The secular and sacred impulse to get on your knees

Straight back, upward gaze, potential tears, evoking the Virgin Mary, hands clasped or maybe bound. Kneeling is a common position in sex, a physical confirmation of yielding to a world of play and power. It conveys a similar feeling to religious kneeling; while the gesture might differ slightly, bowed head and lowered eyes, the pleasures of performance persist.

The physical endurance of kneeling speaks to deference. Kneeling in sex might be self-conscious, playful, allowing a kind of theatrics wherein the performer can bend to the other party’s desires while simultaneously making real their own, while kneeling in the pews can demonstrate utmost religious purity, an ultimate respect for a higher power. In both cases, submission is a choice that is made and affirmed in the act, prostration as performance and promise.

Various versions of kneeling have been incorporated into social practice. Genuflection, the act of bending a single knee to an authority, a kind of knee-bow, is common in both religious and secular settings. Medieval knights once knelt to receive their accolades. Think of the nervous lover lowering themself to propose; the nun taking her profession of vows; the businessman offering his deepest apologies. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley kneels to bury his face into his wife Stella’s stomach, making a show of marital deference, though the move is really a way of reiterating his quiet dominance over her life. Countless paintings depict knights genuflecting before a sword, lovers falling to kiss the stomachs of their beloved. 

It’s a performance of promise. In religious kneeling, there is an aspect of distance and delay that forms part of the pleasure. The trust from the promise is teased out. The object of your devotion isn’t necessarily going to touch you back; there won’t be material satisfaction. This can be played up in sex, but ultimately there is room for a certain kind of gratification, room for control on the kneeler’s part, and play.  

An etymological consideration of the Latin term “flectere,” which forms a stem in the English “genuflect,” offers a few expected definitions: bend, bow down, kneel. Then enters the lexis of power: to cause to change, influence, bend to one’s will. To govern, rule, have sway over. To direct.

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After a communion session, a stagey church mum praises me for having a “beautiful genuflection.” Everyone genuflects in church, but now I became conscious of a layer of appearance, and of being beheld. I hadn’t really considered that my body could make beauty, religious beauty—what made it beautiful, I thought? The pose, the look, the deference? Cathedrals were beautiful; hymns were beautiful; candlelight was beautiful; paintings, statues, images of Mary and angels. Beauty was designed and imposed on other things, I thought. It hadn’t shaken me yet that you could achieve that on your own—or rather, with your own body. Sometimes a gaze could write the beauty onto it, for you.

Is it blasphemous to consider the eroticism of it, to imagine, even, looking back? The supposedly private rite of religious genuflection often happens in communal environments. Anyone could be watching from the next pew. Anyone could be observing, admiring, dissecting. Is it blasphemous to question whether God is the only surveillant—whether that surveillance can be enjoyed?

Once the private act of kneeling for worship enters the zone of observation, it ceases to be a practice solely defined in relation to God, as it enters the realm of constant gaze, and a more flexible, individual language of power. Fleabag, which follows a woman messily figuring out her life after the death of her best friend, offers one of the most famous cultural examples of this tension. In the second season, she develops an infatuation with her local priest. Despite having little interest in the church, she begins attending regularly and befriends him. He isn’t sexless; he isn’t old; he smokes and swears. He veers closer and closer to her fantasy, culminating in a tense scene in a confession booth. Fleabag wants someone to tell her what to do; the Hot Priest tells her to kneel. They kiss. A choral interpretation of the Kyrie plays. She has undone him; he has emboldened her. The scene articulates the unearthing of power-play hidden within a supposedly pure practice; the characters undoing pious codes, as they move from religious to sexual kneeling in a matter of seconds.

Typically seen as a submissive act, kneeling could be said to have an opposite, dominant undercurrent. There’s a bolstering aspect to the practice. It’s performing submission, choosing to present yourself as dedicated to the other party, and in sex, with the acknowledgement that you are going to be observed by the person you’re pleasing.

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With different bodies, genders, dynamics, the exact effect of kneeling for someone varies—but what seems to be recurrent and always sexy to me is getting to watch the other party unfold in front of you, a gratification you’re never sure you’ll get if you’re kneeling for an invisible body. So codified within our cultural histories as a public display of stringent, straight devotion, kneeling can in fact reveal so much, and so much that might surprise us, about what we desire internally.

In Aubrey Beardsley’s 1891 drawing The Litany of Mary Magdalen, the eponymous woman is depicted kneeling and praying, presumably to Christ, as onlookers smirk. Her physical position separates her from the rest, making a spectacle of her devotion that they must look down upon—Beardsley makes a tight-lined, cynical imitation of her beautiful worship. Only one of the other figures in the painting matches her in height: a devil that emerges from behind like a taunting shadow. Does it wish ill upon her? Does it associate itself with her? Beardsley leaves it ambiguous, not unlike the connotations of the act itself.

Kneeling presents its own kind of physical spectacle that tests and stretches both the endurance of the kneeler and the comfort of the observer—and crucially, it is spectacle that reunites deference with an underlying, ever-present atmosphere of eroticism. The mix of sense and complexity, of intellect and psychological, draw similarities to the ethic behind BDSM, working towards an alternative, unifying understanding of the usually contrasted elements of pleasure and danger. In “A Lover’s Discourse,” Barthes associates the term corps / body with “any thought, any feeling, any interest aroused in the amorous subject by the loved body.” He writes, “To scrutinize means to search: I am searching the other’s body, as if I wanted to see what was inside it, as if the mechanical cause of my desire were in the adverse body.” Kneeling is a naked presentation of oneself—in the reciprocal environment of the erotic, it opens up from a solely deferent gesture to a kind of invitation to participate in the same psychological space. The marks left on one’s knees from minutes or hours of pressure can be perceived through a lens of true faith rather than pain—a souvenir of labor, of commitment or devotion.

How beautiful to have a reminder of shared intimacy, and of giving yourself whole. To be able to look upon the grooves on your legs and see devotion. To give someone head and see God.