I never wanted a peek into the sex life of orthodox Jews — it’s just too sad. Religion really does wreck people.
“She’d just found out what and where her clitoris is, after her third child,” Marcus said. “She’d told her OB-GYN that she was having pain,” and during their conversation he informed her about her anatomy. Merely having this basic knowledge put her ahead of plenty of Marcus’s Orthodox patients, who tend to be from the Satmar sect, one of the most strictly observant groups within Hasidic Judaism. Their circumscribed upbringings, in sections of Brooklyn or in Monsey, N.Y., a hamlet north of New York City, have been utterly insular, their worlds devoid of secular books, let alone television and the Internet. About sexuality, their minds have been kept free of information and infused with fear. “They have zero — zero — connection to pleasure,” Marcus said. “And there’s no vocabulary to start with them. We have an intake form to fill out, and they get to ‘orgasm’ and go to the receptionist and ask, ‘What is this?’ ” When Marcus begins to explore whether they’ve ever been aroused, they have no understanding of the concept.
But if she learns what a clitoris and orgasms and arousal are, she might be less devout!
To me, that would be a good thing. To religion, the worst thing in the world.
Well it’s only the 21st century. Perhaps all they need is a little more time.
@grumpyoldfart:
FTFY
I suspect female circumcision would be more prevalent amongst the people of this sect if 1) it didn’t draw attention to the naughty bits that could otherwise be ignored and 2) it would mimic the God-Abraham covenant and for a woman to do so would probably be the most blasphemous thing they could imagine. I mean apart from the idea that their silly god doesn’t actually exist.
The very idea that you’d have to pass your bedroom activities before the eyes of a second guy to pass muster is creepy beyond description.
> To religion, the worst thing in the world.
Slainte!
“She didn’t want her intimacy with her husband to be prost — the Yiddish word for vulgar, debased. “We don’t want to think about it the way the other world thinks about it,”
Nah, this is pretty much the same as the way the “other world” thinks about it – sex as a force to be channeled to constrain people. Whether women are taught to be hypersexual to satisfy lusty men or hyposexual to satisfy strict clergy, both misogynistic worlds teach male agency and female obedience before healthy female expression. This prevents healthy sexual expression by anyone, of course.
An orthodox Jewish newspaper photoshopped Angela Merkel and other women out of pictures of world leaders walking together in Paris. Why should they expect people who don’t truly exist (in their minds) to enjoy sex?
Remember when Naomi Wolf fantasized that the modesty rules of orthodoxy must make sex hotter because your husband is deprived of access to other women’s hair for fantasizing about?
Yeah, guess not.
mykroft@7 wrote:
An Orthodox Hassidim refused to even sit next to a woman on an airplane (because THE BOOK tells him to never sit ‘side by side’ and so close, to a woman). Air Israel is proposing to offer separate male & female sections of coach class in their planes.
.
Don’t matter which one you talkin about: Religion ruins everything.
From the article:
Through this wise tale, I have gratefully learned where I should, as a vagina-bearer, place my priorities if I’m ever to be brutally murdered.
I guess what is the most surprising thing to me is that there are enclaves in Brooklyn, where they are able to keep people that ignorant.
“Their circumscribed upbringings…”
I think that refers to the males.
To carbonfox @10: I recall some version of that tale in a story by I.L. Peretz. There were also similar acts of ‘martyrdom’ (yuck) by Jewish men – one was a Jew whose home was being burgled – he was going to let the burglars take anything, until they reached for one small box. That was when the victim objected and was killed by the burglars. The contents of the box? Some earth from the Holy Land which was supposed to be placed in the man’s grave. The second was about a Jewish prisoner who was being whipped (probably with a group of prisoners, the whipping was intended to march them somewhere) – his yarmulka had fallen off, and as he turned back to retrieve it he received a lash in the face that killed him.
