Fornication

The passion of fornication is the desire for sexual pleasure.

So what’s wrong with that? That’s the question that immediately comes to mind in this age of license. Let’s start with an extreme case of fornication.

We were once scanning blogs for entries on the Jesus Prayer. There was an entry in a blog that caught our interest. The reference to the Jesus Prayer wasn’t exactly correct, and the blog was accompanied by a photograph of the blogger with bare torso. In our naïveté we wondered, now why would he have a bare torso? We followed up to the blogger’s profile. It turns out that he lives, in his own phrase, in ‘Sodom by the sea’. He has some remarks about his sexual preferences: He doesn’t mind if his partners use ‘herbals and recreational drugs’ to increase their pleasure, so long as they don't talk on and on. He prefers to be on top, but ‘an obedient boy’ can do him ‘until the cows come home’. He’s into certain kinds of bondage. There’s more. Persons interested can email him to discuss a meeting.

Here we see sexual pleasure pursued for its own sake. We see the use in a certain subculture of ‘herbals and recreational drugs’ to increase that pleasure, along with certain ‘kinky’ practices (we wonder: now just what does he mean by ‘an obedient boy’?).

This is, we hope, an extreme case. However, it indicates just what the passion of fornication is in its essence: a desire for sexual pleasure which treats others as objects (willing or unwilling) to be exploited to obtain that sexual pleasure.