forgive me father, for i am h*rny.

on why hot men of God are our favorite tv boyfriends.

there’s an episode of sex in the city where miranda is seeing this stuck up catholic playwright who is so caught up in his religious guilt over swapping bodily fluids with a woman he’s not married to, he runs off to shower the moment they’re done clapping cheeks.

it remains one of my favorite episodes of the entire show specifically because it was one of the first places i’d seen faith and dating intersect in a way that wasn’t treating the issue with any preciousness onscreen.

sex in the city is a show that’s interested predominantly in the sexual liberation of women (and in trying to convince us that new york has zero people of color living in it); it’s unsurprising, then, that the ‘religious man’ is seen as antagonizing force to fear. there’s no space for shame, and a man who is ashamed of getting with someone raises a conservatism that isn’t welcome. in this context, the ‘man of god’ is an oddity that serves as perfect dinner time gossip fodder among socially liberal girlfriends.

oh my god- did i tell you about that catholic guy i was seeing? he used to run dick in hand to the nearest bathroom to beg god for forgiveness immediately after we were done fucking. he was fine as hell though.

in the show, men who believe in god are an easy addition to the ‘never, ever under any circumstances let him inside you’ list (not that you asked, but my personal no ride list consists of DJs, barbers, actors of all kind, men who speak arabic, men with literature degrees and an endless supply of tote bags; whores. the lot of them).

step into the 2010s and the portrayal of religious men changes, dramatically. phoebe waller-bridge drops fleabag and then fleabag season two and single-handedly gives priest’s more positive pr than anyone could have imagined. exit stage left the condescending christian lover hell-bent on shaming you for sleeping with him- enter stage right hot religious men with hearts of gold.

more specifically, enter andrew scott’s hot priest, all boyish charm and damaged intensity. he isn’t just a subversion of a certain urge to alienate the ‘religious’. he’s a romantic lead, the very focus of desire.

there is something refreshing about seeing a religious character get to be ‘normal’ and ‘modern’ onscreen ( i feel like to the atheist imagination, we live in huts refusing vaccination) but i wonder if even that betrays a certain prejudice against what it means to be religious in the first place. some have argued that hot priest sacrifices parts of his faith for fleabag in order to be more palatable; he’s a drinker, he breaks his oath of abstinence at least once for fleabag, he cusses and flirts.

would we have been as obsessed with him as a character if he wasn’t ‘cool’? if he was a rigorous stickler for the rules? he’s more moderate, more tempered in his faith and thus more desirable to the non-religious who need to be eased into this world.

ramy- ramy youssef’s self-titled comedy series that follows the most chaotic egyptian american you can imagine- has a hot holy man of its own in the form of mahershala ali’s sheikh malik (leaving a gap here to give you time to bark at/lick your phone screen):

malik serves as an example to ramy, an ideal muslim that he should aspire to. he’s also muslim as fuck; where priest loves in the grey at moments, the sheikh is pious in a way that is almost coolly intimidating. ramy does a good job of showing us muslims in varying degrees of practice and so then you can have a sheikh malik and not alienate him for his rigidness. we get a spectrum so the message isn’t ‘you should only be comfortable around a person who believes in god if they area’t as ‘practicing’’, the message is that even if that person is deeply religious, they can still be attractive so long as it is devoid of judgment and aren’t a cunt to people.

in a lot of ways, the relationship between malik and ramy mirrors the relationship between priest and fleabag; the flawed, religiously condemned and their spiritual guardian who refuses to forsake them, no matter how many mistakes they make. fleabag is a complicated woman with some ugliness to her emotionally, ramy someone who is at times too selfish to be a good person. even joanne in nobody wants this has a certain cloud of chaos following her around. they’re all main characters the ‘religious’ are meant to be judgmental of.

hot priest’s acceptance of fleabag is a radical testimony of worthiness; if rom-coms are based in the fantasy that men will like women for who they are then these religious lovers add to that fantasy a removal of religious guilt; i’ll love you even if you think that the very basis of my morality and faith seems silly to you. you are worth loving even if you believe yourself irredeemable.