She is to be roped to a horse and dragged through the streets until she dies. But before this happens, she manages to pin or sew her skirt to her lower legs
That story is clearly a lie. When you’re being dragged on a rope, you’ve got both hands on the flippin’ rope.
Wow! Talk about fucked up. Proving yet again the title of Hitchen’s book.
When forced, as a child, to attend church, I never found it transcendent. Sex with my lovely wife: transcendent. So we now refer to our sexual congress as “communion”. Much better use of the term.
That was a terrible, terrible reading. As someone who was raised unbeliever and did not even know that religious people exist until the age of around 10 I cannot even try and connect with those poor people who wretch their lives trying t follow completely stupid superstitions. I simply do not comprehend it. I know and understand that othering is a bad thing, but I cannot empathise with devoutly religious people at all, and only somewhat with moderately religious people.
They seem like other species to me, and articles like this do not make me to connect with them. They make me pitty them, feel sorry for them, but not to connect. This sort of thinking is completely alien to me. I cannot understand how those poor women do not refuse to obey their mysogynistic rabbis other than that their minds were damaged and broken from early on and never truly developed.
I cannot understand how it can even be legal to treat people like this in a supposedly secular country. This is not freedom of religion, this is downright religious oppresion. Damagin childrens minds with religion beyond repair should be illegal.
When Marcus begins to explore whether they’ve ever been aroused, they have no understanding of the concept.
A morbidly interesting challenge to the concept that masturbation is universal.
There’s similar ignorance among many fundamentalist Christians. Had an anti-choicer on Twitter ask me with a straight face (and much indignation) “Why would you have sex if you don’t want to have children?” The idea of sex for pleasure and emotional connection to your partner is either utterly alien to them, or they know some people do it but it baffles them as to why, as it is such a clearly sinful act and in opposition to God’s purpose for sex.*
Deeply deeply sad.
(*I am of course aware of the hypocritical preachers who demand total repression of sexual pleasure from their congregation while engaging in all manner of diddling on their own.)
Holy balls, I’m asexual and I still think that’s fucked up.
Deeply, deeply sad. One thing I can’t wrap my head around is the lack of a desire to please someone you supposedly love on the part of the men. I see how the responsbility for following the sex rules is firmly placed on the women, but for my own self respect if nothing else giving my partner pleasure is a huge part of why we do this. The idea of being too ignorant to understand the idea of giving sexual pleasure and the way in which for want of a better word it satisfies the soul is horrifying to me. In some ways I would almost describe the people in the article as virgins. They’ve reproduced but they have never had sex, let alone made love.
A couple of quips.
First, the article is about Satmars, who are ULTRA-Orthodox, not Orthodox. Second, even in the Ultra-Orthodox grouping, Satmars are by far the weirdest, most insular sect, that makes the Lubavitches (who are also Ultra-Orthodox) look like hippies by comparison.
Mainstream Orthodox Judaism is actually much more liberal on the subject sex than Catholicism or conservative Protestant sects. Sex for pleasure (within marriage, of course) is strongly encouraged, a woman’s health (including her mental health) takes precedence over procreation, there is no bar against using birth control or even abortion, marital rape is regarded as an unspeakable sin, and, while premarital sex is considered very bad, people aren’t as obsessed with a woman’s formal, physical virginity as Christians are.
None if this is to deny that what’s described in the link is horrible, but to suggest that Satmars are representative of religious Jews generally is kinda insane. Might as well resurrect the old trope that Jews do it through a sheet.
How do you figure? The orthodox jews I have had contact with still prohibit women from touching non-family member men. The women must still cover their hair with cloth or a wig. The married couple are not to have physical contact when the wife in approaching menses or during menses. There’s more than that, but that alone makes them considerably less liberal regarding sex than most catholics or protestants. Some conservative catholics and conservative charismatics or evangelicals may approach that level of restrictiveness, but to claim that orthodox jews are more liberal on sex than catholics is not accurate.
If God had wanted them to be sexually aroused, he would have given them means to experience pleasure. Remember, these are God’s chosen people. It makes me wonder how they procreate without an erection.
