Goddess Worship, Sacred and Profane

“If you want your wife to be a Goddess, worship her.”—Clairette de Longvilliers

I will never forget the first time I came upon Lady Misato’s likening of “wife worship” to classic courtship behavior. It was a mind-blowing revelation for me. Lifelong impulses that I had vainly tried to suppress, and that I had given into repeatedly in secret, furtive spasms, were suddenly redeemed. All those bizarre S&M images, associated in my psyche with shrinkwrapped, verboten magazines in back aisles of sleazy bookstores, were transformed into romantic storybook images of ladies fair and knights errant.

Thanks to Lady Misato, I could see myself as the knight, with my wife enthroned as my queen. Instead of hiding all my submissive yearnings from her, I was free to integrate them into my marriage.

A couple years back in this blog, in a posting titled “Swagger vs. Grovel,” I wrote that guys hanging out at strip clubs were actually practicing goddess worship, whether they knew it or not. I conjured a typical topless-bar tableau, with male patrons “packed shoulder to shoulder in the stage-side seats, gaping up in idolatrous awe and hanging their hard-earned cash along the railing. These are offerings to the prancing priestesses on high, who do the strutting and swaggering, affording the acolytes below only sneak peeks into forbidden paradise.”

I wasn’t making this up. In my bachelor daze, I had been one of those guys at the rail, or maybe sitting farther back, peeling off fives and tens and twenties I couldn’t afford as tribute to these tease-queens.

For awhile there I got pretty obsessive-compulsive about it. I wasn’t really looking to date a stripper—though that did happen once or twice—as for a goddess to worship. That didn't happen, but I did donate major portions of my minor earnings. I was lucky, looking back, that this all happened pre-Internet. Otherwise I would have been a prime candidate to become the moneyslave of some Web-savvy succubus.

My point in the earlier posting about strip clubs was stated this: “Goddess worship could hardly be more explicit, nor the imbalance of power between male supplicant and dominant female more visible. Vive la différence!”

And I didn’t, and don’t mean “Goddess worship” figuratively. For many guys, including me, there is a religious component to this adoration and apotheosis of the female. Kneeling and genuflection, obeisance, even groveling and foot-kissing, all these are religious postures hallowed by history and tradition. What is often termed “sub-space,” that intoxicating submissive rush experienced by some males in moments of surrender to a dominant female, can also be viewed as a legitimate variety of mystical experience.

Might it not be akin to the submissive ecstasy experienced by a monk or fakir enduring penance or self-flagellation while contemplating the Divine Feminine or the Goddess Mother?

Whether these masculine prostrations and devotions are sacred or profane, carried out in a sacred shrine, a candlelit chapel, a roadside strip club or behind the closed doors of a wife-led marriage, my hunch is that all qualify as goddess worship, pure and simple.

And what better way to start the day for any man blessed to live with a goddess? As Elise Sutton advised one husband in regard to his wife: “You should worship her and adore her every day.”Or, as one husband put it: “I am so lucky to have her to serve, obey and please every day of my life!”