Ezra Justin Lee

Screwing Yourself

— Originally published in print // Permalink

Roger doesn’t use the internet because he actually doesn’t need to. He has porn in his mind. And honestly, he didn’t feel too guilty about turning it on last night, even though his church friends say that he probably shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing if he wants to be a good Christian.

He now sat in his room atop his sweaty, ruffled blanket, and he had been awake for 30 minutes already. And his teeth weren’t even brushed. Still in his baggy pajamas, he sat there quietly musing about why he seemed to be so in love with sex – about both the real kind with other people and the kind with one’s own hands. And though he wasn’t feeling too guilty about punching the clown the night before, he still didn’t feel quite right about it. So his conscience was a little uneasy.

Roger tried to sit calmly and meditate, the way his yoga teacher had instructed him. But his thoughts were a storm, so he quickly gave up. He couldn’t quite understand how you were supposed to think about nothing when in meditation. His teacher made it look easy but his mind swelled with myriad thoughts. Thoughts swam in his head about why the hell God would make humans into such sexual beings if he didn’t want people to explore things as freely as they wanted. He thought that God could be a withholding jerk sometimes.

He remembered when he asked his pastor about the issue, he told him that sex within the constraints of marriage was a beautiful, good, and liberated thing – a metaphor for the unity of Christ and his Church embodied in physical form. This was easy enough to believe. But Roger couldn’t quite make the connection to how understanding this metaphor would help him deal with his burgeoning sexual urges so he could better be a good little Christian. Maybe he wasn’t trying hard enough to understand; he didn’t know.

The Christian self-help books hadn’t helped much either. Their attempts at romanticizing “waiting for marriage” and abstinence seemed too oblivious of what it really felt like to be the proverbial horny schoolboy. One of them even talked about how good Christian men should not masturbate since it’s essentially the same as “screwing yourself,” in the most literal sense. These calls to action, or sexual inaction, one could say, had not diminished the sexiness inside of him often raging for release. Had the writers of these books ever even been to his sexy little college town on any given warm sunny day? Sunny days usually meant more skin: lower-cut shirts and higher skirts. Those days were the hardest to keep his wandering eyes to himself.

Roger tried praying to God, asking him for help to understand. He felt a little humiliated while praying because last night was itching at his insides.

He finally got up and slowly slinked himself to the bathroom. While brushing his stiff teeth, he looked outside through the bathroom window and saw that there was hardly a cloud in the sky. It would be a warm, sunny day.