daddy adam brody’s rabbi gives a speech to joanne towards the end of nobody wants this where he tells her that he’ll love her even if she doesn’t change. that she is enough as she is. that he can handle her. fleabag and priest’s relationship doesn’t fall apart because of who she is, it falls apart despite what she means to him because his other love- god- is calling him back to service.

that moment at the bus stop is so bittersweet. it hurts that he must leave her but it’s beautiful because they got to experience one another. he’s perfect for her, and her for him but something bigger than both of them is at play. it’s completely understandable that we all collectively lost our shit over him. he’s highkey the perfect man: emotionally intelligent, community oriented, sensitive, identical to andrew scott.

i’d also say that the hot man of god stands in direct opposition to what hollywood has for years passed off as ‘desirable rom-com boyfreinds’.

we had the womanizer (ten things i hate about you, the ugly truth), the slapstick comedy inspired pain in the ass who only gets away with being a cunt because he has great abs (yes, this is glen powell in anyone but you shade). as people cry out for the return of ‘classic’ rom-coms where the men at least pretended to like the women they wanted to get with, is the hot man of god our answer to the usually toxic, trifling men we’ve been left with?

at a time where spinelessness and mass apathy have taken a hold, perhaps the most attractive thing about these men in their unwavering belief in something that insists on having a moral compass.

and we can’t forget about the kink of it all; the hot transgression of it. hot priest’s ‘kneel’ practically drips with sex. it takes a phrase he’s probably said a thousand times in a religious context and utterly imbues it with a hunger that is thrilling. it’s a directive not to repent, but to sin. it’s faith as foreplay.

us religious sorts have an interesting relationship to desire (i remember the first time i thought a boy was cute i ran home and prayed for an hour so that God could forgive me for fantasizing about his delicious arms). to want is to put the self first and most religious clerics don’t believe they serve themselves; they serve their communities.

in islam, we have a word: ‘jihad’ -you may have heard it being spat out of the mouths of imperialist islamophobes as they try to villainize us, bastardizing the phrase to excuse mass invasions of the middle east for instance- and it means' ‘to strive’. it’s a practice that asks us to question and battle with ourselves. with our desires.

in a time culturally where being horny on main is the norm, it’s an interesting practice to try to observe because lust determines so much of our lives now. you’ll start watching that show because you want the lead actor to [redacted] you in the [redacted] until you [redacted]. you’ll go on that date because the person you matched with posted a fire topless pic, or you add those shoes to your wish list because you saw them on some influencer and immediately wanted them for yourself. lust seems shared but it is the most selfish state to be in because you chase your own gratification to a finish point.

so what happens when you force lust onto a person who believes that it is their divinely ordained responsibility to serve anyone but themselves? you get heartbreaking choices like hot priest walking away from fleabag, like sheikh malik knowing that he can’t save ramy.

we tend to link hardship with piety. baring the brunt of tragedy, braving heartbreak for the sake of a higher power- it is in its own way romantic. maybe that’s why we are drawn to these characters. because they feel so deeply. so earnestly. perhaps they wake a part of us that wished it could blindly believe in anything, that is unmarred by the cynicism of trying to exist in a world that is on fire. perhaps their selflessness is inspiring.

or maybe they keep casting the finest men of our generation in these roles and we all have the collective depth of a puddle.

if that’s the case then forgive us father for lusting after your most loyal servants. we are merely appreciating the beauty you have bestowed upon us.

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thank you so much for reading and for letting me guide you through your lust. i promised myself that i would only press publish on a piece if i loved it, no matter how long the gap between essays might be (though rest assured, you’ll get atleast one a month from me).

there’s so much i want to write and update about the newsletter already but i’m saving all that since we’ll be hitting another utterly wild milestone soon! i’d love to know what else you want me to cover or if there are nay bits of culture you’ve come into contact recently that you can’t stop thinking about.

as ever, thank you for reading. until next time loves,

aa x