What Does the Bible Really Say About Sex? Part 2: Obscenity, Pornography, and Kink in the Bible
A 19th-century woman's criminal defense lays plain the pornography of the Bible
The battle for sexual freedom has been a long, arduous one. Sometimes, the struggle for women’s rights and the battle for sexual liberty were indistinguishable, considering how men used to view women in the olden days. And few people in the history of the world have been as villainously against human sexuality and women’s liberty as Anthony Comstock.
Comstock believed that men were fundamentally immoral because of their sexual impulsiveness. But get this…like the modern INCEL posting on Reddit forums about how women are “controlling” them with their omnipotent sexuality, Comstock believed the responsibility ultimately fell to the women who were allegedly guilty of luring men into “sinful” behavior. He even had a term for women—sex radicals.
What did Comstock use to justify his anti-sex, anti-woman inclinations?
The Bible, of course.
To be clear: not every Christian is like Comstock. But a significant number of far-right Christians here in the United States are, and for perfectly explainable reasons.
Some, though certainly not all, of the Bible’s passages resonate with a peculiar type of person who finds bold, attacking statements of uncleanliness (“sin” isn’t quite synonymous with uncleanliness, but the two are often paired) appealing.
The way I see it, calling someone “dirty” or “unclean” packs a punch that “villainous” or “wicked” doesn’t offer. Wicked can be sly, powerful, or cunning—but filth is baked into every cell of a person, one that causes us a visceral reaction (conservative, anti-sex values have been linked with feelings of disgust in countless studies).
Filth is embarrassing, denoting a lack of control. It’s the stuff that pure hatred is made out of, which is why so many tyrants and control freaks throughout history have found the Bible particularly useful.
To call someone a sinner is one thing—to claim that everything about them, from their nature to their behavior, is “unclean” is a whole other level of domination and degradation.
This is a long one—nearly 3,500 words—and we’ll work our way back through history to glance at interpretations of human sexuality across the centuries.
The Rise of Comstock
Anthony Comstock's ascent to power reads like a cautionary fable for those who mistake moral authoritarianism for virtuous leadership. As if sprung from the pages of a Gilded Age novel, Comstock's journey began innocently enough, with him landing a job at the United States Post Office.
Little did the unsuspecting public know that this seemingly unassuming figure would go on to wield a sledgehammer of self-appointed righteousness, smashing any inkling of personal freedom and sexual expression in his path. Anything related to sex, from condoms to simply talking about it would become illegal for nearly a century until Roe V. Wade.
If you haven’t read it, I suggest bookmarking this article I wrote some time ago discussing the threads of anti-sex religious fervor in America since before its inception:
The Cult of Comstock
I recently watched the Netflix series How to Become a Cult Leader, narrated by Tyrion Lannister and Peter Dinklage. I’ve got to say—the parallels between Comstock and cult leaders are pretty striking.
As Comstock maneuvered his way into the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, it was as if he had stumbled upon a treasure trove of moral indignation that he could wield like a club. With an unwavering belief in his divine mandate to cleanse the nation of all things lubricious, he set out to enact a reign of terror under the guise of moral hygiene.
The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice straight-up sounds like the religious arm of a 1984-esque totalitarian regime, doesn’t it?
Silenced by Obscenity Laws
Comstock Laws were a series of repressive statutes enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States. These laws aimed to suppress and control what was deemed obscene, immoral, or sexually explicit material, including contraceptive devices, information on birth control, and publications addressing topics related to human sexuality.
They branded condoms as contraband, classified information about contraceptives as forbidden knowledge, and turned even the mildest whisper of sexual curiosity into a criminal offense. The penalties were stiff—years of hard prison labor.
Though Comstock Laws began as bans on materials being shipped through the Post Office, they quickly morphed into much worse. People would. Be arrested for simply speaking about sexual topics; the First Amendment be damned.
When Comstock rose to power, two fierce, intelligent women who fought hard for women’s rights in the 1800s quickly became targets in his sights—Madame Restell and Annie Besant. Both would become two of the most famous women prosecuted that century.
Madame Restell
Madame Restell (real name Ann Trow) is a name that conjures as much curiosity as it does controversy. This enterprising lady of yore, a true maven of her trade, made her mark in the hushed tones of the very prim 19th-century New York, offering a menu of services that women desperately needed—family planning contraception and an early version of the Plan B pill.
Abortions and "female remedies" were her pièce de résistance that earned her a place in the long history of the battle for women’s rights. Her services were a charming selection that could turn any back-alley abortionist green with envy.
With the grace of a tightrope walker, she danced along the fine line of legality, evoking gasps from both moral crusaders and those who recognized her audacious entrepreneurial spirit. She invented the first highly reliable birth control and abortion pills (the first that didn’t also run a high risk of killing the woman taking them, that is).
Annie Besant
Along with Charles Bradlaugh, Mrs. Annie Besant would be charged with publishing obscene work under Comstock Laws in 1877 when the two passed out pamphlets on contraception.
The work was deemed “pornographic,” and she was indicted on charges. In response, Besant assembled 150 passages from the Bible that talked about sex, both from the twenty-four books of the Old Testament and from sex books of the New Testament.
She assembled them into another pamphlet she called Is the Bible Indictable?
Take that, Comstock!
This maneuver was ingenious.
She was pointing out a rather embarrassing fact for religious fanatics like Comstock—that sex is as omnipresent as whichever creator the zealot believes in. It touches all things human. We were all born from an act of sex, no matter how much we may try to deny it.
A similar sentiment was echoed when under the new regime’s versions of the Comstock Laws, Florida, and Utah’s sex education ban, parents successfully petitioned to remove the Bible from schools. Because it does contain quite a lot of sex (and a boatload of violence). Ironic that far-right-wing Christian extremists have pushed so hard to get books removed from schools because they contain a modicum of sexuality, yet, the Bible itself is riddled with it, as Besant accurately pointed out.
She illuminated what zealots often forget—that sex is baked into whatever holy books they want to enshrine into law with legislated morality.
The Kinky Sisters of Ezekiel
And Besant was absolutely right. I tell those stories to say this: there are plenty of sexual, even quite kinky, stories tucked away in the Bible waiting to be uncovered. Ezekiel chapter 23 has one of the weirdest of all the Bible’s sex stories when Jehovah himself hooks up with two sisters in a story that’s probably allegorical.
I can see the Pornhub title now: Powerful Deity Bangs Two Sisters at the Same Time and Gets Them Pregnant.
…there were two women, the daughters of one mother:
And they committed whoredoms in Egypt; they committed whoredoms in their youth: there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity. And the names of them were Aholah the elder, and Aholibah her sister: and they were mine, and they bare sons and daughters.
Most people believe this verse is an analogy for Jehovah’s disapproval of the behavior of Israel, an allegory bemoaning Ancient Israel’s adoption of foreign customs. But it’s still a strange way to make a point, and it reeks of male jealousy of the erotic variety, the type you wouldn’t expect from an omnipotent deity.