness and fulfillment. My wife and I have a screw whenever time and our clashing temperaments allow. We've been sticking it to each other for the better part of a decade. Still, we clash and mesh with vigor and imagination. (Imagination becomes more essential with each passing year.) I've heard tales of married doldrums in which wedded partners force themselves to look at one another as sexual beings, and then--after a quick and clinical semen dispensation--discretely glance away as each takes their separate turn scurrying to the bathroom and swabbing up. The wife and I are luckier than that. A few years ago during a European vacation, we fucked so often, so loud, and so long that a Midwestern family staying in the room adjoining ours complained to the desk and had themselves moved to a different floor. They thought we were French or some other type of perverts. If only that were true. Those days of chasing and capturing wayward urges are gone. The truth was in the eyes of the bellboys and chambermaids, whose brows failed to raise so much as a single centimeter while passing us in the halls. The wife and I, for all the enthusiasm of our near nonstop naked calisthenics, were nothing more than an old married couple, devoid of any redeeming trace of scandal.