Religions’ attitude towards sex is indeed horrible.
Check this out:
http://www.fstdt.com/QuoteComment.aspx?QID=100664
That is unbelievably creepy.
—
I seriously cannot reconcile that story with ultra-conservative religious culture at all. If men glimpsing the genitals of a torture victim is sufficient to bring disaster, then men suck. Why the hell, if you honestly believe that, would you put men in charge?
@10: Maybe I’m completely misunderstanding the story, but it seems to me that there is another way to interpret it: You could look at it as this woman is in the process of being tortured to death for her beliefs and/or race. There’s nothing she can do about that. But she knows that part of what her torturers are trying to do to her is to make her publicly show a part of her body that she wants to keep private. She can stop that from happening by sewing her skirt down. So she does so as a final “fuck you” to the people killing her. The guys in her religion misinterpret her motives because they’re in “it’s all about me” mode and never considered that she might be doing it for her own sake, not theirs.
@Grewgills — apropos of Amused
You all might read Daniel Boyarin, who wrote Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (1993). It’s worth reading carefully, as it talks a lot about the evolution of rabbinical attitudes about sexuality as well as the sex act itself. It’s not as straightforward as one might think.
Also yeah, this isn’t a terribly representative sect, and just because someone doesn’t touch someone during menses doesn’t mean they aren’t a wild one in the sheets, you know? After all we have plenty of weird taboos in secular culture as well. Think of all the stereotypically “gay” things a guy isn’t supposed to do. Gender policing cuts across religious and secular lines. This isn’t to say it isn’t often more rigid in a lot of religious contexts in some fairly obvious ways, but try being a man who carries a purse and calls it that and not an iPad case.
Anat @13,
Thanks! I was able to track down Peretz’ version of the story, “The Three Gifts” (the second gift is the one that deals with the tale recounted in the Times).
For the curious, a PDF is available here: http://www.bibleandjewishstudies.net/stories/Three_Gifts.pdf
I do wonder if this story had it’s roots in oral tradition or if it originated purely from Peretz. In any case, it seems like it has taken on a life of its own.
Dianne @26,
That’s a charitable interpretation (which I like rather more) and it seems as valid as any after reading the story by Peretz. Of course, my other thought is that it’s questionable if this tale is based on actual events, and even so, the way the story is being used today is clearly to impress upon young girls the importance of modesty. I find similarities to the story I’d heard as a child of a Christian saint mutilating her face so that men wouldn’t find her attractive; even under pain of torture and death, a woman must always be concerned foremost with smothering her sexuality. Regardless, I do like the idea of recasting these fundamentalist morality tales with a more feminist spin!
“O Lord, we thank you for the intimacies we’re about to enjoy, and we wish you, as always, lots of fun watching!”
– Homer Simpson retranslated from German.
Of course it’s not universal. Even without being made to be afraid of it, not everyone is curious enough and sensitive enough to discover it if they aren’t told about it.
“They” in the quote aren’t the men, but the women.
But in case you really want to know how a man who doesn’t get psychologically aroused can reproduce by natural means, here goes: 1) erections (and indeed orgasms) can be brought about by purely physical stimulation; 2) should that somehow not work, wait for morning wood. Morning wood has nothing to do with arousal – it happens several times a night for 3/4 of an hour, for unknown reasons (oxygen supply is suspected); if it’s still there in the morning, you haven’t slept for long enough.
Yep, and then keep in mind that that list is generally shorter in the US than in the Rest of the West.
@David 30
That wasn’t my experience living in Western Europe, nor has it been my experience with Western European friends living in the US. There are a variety of habits and dress carried over from Western European culture that are tagged in many parts of the US as effeminate and therefor stereotypically “gay”. Things as silly and gender neutral as carrying a hand bag or wearing capri pants in much of the South or Mid and Mountain West will get you unwanted attention that they won’t get you in Western Europe.